Possession: Explicitly Yours, #1

Vero whistled low, craning her neck to see through the neon maze that was Hey Joe’s front window. “Check out those wheels .”

The door was propped open for the seventy-degree weather. In the early-evening dusk, a man in a suit got out of an Audi. Lola and Johnny, crowded behind the bar with Vero, looked at each other.

“Let me handle this,” he said.

“What’s going on?” Vero asked. “Is it the money guy?”

Lola’s gaze snapped between Veronica and Johnny. “You told her?”

“Personally, I would’ve accepted the offer,” Vero said, a teasing smile on her face. “Wonder how he feels about redheads.”

“It’s prostitution,” Lola said.

“I prefer to think of it as a trade.” Vero opened her hand toward the door. “You got something I want,” she pointed at her crotch, “I got something you want.”

“So you sleep with him then,” Lola said.

“Honey, for that much I would. I don’t care how he looks.” She leaned over so Johnny couldn’t hear. “But damn if that man didn’t look good.”

Lola shook her head. “He looked like trouble.”

She laughed throatily. “You know Vero gives it up to trouble for free all the time.”

Lola willed herself to look away from the door. It’d been days since Beau had been there. She hated to admit she was still thinking of him. There had to have been a reason he picked her, but she went in circles trying to figure it out. Had there been others? If so, what was the common factor between them?

She tore her eyes away to focus on Johnny. He watched the door with more intensity than he’d looked at her with in days. A few hours earlier, an unusually large table of male customers had ordered round after round. He’d joked with them that if they doubled their bill by the end of the night, he’d throw in a complimentary lap dance from the waitress of their choice. “Come on, I’m joking around” had been his defensive answer to her glare. Johnny didn’t joke around like that, but he hadn’t really been himself since the picnic.

Lola held her breath when the man walked in. She and Johnny exhaled at the same time. “It’s not him,” Johnny said in a way that almost sounded disappointed. Johnny leaned over the bar. “Can I help you?”

In the light, the man was clearly not Beau. His arms were too short for his wrinkled suit jacket and his belly strained the buttons of his dress shirt. “Wow,” he said. He narrowed his eyes up and around, stopping at the framed black-and-white photos of musicians on Hey Joe’s stage. “This is even more authentic than it looked on the Internet. Not like the dives you see in Brooklyn where all the stuff on the walls came from a website or boutique.”

Vero was refilling the bar caddies. Johnny picked up a jar of olives she’d asked him to open earlier and knocked the lid hard against the edge of the bar. Everyone jumped and turned to him. He twisted off the top and passed it to Vero without removing his eyes from the man. “What can I do for you?”

He held out his hand for Johnny, who just stared at it. “Hank Walken,” he said, jovial and unaffected by the brushoff.

“Jonathan Pace.”

“I’m looking for Mr. Wegley.”

“Mitch isn’t around right now. What’s this about?”

“Heard this place is for sale. You guys worked here long?”

“About twelve years,” Johnny said.

“How’s business?”

The man was smarmy. Lola would set the building on fire before a guy like that got his hands on Hey Joe. “It sucks,” Lola said. “In fact, the whole block sucks.”

Hank nodded. “Interesting.”

“Interesting?” Johnny asked.

Hank scanned the wall behind them. “Yeah,” he said absentmindedly. “It’s got a lot of potential. Would do well with some sprucing up.”

Johnny and Lola exchanged a look. “Sprucing up how?”

“I’ve done my homework. This place has history. Foot traffic. Repeat business.” Hank checked under the lip of the bar as if he expected to find something there. “That’s not showing in the numbers, though. It needs a fresh touch. Something special. Maybe a rooftop bar or a lounge area or something.”

“This is more of a local joint,” Johnny said.

Hank’s eyes went to a pool game happening in the corner. “I picked up on that.”

“It’s the complete opposite of a lounge.”

