Limbo (10 page)

He was knocking on Eve’s front door in under two minutes. She pulled it open immediately. ‘Sorry. It’s Harry again. I can’t get him to leave. He’s in the gladiator suite.’

‘I thought you were going to ban him after the last time?’

‘Gabby had booked him in, it’s been a while since he visited so she thought he was over it.’ Eve shrugged. ‘He tips well.’

‘Where’s Gabby now?’

‘In my flat.’

He walked in, the warmth embracing him. ‘Send her home while Harry and I chat. Are you all done for the night?’

She nodded and he said, ‘Send everyone home and make a pot of coffee.’

Eve’s worked on appointment only. It wasn’t open twenty-four hours like a lot of the other legal brothels in Brisbane. They didn’t take customers off the street and they were situated far enough away from the main Basin drag that johns rarely just stumbled upon it. And even if they did, nothing about the building indicated it was a brothel.

A person had to
know
about Eve’s to find it. And it was
known
. For its good old-fashioned service and its discretion. Eve could have made a lot more money catering to the kink end of the market, attracting clientele who liked things they were prepared to pay big for, but Eve’s
employees
came first. Part of the reason she set the brothel up in the first place was to protect women from the more extreme johns out there.

At Eve’s, a client could get just about anything they wanted, unless he was into inflicting pain or wanted to spray his bodily fluids around unchecked. Then he had to go somewhere else.

And clients who frequented Eve’s knew the score.

Dash made his way past the bar, a sumptuous, tastefully decorated room consisting of cosy leather chairs, dark wood panelling and elegant parquetry floors. A corridor beyond the bar led to five rooms —
suites
— all done up in different themes that a staff of thirty-five women, mostly employed part-time, kept humming from ten until two during the day and eight until late seven days a week. Closed public holidays.

The brothel’s laundry bill was staggering.

Dash found Harry staring into his scotch, sprawled naked on the rumpled bed propped up against the colosseum headboard. Harry liked scotch and the room came with its own mini-bar. Unfortunately scotch didn’t like him. Scotch bought out the depressive in him.

Harry was a big guy, tall and beefy, with solid brickie-labourer honed muscles beneath the layers of flesh and a crown of golden curls. He looked exactly like a twenty-seven-year-old Botticelli angel.

With,
apparently
, an absolutely enormous cock.

Way more information than Dash needed.

For god’s sake, someone that good looking and well-endowed could have gotten laid for free anywhere, anytime but Harry had developed a fixation for Gabriella when she’d danced at one of the topless bars in the city two years ago.

‘Harry,’ Dash said, striding into the room grabbing the sheet at the end of the bed and yanking it up to cover Harry’s modesty. He didn’t mind having to talk a depressive, obsessive client of Eve’s off the ledge at one in the morning but he’d be fucked if he had to worry about the guy’s cock while he did it.

‘I thought we weren’t going to be meeting like this again?’

Harry looked up from his drink. ‘Dash! I’m sorry man, I’m so sorry but I couldn’t leave her…I just couldn’t leave her. She loves me. I know she does.’

Dash sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Didn’t we speak about this last time?’

‘Yep.’

‘And what did I say?’

Harry frowned and looked into his drink as if he was trying to divine the answer to Dash’s question from the liquid amber depths. Clearly it wasn’t in there.

‘This is Gabriella’s job,’ Dash reminded him gently. ‘You pay her for sex. She doesn’t love you.’

Harry nodded his head. ‘I know .’ He turned pleading eyes onto Dash. ‘But she’s so beautiful. And she smells so good. And if she marries me, she won’t have to be a prostitute anymore.’

Eve entered, balancing a tray with two coffee mugs and a full coffee pot. She placed it on the bedside table constructed from faux Roman columns.

‘All women smell good, Harry,’ Dash said prying the scotch out of his hand.

‘Not like Gabriella. She smells like honey jumbles and summer rain and a meadow full of flowers.’

Dash frowned. For fuck’s sake. Harry clearly read too much poetry. Or was ovulating. If Harry dared get a hard-on from this girly shit while Dash was sitting less than a foot away he was just going to haul his ass to the lock-up for the night. And then try and spend the rest of his life forgetting it, although Dash suspected there wasn’t enough brain bleach in the world to erase this little tete-a-tete from his memory banks.

