by Bonnie ZoBell

Flipping your hair over your shoulder, you approach a bar, the fun one with red leather seats that hardly stick. Your favorite jukebox song teases: “How Could You Believe Me When I Told You That I Loved You When You Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life.” Smokers issue smoke at the entry while the working neon beer signs blink magenta and sky blue. 

Warm bodies sidle up as you enter, sweat pervades, but it’s good sweat, dancing sweat, the kind of sweat that makes you glad you came. 

You live in the neighborhood, making it slightly more okay you’re a woman in a bar alone. You’re a good girl, but you have your urges. 

Eddie spots you right away. His bass rests onstage while he and other band members break. Large men with large jeans, they shake with big hands, accepting accolades, slapping backs, winking at pretty women. Working the crowd is part of the gig. 

Eddie checks you out over the shoulder of a dark-haired beauty. While she leans against peeling wood paneling, talking, he lifts his chin at you. You smile back. 

The place is packed, so you squeeze in at the table closest to the stage with two guys in cowboy boots The cowboys are pleased with your company, and you let them buy you a drink. You don’t mention you’re a lawyer. You say things like “dude,” and “no shit,” and “get out of town.” The one on your side of the table touches you occasionally, a pat on the shoulder, a brief melding of thighs.

“Drop Kick Me Jesus through the Goal Posts of Life” pops up on the jukebox. This is Alpine, San Diego, after all, the sticks. Shit kickin’. You tap your foot. Keep an eye.

There’s the lesbian Eddie slept with before you. Because she and her wiry body aren’t even remotely attractive, you can’t seem to make yourself jealous, but whatever else you can say about Eddie, he finds beauty in all women. She’s a hippie chick, he’s said. Cute. 

Eddie’s called back to stage and leans close to the dark beauty with that smile of his, no doubt promising to be back. He turns toward the stage and winks at you. You laugh because he’s such a bad boy. You shouldn’t want to see him, but you do. 

They have names for women who leave bars with the likes of Eddie, alleged psychological syndromes. But you wear your pheromones on your sleeve. Just out of an awful marriage, you hope never to commit again as long as you live. 

He kisses your neck while instruments are tuned, says you’re beautiful as feedback screeches through the PA. Soon “Did I Shave My Legs for This” bounds out of the band’s speakers. The dark beauty glares across the dance floor and quickly away because she doesn’t really want to see you. You know she’s plotting. Drama is at the heart of dive bars. 

Will she touch him when no one is looking? When people are looking? Will she send him a drink? Will she tuck her number into the coin pocket of his Levis?

The bartender knows you and brings your favorite on the house. A rusted Hamm’s sign shows a red canoe by a flowing blue river. Yellowing bar jokes are stuck to the register. The first dollar bill is signed and framed. 

Eddie and you face each other as he performs, and you know you’re not the only one picturing what you do alone in his dimly-lit place or yours, how neither of you is afraid of being rude, of wanting, exploring.

You dance with one of the cowboys right in front of Eddie’s spot onstage. The cowboy’s knee slides between your legs. You stare into Eddie’s eyes.

Next break, Eddie grabs your hand despite the dark beauty, and you all but gallop to the parking lot. He’s hard against your stomach. His mouth encircles your breast, his tongue curlicues around your nipple. You squeeze his ass like you want to take some home with you. 

He tells you about the son he misses, and you tell him about you and your ex still fighting over the dogs.

“I’m writing a song for you,” he says as you walk back. “It’s called ‘Your Love Left a Tattoo on My Heart.’” 

You kiss him on the cheek and tell him about an asshole client. 

On stage, he waves his pinky at you, and other girls smile, too. Except the dark beauty. She’s combed her hair out, applied new lipstick. Her sweater is short so her abs show. She is a beacon, so pretty that eyes automatically fall to her. Her mission has been announced by merely standing there in tight jeans.

When Eddie waves a pinky at her, too, she beams, but not when he does it to the lesbian. 

During the last set, another of Eddie’s old flames arrives, one he slept with after being freed from twelve years of marriage. Short and smoldery, the multitudes of piercings up and down her ears indicate a lack of boundaries, which scared him. She liked candlelight and sitting up in bed wearing nothing but a fur coat, thunderous heavy metal and Eddie eating her while she chain smoked.  

“I’ll bet it turned you on, slave boy,” you’ve told him.

A sheepish smile.

The dark beauty pines over Eddie. He closes his eyes to the rhythm.

Afterward, he immediately drinks a beer, bottoms up, and pats sweat off his face with cocktail napkins.

The dark beauty all but dashes for him. She will not be going anywhere tonight without a scene. He drifts from her to the lesbian for a laugh or two, then a hug with the nasty girl who will undoubtedly proposition him.

Hey there, he says when he comes to you. A warm hug.

You have ten minutes, you tell him, before you walk back to your apartment around the corner and wait.