“There’s your problem.” Hank pointed at Johnny, grinning. “You’re not thinking outside the box, son. It’s all about the angle. We give it a cool, hip, rock ‘n’ roll vibe. Get some young celebrities to make appearances at the reopening. We’ve already got the rep, but a new look and a little rebranding could do wonders.” He nodded thoughtfully to no one in particular. “I’ve flipped bars before. Five minutes in here, and I’m seeing a lot of missed opportunities.”

It was exactly what Lola and Johnny had been saying for years. Mitch wasn’t willing to budge on a lot of things to keep the integrity of the bar, but sales suffered as a result. Not that Lola and Johnny had ever once discussed turning it into a lounge. “What opportunities?” Lola asked.

Hank looked back at her and narrowed his eyes. “Think I got this far by giving away my secrets, sweetheart?” He laughed good-naturedly but didn’t answer her question.

“Business really is slow,” she said. “Not sure this place can be saved.”

“I disagree,” Hank said. “In the right hands, Hey Joe could be at least doubling profits by this time next year.” He dug his sausage-like fingers into his suit jacket. “I’ll give you my card. I’m just going to take a look around. If I don’t hear from Mr. Wegley, I’ll try again tomorrow.”

Johnny took the card. “He won’t be in until Friday.”

“Any way we can get him in here to take a meeting?”

“He’s out of town.”

“Guess I should’ve called before hopping on a flight from New York. That’s all right. I’ll wait.”

Hank walked away. He swiveled his head, pausing to read the flyers Lola had designed and stuck on a corkboard. He inspected the floors, touched the walls—got so close to the pool table, a man nearly twice his size asked him if he knew any surgeons who specialized in pool-cue removal.

Johnny held up the card for Lola, ripped it and dropped it in the trash behind the bar. “Are you kidding me? A rooftop bar?”

Lola shook her head. “Can you imagine if Quartz and the guys heard that?”

“Hey Joe’s got history, man,” Johnny said. His eyes narrowed on Hank as he made his slow way to the exit. “Seriously. You can’t just flush that down the toilet.”

Vero shrugged. “Something needs to change. Maybe it’s time, Boss.”

“And maybe you go snort some lines,” he said.

“Johnny,” Lola scolded. “What is with you?”

He muttered an apology, grabbed a Coors from the mini-fridge and keyed off the top. Vero muttered about checking on her tables. Lola kept her mouth shut and didn’t mention Johnny’s no-drinking-during-work-hours rule.

Vero hadn’t put anything away. Lola picked up the jar of olives, but it slipped out of her hands and broke. “Damn it,” she cried, jumping back. “Why don’t you guys ever clean up your own shit?”

“You guys?” Johnny asked.

Lola glanced up at him. She saw an opening for her frustration and took it. “Yes, you guys. Did you not see the basket of clean laundry that’s been sitting out since Saturday?”

Johnny’s lips pinched. “I thought you were waiting to put it away.”

“Waiting for what?” Lola asked. “There’s no law that says you can’t do it.”

He held up a palm and the beer in his hand. “Sorry. I didn’t realize it was a test.”

“It wasn’t,” Lola said under her breath, squatting to clean up the glass. “It would just be nice if someone else did something once in a while.” She’d overreacted. It was second nature to clean up after Johnny and that transferred over to work. But the constantly taking things out and leaving them there annoyed her sometimes.

She dropped the big pieces of glass in the trash, right on top of the two halves of Hank’s card. “Johnny?”

“What?” he asked. “I said I was sorry.”

“No, not that.” She paused. “Where’s Beau’s card?”

Johnny stopped staring into space and turned abruptly to her. “Why?”

“I remember him setting it on the bar, but I never threw it out. Just wondering what happened to it…”

Johnny took a long swig of his drink. He inspected the bottle. “I tossed it.”

“That night?”

“Yeah.”

“When?”

“Like I said, that fucking night, right after he left. Ripped it in half too. Should I have burned it?”

