Snippet #2775991

“That’s it?” Rick said, with not a little skepticism, and the corners of Izzie’s lips quirked ever so slightly into the faintest ghost of a smirk.

“Well,” she began again as folks began to clamber up to their feet. “That solo was ten different kinds of all over the place. Listening to poorly-executed improv is a kind of torture in my book.” Everybody had their off nights, though—and Ted had always been a talented improviser, going back to the Sturm&Drang days. Izzie, who had never been much of a lead guitarist anyway, would spend hours meticulously constructing each composition, making no compromises, hammering every piece out until it aligned note-for-note with what she was hearing in her head. And then Ted would walk in, limber up his fingers, and come up with leads for each composition on the fly. Really, you’d have thought it was a recipe for success.

“That guitar-bass interplay was a thing of beauty, though,” she allowed. “Just about makes up for putting me through the Naraka that was that solo.” She stood up, shrugging her jacket onto her shoulders as she did—she’d left it hanging over her chair—and finished, “You good to get going?”

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Valentina stared down the neck of the bottle in her hands as intently as if she were trying to set its contents on fire. All the while, Ada talked—and Valentina pretended she wasn’t listening, that she was letting every word go in one ear and out the other. Didn’t matter. She’d said what she’d said. And she hoped what she’d said had hurt Ada’s feelings, too. She hoped the drummer had concluded that inviting Valentina out tonight had been a mistake. She hoped whatever had prompted her to think it was a good idea in the first place had been thoroughly crushed.

Eventually, Ada joined Valentina in her silence, which meant Valentina could stop pretending to ignore her, and commit some of the energy she’d been putting towards that into more important things, like worrying, and being generally unhappy. She lifted the bottle to her lips gingerly, as if she were handling a live bomb, and took a sip. Ada had been right—it certainly wasn’t the same as just downing the entire thing in one go. For one, she could actually taste the stuff now that she wasn’t acting on impulse. She swallowed, set the bottle down on the bar, stared back down at it again, and decided it tasted horrid. Was this considered good beer? Was there even such a thing as good beer? There had to be, Izzie drank beer. She tried to imagine the kind of beer Izzie would consider good—something with a really long German name, she decided, with a bunch of umlauts, brewed by monks in the remote mountains of Switzerland.

She glanced down at the label on her beer. ‘Budweiser’ probably wasn’t it.

Ada stood up beside her—Valentina heard her stool shift beneath her, saw her stand out of the corner of her vision—and for just a second, Valentina contemplated making a break for it. The prospect was dashed almost before she had a chance to really entertain it. For one, even this disaster of an evening wasn’t going to impel Valentina to walk ten miles back to her place. For another, Ada didn’t actually leave, depriving Valentina of her opening.

When the drummer plopped right back into her seat, a faint glimmer of curiosity managed to cut its way through all the bitterness and irritation, like a sliver of sunlight through clouds. Reluctantly she tore her gaze from the bottle and up to Ada and her… new friend? Whatever he was slurring about sure seemed friendly. Maybe a little too friendly, actually. Since when were drunk people this friendly? She frowned and looked back down at the bar in front of her, but her resolve withered in seconds, and she glanced back up at the pair. The drunk guy had his hand on Ada’s arm—she saw his knuckles go white with how tight he was holding on, and she heard the drummer grunt in discomfort.

Oh jeez. Valentina had seen movies. She knew how this went down. Some meathead who’s had one too many Pabst Blue Whatevers starts trying to get into a lady’s pants, he gets a little handsy, somebody’s got to step in and be a hero. Usually by, I don’t know, smashing a bottle over the asshole’s head. She looked at the bottle of beer in front of her, and tried to imagine herself railing the guy over the head with it. On the cinema screen of her mind, the bottle bounced harmlessly off his noggin, a bouncer came by to dropkick Valentina out of the bar, and she wound up walking ten miles back home. Not an acceptable outcome, for a number of reasons.

So then what? Would threatening to introduce him to the taste of his own liver do the trick? Would he interpret that as some kind of weird sexual innuendo? And then—restraining the urge to look at Ada and see how she seemed to be taking it all, if she seemed amused or afraid or annoyed—the question became, what does Ada want me to do? The frown became a scowl. She never knew what people wanted.

In the end, she sat there, staring at her hands, and didn’t do much of anything.