Page 13 of Taking Turns

A good thirty minutes later he walks back in. The lobby has cleared out by now. Everyone has gone either home or downstairs.

Smith shrugs off his coat, looks up at me as he’s relieved of it. And then he’s passing the sentries as they hold open the black velvet rope and walking up the stairs.

“Well?” I say, when he enters the bar and takes a seat across from me where Quin was sitting. I’m in his chair and I know that pisses him off. But it has the best view. “What happened?”

“I really wanted to fuck her in the car.” He says this while he fills the snifter the bartender has placed in front of him and takes a drink.

“Why?” I ask. Trying to think it through rationally.

He shrugs. “She’s dirty, I can tell. I played with her pussy in the closet and she got wet. She sucked my finger like it was a cock.” He shrugs again. “She’s new and shiny. And it’s been a while since I had a fuck. So it crossed my mind. Are you going downstairs?”

“Are you going downstairs?” I ask, cocking an eyebrow.

“If you’re gonna play, I’m not staying behind. Are you gonna play?” He takes a long sip of his brandy, his heavy-lidded eyes trained on mine.

“Probably,” I say.

“Well, then,” he says, standing up. “Let’s go.”

I follow him out of the bar, then downstairs. We wait at the back-lobby elevator. “Did you get her name?” I ask.

“Nope,” he says.

I nod as the elevator doors open.

We step inside and descend.

Chapter Four - Chella

I met Rochelle Bastille about six months ago. I say about, because I’m not really sure when she first appeared in my life. The only thing I know for certain is that I first noticed her last July while I was at Buskerfest at Union Station. She was one of the street performers. A strikingly beautiful girl, but not in any of the classical ways that I often notice.

She was like a throwback from the Sixties. Long, straight, dirty-blonde hair with flowers weaved through braids on either side of her head that ended up as a chain of daisies.

She was singing. A church song I sang when I was a little girl. She strummed a guitar and even though Buskerfest is nothing if not wild, it was like she had a little sphere of silence surrounding her performance area.

That was the first time I noticed her.

The first time I met her was in a second-hand book and vinyl store half a block down from the art gallery I manage on the 16th Street Mall. It was about two weeks later, maybe. I was looking for a gift for my father’s sixtieth birthday. He’s a man who has everything and needs nothing. People like him require very thoughtful gifts or no gift at all.

I have tried the no-gift approach and didn’t find it quite got me where I wanted to be with him. So this year I made a commitment to find him something meaningful. Something he’d notice. Something that would show him that I cared. Remind him that I was still interested in his opinion.

Henry Walcott really is a man who has everything and needs nothing. But he’s sentimental about Sixties pop music, especially if it’s on vinyl. So I was in the bookstore that day to pick up a 45 that I had asked the owner to try to find for me.

Rochelle was in there at the same time. When I walked in she was chatting with the owner, so I decided to wait my turn over in the used book section.

That’s when things started to unravel, I think. That innocent trip to the used book section. That prominently displayed first edition copy of Nicole Baret’s The Longing propped up, front and center, inside the rare books case.

The Longing. It was an urban legend up until nineteen seventy-nine when a whole cache of books was found in an attic. It had been rumored that only two hundred copies were printed and that attic had all two hundred of them.

It makes me wonder… did Ms. Baret self-publish them? No publisher came forward to claim them. Ms. Baret died two decades before from an overdose while she was at a sex club. And if she did self-publish them, was there more than one printing? How could all two hundred copies of The Longing still be boxed up in someone’s attic when the book was legendary? Everybody knew about it. So how could they know about it, if no one ever read it?

It was such an intriguing mystery in so many ways.

“Do you think it’s real?”

I remember whirling around in the store, startled by her soft voice. She was wearing a long dress made of pale yellow velvet that day, even though it was hot outside. It was low-cut, so her cleavage was ample and there was no way—I don’t care who you are, man or woman—to avoid looking at it, it was that beautiful.

When I got over her tits, I looked up into her blue, blue eyes and recognized her from the carnival. “I don’t know. I heard they were all auctioned off at Christie’s thirty years ago.” I stopped and shook my head. “I just don’t know who would sell it. And here?” I crinkled my nose. “I love this store, it’s great and all, but how did The Longing get here?”