If You Fall (Brimstone 1)

Brandon, on the other hand, was desperate to look for his second wife. He wanted to create a business empire and an empire needs an heir.

As to the girl who was leaning in close to me, squeezing her tits together for me to admire, I wasn’t usually bad with names, but I was so damn preoccupied that I didn’t really listen when we were introduced earlier in the evening. The talk was loud and the music, too. My mind was elsewhere. I’d downed a glass or three of bourbon and was working on a serious drunk.

I wanted to forget everything.

So when she asked me to dance about an hour into the evening, I couldn’t remember her name, despite spending the previous fifteen minutes bending down to pretend I was listening raptly to everything she said.

“Let’s dance, Beckett,” she said and grabbed my hand. I smiled and allowed myself to be pulled away from the bar.

“What’s your name,” I asked when we arrived in middle of the dance floor.

She stopped dead in her tracks. “You don’t remember my name?”

I shrugged and tapped my head with a fist. “Sorry,” I said and shouted into her ear over the noise. “It was a hard day. I’m pulling a blank.”

“You’ve been talking to me for an hour and you don’t know my name?”

She gave me a look of disgu

st and then went back to the bar, leaving me standing all alone, surrounded by writhing people. I didn’t really care, because I hadn’t planned on picking up a woman that night, but I could get into dancing. I needed something physical to work out the stress.

So I did what any drunk red-blooded American male would do when stood up by his dance partner. I started to dance by myself, slowly integrating into the mass of thronging bodies. No one cared that I was alone. In fact, everyone was happy to dance with me, male and female alike. Soon, I lost myself in the music, dancing song after song until I was so hot that I had to remove my suit jacket and throw it on a table at the edge of the dance floor.

I seriously needed to work out a mega-dose of business-related stress.

When I finally left the dance floor, I saw that the young woman whose name I most un-chivalrously forgot was now leaning in close to Brandon. They looked hot and heavy and so I smiled to myself and went to get a beer at the other end of the bar. I’d let them romance each other while I cooled off.

I met up with another staff member and we stood at the bar and talked about the day at work, drowning our mutual sorrows. I switched to tonic water about then because I could feel I’d almost reached my limit.

About an hour or so later, I left the bar and went to the men’s room for a leak. I stood at a urinal in the washroom and thought back to my day. I was a lot drunk, dealing as I was with a death of a best friend and potential death of the company he and I had founded and nurtured after we returned from the war.

I closed my eyes as I stood at the urinal and tried to blank out everything but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t help reconsider my life.

Something nagged me. I couldn’t say what it was, exactly. It was this nameless, faceless darkness that filled me. Maybe due to a dead war buddy and a business in jeopardy. And something else, but I decided to save the existential angst for some other time.

Whatever it was, it was enough to take the edge off my enjoyment of the night. I glanced around the tiny bathroom, the walls of which were covered in crude graffiti. Oversized dicks competed with hairy and hairless pussies, boobs and the names of women with numbers beneath them along with ratings. There was water on the floor from a toilet that overflowed, and cigarette butts had been ground into the tiles.

The grout was black from filth.

I washed my hands and stared at myself in the mirror.

Longish unruly dirty blond hair falling in my eyes and below my collar, my grey tie and the first few buttons of my white shirt undone, three days’ worth of stubble on my jaw, some liquid spilled on my suit. Bloodshot blue eyes. A very bad taste in my mouth and the start of a headache brewing somewhere in my cranium.

Fuuuuck…

What the hell was I doing with my life?

I spent the next morning with Casey, one of my oldest and best female friends from Stanford who enlisted in the Army the same year Graham and I enlisted in the Marines – and no, we never fucked. The butchest lesbian I knew with biceps that rivaled mine when I first started lifting, she was my go-to girl when I needed a shoulder to cry on, which was almost never, of course. But after firing half my team and most of all, after losing my oldest friend, I needed a sounding board. Other than a few moments last night at Blanc, I hadn’t seen her in weeks since she’d been out of country on some consulting job.

I needed my Casey time.

“How are things?” she said as I helped her with the barbell. I spotted for her in the weight room at the club we both belonged to.

“The shits,” I said, and stood back, watching as she did her reps.

“Still upset about Graham?”

I nodded without speaking.