He glanced at Eve as she passed the mugs and he handed one to Harry. ‘Here. Get this into you,’ he said. ‘Then you’re going home.’

‘I love her. I can rescue her,’ Harry said, his blue eyes pleading. ‘And she can rescue me right back.’

Eve withdrew and Dash resigned himself to drinking a pot of coffee with a giant, naked cherub who fancied himself as Richard goddamn Gere. ‘She doesn’t want rescuing, Harry.’

He shook his head. ‘This isn’t the life for her.’

‘She knows that, Harry,’ Dash murmured. ‘That’s why she’s studying to be a physiotherapist.’

He got a dreamy look in his eye and smiled. ‘She’ll be
good
at that. Maybe I can become her first client?’

Dash wasn’t entirely convinced Harry knew what physios did. His goofy grin seemed to suggest he’d be lining up for a massage — the happy-ending kind — instead of treatment for an injury.

‘Drink up while it’s hot,’ he said.

Dash spent the next hour chatting to Harry about the job he was working on while he sobered up. Dash learned more about how to mix a perfect mortar than he ever wanted to know. But when two guys were conversing and
one of them was naked
, the manlier the topic the better as far as he was concerned.

At quarter past two, Dash was walking a fully dressed Harry outside to catch the cab that had just pulled up.

‘Remember,’ Dash said as he reached for the door handle. ‘You’re banned. Join RSVP or download a Tinder app for Christ’s sake.’

A rather more sober Harry nodded. ‘Yes, Dash.’

‘I mean it. There better not be a next time because I’m just going to tell Eve to ring the cops.’

‘There won’t be a next time, I promise,’ he said meekly, folding his frame into the back seat of the taxi. ‘Tell her… Gabriella…I’m sorry. Tell Eve I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.’

Dash nodded as he shut the door. ‘Night Harry.’

The cab pulled away and Dash watched it until its taillights disappeared around the corner. His breath misted into the cold night air and he shivered before heading back into Eve’s and bounding up the stairs marked
Private No Entry
to her flat.

She was sitting on a stool at the bench that separated kitchenette from lounge room when Dash entered, tapping away at her laptop. She adjusted her retro, horn-rimmed glasses on the bridge of her nose and smiled at him. ‘Thanks,’ she said ‘I’m sorry to call you but you just can’t physically shift him when he doesn’t want to go. He just digs in.’

‘It’s fine,’ Dash dismissed as he drew closer, coming to a stop, leaning his hip into the bench. ‘I don’t think you’ll have any more trouble from him but I want you to call the police if he ever re-presents.’

She shook her head, smiling at him. ‘That’s why I have you. My own private triple-zero hero.’

Dash chuckled. Her hair was down, her head tilted and she was looking up at him through sleepy eyes. ‘Oh really?’

‘Uh-huh. Harry’s harmless enough, I just wanted him gone. I didn’t want to escalate the situation.’ She pushed off the stool and took a step towards him, resting her hip against the bench too. Their bodies were almost touching. In her heels she was only a couple of inches shorter than him.

‘You know you catch more flies with honey than you do vinegar, Dashiell,’ she said, reaching for the tab of his zipper at the hollow of his throat and fingering it.

‘Is that a fact?’ he murmured, picking up a silky blonde curl off her shoulder, his gaze locking on the plump red pillows of her mouth.

‘Maybe you need a lesson?’’

Dash slid a hand onto her free hip and dragged her closer. ‘Will you wear those glasses?’

Eve laughed. ‘Just the glasses?’ she asked with faux innocence.

Dash chuckled. He liked being with Eve. She was warm, generous, easy on the eye and happy to keep things casual.

She was also still in love with her ex.

He rubbed the strands of her hair absently between his fingers. ‘I take it trying again didn’t work out?’

Four months ago she’d told him she and Tom were dating again. Dash had been pleased for her, and philosophical even though his chances of the occasional random hook-up had just faded to black. Eve wore her heart on her sleeve. He knew how much she missed her ex.

She shook her head sadly. ‘The man was at the front of the line when they were handing out the stubborn.’

‘His loss,’ Dash murmured, pressing a soft kiss to Eve’s temple.

Dash had met Eve’s ex-husband. Hell, he’d even liked him. But clearly the man was a prize idiot if he couldn’t see what was right in front of him.

And Dash has absolutely no compunction about being Eve’s port in a storm.

