He checked her out as she ordered a drink. He caught the sun line on her ring finger. Married, but that was fine; it only made them more eager. Her treadmilled thigh rippled as she crossed it over the other. He eyed her open suit jacket, her freckled chest, her small breasts, loose in a black brassiere.
“On my tab,” said Holiday to the bartender as she placed the drink in front of Rita.
“You’re gonna spoil me,” said Rita.
“I’ll let you get the next one.”
“Deal,” she said. “So what line are you in?”
“Security,” said Holiday. “I sell trackers, surveillance equipment, wiretap devices, that kind of thing. To police.”
He had a friend, an ex-cop like him, who did just that, so he knew enough about it to bullshit her.
“Hmm.”
“You?”
“Pharmaceuticals.”
“You got any samples you wanna lay on me?”
“Bad boy,” she said with a crooked smile. “I’d lose my job.”
“I had to ask.”
“It’s okay to ask.”
“It is?” said Holiday.
She drank vodka tonics and he stuck to Absolut on ice. She matched him one for one. They finished his pack of smokes and he bought another. He moved closer to her and she let him and he knew that he was there.
He told her about his most embarrassing moment as a salesman. It was a variation on a story he had told many times before. He changed the details as he went along. He was good at that, too.
“What about you?” he said.
“Oh, God,” she said with a toss of her hair. “Okay. I was in Saint Louis last year. I had flown in that morning for a big lunch meeting, and I thought I had cushion time between my arrival and the meeting. So I wore some comfortable clothes on the flight. Comfortable but definitely not appropriate for the meeting.”
“I know where this is going.”
“Let me tell it. The plane was real late getting in, and I had to pick up the rental car as well. By the time I did it, there wasn’t enough time to check into my hotel, change my clothes, and still make the meeting.”
“So where’d you change?” said Holiday.
“There was a garage under the restaurant where we were supposed to meet.”
“You couldn’t use the hotel bathroom?”
“It was real dark in the garage and nobody was around. I changed in the backseat of the rental. I had my top off, I mean completely off, because I had to put on a different bra than the one I had on, and this old guy walks by on the way to his car. Instead of doing the decent thing and walking on, maybe doing a double take, he comes over to the window and taps on it, and he’s staring at me, really checking me out…”
“I don’t blame him.”
“. . . and he says something like, ‘Miss, can I be of any assistance?’ ”
Holiday and Rita Magner laughed.
“That’s what makes the story,” said Holiday. “That detail.”
“Right,” said Rita. “ ’Cause otherwise, it’s not all that unusual. I mean, it wasn’t the first time I’ve been nude in a car.”
“And I bet it won’t be the last.”
Rita Magner smiled, reddened a little, and knocked back the rest of her drink.
“That day in the garage,” said Holiday. “Did you have on the black thong you’re wearing now?”
“How do you know that?”
“You’re definitely wearing a thong,” said Holiday. “And it’s gotta be black.”
“You’re bad,” she said.
She mentioned the minibar in her room.
Going up in the elevator, he moved on her and kissed her mouth. She parted her lips, and against the wood-paneled wall her legs opened like a flower. His hand went up her bare thigh and touched the lace of her black thong and beneath it the dampness and the heat. She moaned under his kiss and touch.
An hour later, Holiday was walking back to his Lincoln. She’d been as needy and voracious as he’d expected, and when it was done he left her to her memories and her guilt. She hadn’t given him any indication that she wanted him to stay. Rita was now like the others, a prop, a story to tell the boys at Leo’s, something for them to imagine and be envious of even as she was wiped from his mind. He’d forgotten her face by the time he turned the key to his car.