Warming Trend (7 page)

“I’m envious. All I have is a not-so-effective shower. I must have rinsed off six times last night. I’m glad to be working here right now, even if the freezer units are having a hard time keeping the tables right.”

As welcome as the cold temperatures were in the club, this environment was artificial far too dry, and the ice varied too much in texture day-to-day to feel like anything but the inside of a freezer. The tourists loved it, and so did some of the locals, but that didn’t make it like home. Ani wasn’t sure she really remembered what
cold
meant. She was about to express her opinion of the weather with a choice expletive when a table on the far side of the dance floor crashed onto its side. Ani peered toward the incident it took quite a hit to move one of these tables. There didn’t seem to be a fight, so she locked the register and went to help the ice groomer.

Halfway across the long room she realized that the ice under her feet was too soft. The tables were too shiny several had some standing water on their surface.
Crap
. That meant the freezer units were off, and more tables were going to topple as guests started losing their footing. Visions of lawsuits danced in her head. At least there wasn’t the risk of broken glass. It wasn’t just novelty that made them use nothing but barware made from ice, it was practicality. Broken glass on ice floors was invisible, and the floors couldn’t be vacuumed, they were groomed with something like a small Zamboni.

The bouncer, who wore the same kind of cleated boots that Ani preferred, began lending an arm to patrons as they cleared the club. Tabs underway were forgiven, and tokens to waive the cover charge for another night were handed out. The main doors were opened to let out the crowd more quickly, but the rush of sweltering humid air only added to the dripping walls and slippery floors.

“Okay, kids,” the assistant manager announced, holding to a pole to keep from falling. “We have a major meltdown in two units. I already had my orders from the kahunas at corporate that next time it happened to go ahead and replace them with the more efficient models. Plus we’re going to do a complete melt and clean out, refloor the dance area and redecorate.”

“How long is that going to take?” Lisa was wringing her hands.

“Ten days to two weeks. Sorry nothing I can do about it. We’re an ice bar and we got no ice.”

Ani heaved a stoic sigh. They’d had an outage last year that had lasted a week. Fortunately, she had the savings to tide her over.

Lisa, as they walked out the back corridor together, was far more concerned. “Great. No job for ten days maybe two weeks? I was just starting to get on my feet. TBE stuck me with the cell phone contract and I had to buy a car because my name wasn’t on the registration even though I paid for half.”

Over the last ten days, Ani had heard all about the financial situation left from “The Bitch Ex.” She tried to be encouraging. “Maybe it won’t be that bad.”

Lisa was almost in tears. “I can’t go two weeks without a paycheck, and I’m not going back to dancing. This is what I get for not having a nest egg. TBE took my nest egg!”

“Dancing?” It was the first Ani had heard of it. Given Lisa’s graceful voluptuousness, the word
exotic
immediately sprang to mind.

“Not really. More like Lap Sitting and Grinding at that dump near the airport.” Lisa ran her hands through her already wild hair. “What am I going to do?”

“Come on,” Ani said. “Let’s go find something to eat.”

“Nothing’s open but the after-hours clubs,” Lisa predicted.

She turned out to be right, so Ani offered the meager contents of her kitchen and full use of the bathtub, the offer of which vastly improved Lisa’s mood. Lisa proved herself imaginative by making thick instant coffee, adding slugs of chocolate syrup and pouring it all over tall glasses of ice. She didn’t waste any time filling the tub with cold water, stripping down and climbing in. She wasn’t exactly shy in the process.

“Oh, stop averting your eyes.” She flicked water in Ani’s direction. “You had your chance. The least you could do is leer a little. I need an ego boost.” She leaned back in the tub, eyes closed as she sipped her iced coffee.

Ani sat on the commode and had to admit that nothing was wrong with Lisa’s body, and a great deal was right. Yet she couldn’t even conjure up a fantasy. Still, there was nothing wrong with flattery. “Okay, I’m leering.”

Lisa opened one eye. “You are not.”

“I’m trying.” If she had a tail, she’d have wagged it for emphasis.

“You are
frigid
, aren’t you?”

“I’ve been trying to tell you that.”

“How come you’re not freaked about no work for two weeks?”