Eve gave him a sad smile, tracing a finger over his bottom lip. ‘You always say the nicest things.’

Dash pressed his lips against the pad of her finger before rubbing his cheek against hers. ‘Well, if I’m guessing this whole vibe right,’ he said, ‘I think I’m about to get laid, right? Do I look stupid?’

Eve laughed. ‘Not from what I remember.’

He moved his lips to nuzzle from her temple down to her ear. ‘Mmm,’ he said. ‘You smell like…honey jumbles.’

Eve’s throaty vibrato laughter tickled the air around him as she extended her neck to his questing mouth. ‘Not summer rain or a meadow full of flowers?’

Dash inhaled deeply, his nose pressed to the curve of her neck. ‘Nope, definitely honey jumbles.’

He heard the harsh zipping noise as his jumper was opened. Warm hands found his chest and his belly, a hot mouth pressing to his nipple. He groaned as Eve’s tongue flicked over it.

‘Please tell me you have condoms somewhere?’ Dash hadn’t exactly been thinking about this eventuality when he’d pulled on his track pants and hightailed it over here.

If he had, he would have stuffed his wallet in his pocket. He was ninety percent sure there was one in there.

Seventy-five percent at least. Although he couldn’t be sure of its expiry date.

Eve laughed, pulling away slightly. ‘You’re standing in a brothel. The walls are practically papered with them.’

He laughed too at his ridiculous statement. Obviously his brain was suffering from a lack of oxygen as his little head took over all higher functioning.

And then she was kissing him with her red mouth and it was so good and sweet and easy, the way it always was between them, and he was lifting her up in his arms, striding over to the alcove off the lounge area that contained her bed and he was laying her on it, helping her out of her dress, her bra, her underwear, then shucking out of his own clothes, pressing her into the mattress, kissing and touching and laughing all the way to the end.

***

When Joy opened the door to Dash’s office eight hours later he was talking on his desk phone to someone she presumed was a client, if the words ‘I can follow him for a few days, see where he goes, who he meets’ were anything to go by. He had his legs up on the desk and was wearing jeans and a t-shirt and if anything, he looked even more unshaven and unkempt than ever.

He held his finger up at her and pointed at his chair. She ignored it, wandering behind him instead in search of coffee and to present Ralph with the little gift she’d bought him. She opened the flap of the satchel that was slung over her head and pulled out the plastic plant she’d bought as she’d passed the pet supply shop she didn’t even know was there until she was on her way home yesterday.

Joy immersed it in the water as she heard the receiver being replaced in the cradle. ‘What
are
you doing?’

Of course with nothing on the bottom of the bowl to anchor the weed into, it simply listed to the side and floated back up to the top.

A startled-looking Ralph cowered in the bottom of the bowl.

‘I bought your fish a present. But it’s not going to work.’ She pulled the floating weed out, placing it next to the bowl as she reached for the coffee pot. ‘I’ll have to buy some gravel first,’ she said, making a mental note.

Dash moved his legs off his desk and turned in his swivel chair, placing his feet flat on the ground and leaning forward at the hips to inspect the gift. ‘You can’t leave it there, that’s just cruel. So close yet so far away.’

Joy looked down to find Ralph had swum to the side of the bowl and appeared to be looking longingly at the only piece of greenery he’d probably ever seen. She’d go as far as to say he was pressing his nose against the glass. If, indeed, fish had noses.

‘You’re spoiling him,’ Dash tutted. ‘He’s going to want a shipwreck and a plastic diver for company next.’

‘Think of it as an investment in his mental health.’

Joy leaned her butt on the bar fridge as she sipped at her coffee, grimacing at the bitter taste of the strong black brew. She’d learned to take her coffee how it came over the years — dive bars weren’t known for their quality hot beverages — but this stuff made sludge look tame. It had to be rotting Dash’s gut.

‘You do know they have these fancy machines you can buy nowadays that make really excellent coffee. Lovely little pods, no messy filter paper full of disgusting sludgy, wrung-out coffee effluent.’

Dash reached forward and grabbed the pot, pouring himself another before slotting it back onto the hot plate. ‘No thanks. Years on the job mainlining government-issue coffee has completely bastardised my tastebuds.’

‘You’re not on the job any longer. Remind me to introduce you to Gloria Jeans.’

He wrinkled his nose. ‘Can’t stand any of the frothy café latte crap.’