“I have something put away for a rainy day. I’m Russian on both sides. We believe that life is meant to be a worst-case scenario, and we plan accordingly.” Given her simple life, she lived off her cash tips and banked her paychecks. She sipped the iced concoction, then went to find some coffee liqueur. After doctoring both their glasses, she settled back on her perch and contemplated the next two weeks. She’d only known Lisa a short while, and it wasn’t saying much for her social skills that Lisa was currently her best friend. She had liked it that way, she reminded herself, prided herself on it, in fact. “I could loan you some money.”

“That’s sweet, but then I’d just owe you money. I’m trying to get out of debt, not deeper in it.”

“Better me than the telephone company.”

Lisa sighed. “Thank you. I don’t mean to sound ungracious. It’s just that I thought I’d hit an easy patch for once. Here I was working with a bartender who put out great drinks faster than a speeding bullet, and scooping up all the tips I could handle without getting handled.” She opened her eyes and leaned out of the tub to put her glass on the floor.

“Leer,” Ani said, legs crossed in front of her. “Boobages, backside leer.”

“Oh. Stop. I’m blushing. You’re too kind.” Lisa gave her the patented
drop dead
glare as she rested her chin on the side of the tub. “What’s that?”

Too late, Ani saw the folded page of the
Fairbanks Gazette
where she’d last left it, on the short stack of clean towels. “Nothing.”

Lisa moved faster than she did. “I knew it! It’s that photo you said you didn’t know that professor.”

“No, I didn’t. I said that I hadn’t slept with her which is what you meant by asking if I had studied
under
her.”

“But you know her.”

“She was my doctoral advisor.”

“Cool. Why couldn’t you just say so? Did you have a thing for her?”

“I admired her, but that’s as far as it went.” She dipped a washcloth into the bathtub, and drenched her neck in cold water. It helped with the heat a little.

Lisa glanced up from the photo. “You had a crush on her.”

“Maybe at first. Everybody does, even the guys and they know she’s gay.” Ani tried for a nonchalant shrug.

“So? Oh…”

“Oh, what?”

“It’s not her. It’s the other woman. Eve Cambra. Who is short but very cute, I might add.”

Hearing someone else say Eve’s name sent a sharp jolt through Ani’s chest. All she could do was nod.

“You left because you broke her heart.”

“I broke everybody’s heart, including my own. I really don’t want to talk about it.”

“You don’t have to.” Lisa peered more closely at the photograph. “Were you two together, or just dating, or what?”

“I said I didn’t want to talk about it.”

“You’re not talking about it, I am.”

“None of it matters. They’ve moved on and Monica Tyndell is exactly the kind of woman that Eve deserves.”

Lisa gave her another of those quick glances that Ani was beginning to suspect were sharper than lasers. “You loved her to distraction, you made some kind of mistake, so you’re giving up on that?”

“I gave up three years ago.”

“You’re still giving up. Some Russian you are. Sounds like you didn’t plan ahead for something. I don’t know what you think you did, but it couldn’t have been
that
bad. You don’t strike me as a quitter.”

“I didn’t quit. You have no idea what academics are like when…I had to leave.” Ani ground her teeth. “Remember the part where I said I didn’t want to talk about it?”

“Vaguely.” Lisa put down the paper. “So are you like an identity thief, a dope dealer, or did you slap her around a little, or what?”

“It was nothing like that. And if I had any honor, I’d go back for my crap that’s probably still sitting in her garage. I’d get my stuff and my dog and go live in Kaktovik.” At Lisa’s arched eyebrow, she added sourly, “Think of the worst freakin’ cold armpit of the known universe and that’s a step up from Kaktovik.”

“Kak-whatever. I mean, come on.” She rested her head on her arms along the side of the tub. “You broke her heart, and she’s taking care of your dog and still has your stuff in her garage? How lesbian is that?”

Put that way, it sounded like ordinary dyke drama, but there was so much more to it. Lisa hadn’t a clue what it felt like to have everyone you’d ever respected whispering behind your back, and the people who didn’t like you saying it to your face, and to the newspaper and on blogs. She didn’t understand what it felt like to know people were taking their business away from your girlfriend because of something you’d done. “Well, I assume she has everything. She’s that kind of person. Way too good for me.”

“That doesn’t have to be true, you know. You can do the honorable thing.”

Ani watched as Lisa dipped under the cold water. When she surfaced, Ani asked, “What are you talking about?”

* * *

There was a reason Ani didn’t let people into her life, certainly not people like Lisa, who looked at things like pork rinds and declared them health food and somehow made that sound reasonable. People who heard
yes
no matter how many times you shouted
no
. Women like Lisa, whose frustrating leaps of indirect logic somehow made sense at seven a.m. after a mostly sleepless night, while standing in front of an airline ticket counter. They still made sense during the process of removing sandals in the security line, and buying really bad coffee and breakfast bagels. It had all made sense until they reached cruising altitude for the puddle jumper that would take them to Atlanta. That was when an inner voice chanting
This is crazy
finally got loud enough for Ani to hear over the straining engines.

“This plane is so small I’m guessing our snack is a can of peanuts the captain opens and passes back.” She felt like sulking, even though she knew it really hadn’t been Lisa’s idea. Ever since she’d seen that picture she’d known she had to go home. It was over, time to get her stuff and get out. Two weeks with no work how much more of a sign did she need? Who cared now if people pointed and whispered and thought she’d masterminded a reckless academic crime? Her dreams of being all that her father had been, plus having an academic degree, of proving his legacy had value by becoming
Doctor
Bycall, were done. Monica Tyndell’s belief in her was over. Eve’s faith had been wasted, and they’d moved on. She’d move on, like she’d always known she would. The only difference was she’d have the support of an unlikely friend. “I bet we don’t even get a movie on the Atlanta to Seattle leg.”

Lisa shifted in the narrow seat as she pulled a thin sweater over her head. “It was nice of you to offer to bring me along, but that doesn’t mean you get to whine the whole time.”

“All I need you to do is look like my hot blond girlfriend, and tell everybody I’m a rich bar owner now, or something.” This is a crazy idea, she told herself. It had sounded so reasonable two hours ago, after a second round of liqueur-doctored iced coffee. They’d scarcely packed anything useful in their bags. Like idiots, they hadn’t gone back to the club to see if they could borrow snowsuits or parkas or high-traction slip-ons for their shoes. Lisa didn’t even own boots and Ani had found that her sub-zero rated jacket, dug out of the back of the closet, had become home to a colony of critters.

They weren’t prepared for Alaska.

“To me, you are rich. After all, your credit card went through, and that was quite a ka-ching.”

Ani shrugged. “I was saving up to go back to school, study something else eventually.”

“As if you think about anything besides rocks and ice.” Lisa sighed. “What else do you want to be when you grow up?”

There was still no hesitation in her. “A glacial geologist. I can’t get past that, but I’m going to have to. What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“The love of somebody’s life.” Lisa turned her head away, but not before Ani caught the sparkle of sudden tears.

“You okay?”

“No, but that’s nothing new. Do you have pictures in your head of your perfect life?”

Standing on top of a wind-sculpted rise on an ice field, at her feet the glory of breathtaking white spread out on one of nature’s largest, most formidable canvasses, the tingle of cold against her eyelashes, and warmth at her back she knew was Eve… Try as she might, Ani couldn’t conjure a big red X to blot it from her mind. Eve and her cooking together in a cozy kitchen, the fire crackling that one wouldn’t go away either. And that one hurt more, because it wasn’t made up, it was a memory, and it came complete with Eve’s laughter and Karrin Alyson on the stereo. “No, no pictures.”

“Liar.”

“Yeah.” She didn’t flinch when Lisa touched the back of her hand with a gesture of sympathy, but honestly, she told herself, it had been three years. She ought to have moved on, she knew that. Even if her one mistake had unfairly cost her everything she wanted, she still should have moved on. Moved on to what well, that was the unanswered question. It was time to start looking for answers.

“How old do you think I am?”

Ani made a show of looking Lisa up and down. “I’m a bartender don’t expect flattery. You’re thirty. Most people would think you’re twenty-seven, maybe twenty-six. I certainly thought you were younger than you are, at first.”

The remnant of tears in Lisa’s eyes was vanquished by her cheeky smile. “I’m thirty-two, oh great bartender. I never wanted lots, not like my folks. My dad upgraded the cars every two years, we were always moving to larger houses. I left home when it was a golf course out the back door. I only ever wanted just enough. The perfect life in my head was an endless curl of surf, a long beach, a bonfire, and it was always today. Never tomorrow.”