Lola looked at him as hard as he avoided looking at her. After finding Beau’s card in Johnny’s pocket, she’d hidden it in her birth control box under the sink—and it was in one piece. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m goddamn sure, Lola,” he said. “What’re you nagging me for?”

Vero walked up and set a ticket on the bar. Johnny snatched it to fill the order. Lola tried to convince herself she owed her boyfriend the benefit of the doubt, but that he’d kept the card meant only one thing to her. However small it was, there was a part of Johnny considering Beau’s offer.

Mitch returned to work that Friday. It’d been a long, draining week of mood swings and clipped words—offenses both Lola and Johnny were guilty of.

While Johnny was distracted up front, Lola went back to Mitch’s office and leaned in the doorway.

“What is it?” he asked without removing his eyes from his computer.

“How was your trip?”

“Productive. Barb found a house she likes.”

“I bet her family is happy you guys are moving there.”

“They are.” Mitch looked up. “Barb is too. She’s wanted this for some time.”

“What about you?” Lola asked.

“You know how it is. This place is a grind. Barb always said if it got to be too much, she wanted me out.”

“But do you have to leave L.A.?”

He held his arms out. “This is L.A. Things were great when I was out there screwing around with customers all day, but now I’m back here most of the time, trying to dig myself out of this hole. Barb knows my dad’s place is the only thing keeping me in California.”

“Yeah.” Lola picked at some peeling paint. “Have you had any offers?”

“Nothing official yet, but it won’t be long.”

“Oh.”

“What is it, Lola? I’m kind of busy here.”

“I don’t know. I just…Mitch, what do you think this place needs? Why’s business slow?”

He sighed. “In the eighties, when my dad handed over the reins, we were already struggling. But then grunge came on the scene and I wasn’t letting that anywhere near here. Not after the rock legends we’d seen.”

“So you lost the young music crowd.”

“Young and some old. You know all this, Lola.”

“I’m trying to see it from a business perspective.”

“All right, then you want to know my first mistake? Pay for play. I let my head get too big asking new bands to cough up cash for a spot on our stage. They walked instead. I could’ve made up for it in the nineties, but like I said, I fucking hate grunge. Turns out a lot of people don’t, though. When Fred’s went belly up, the block became a carousel of crap. Except us, the only place still standing, but our knees are buckling. Barb says I either sell out or get out, so I’m washing my hands of it. I can’t stick around to see what happens.”

Mitch’s words were hard, but she heard the regret in his voice. “That Hank guy said something about a lounge. I think he wants to turn this place high end.”

“We’re meeting later today, so I’ll know more then, but it sounds like he wants to keep the name and image, just make it into something classier. A real scene.”

“But that’s not what Hey Joe is.” That wasn’t what Johnny was.

He shrugged. “Not really, kid. Sorry.”

“Would you say this place is a good investment?”

“There’ll never not be foot traffic. Just about getting back on the map.”

Lola felt her heartbeat everywhere. In the last week, she’d struggled more than ever with the pressure to take care of Johnny in a bigger way than she had been. Now it was more than that. Lola could bring herself to walk away from Hey Joe, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t worth saving for Johnny, for all the other people who loved it and for its history. She might be the only one who could do it. “So if someone had the opportunity to buy it, they should take it?”

“Whatever you’re thinking, forget it. You don’t know anybody with that kind of money.”

“I might.”

“I know Johnny’s got his heart set on owning a bar and believe me, I’d love to make that happen for you two. Nobody knows this place like him. But there’s no way in hell you can even ballpark the offers I’m hearing.”

“What’re the offers, Mitch?”

“Around six hundred grand,” he said.

Lola looked at the floor. More than Beau’s proposition—but people took out small business loans all the time, didn’t they? Maybe not for that much, but the difference? She cleared her throat. “If Johnny and I could come up with the money—”

“Hey,” Mitch said, shaking his head. “Come on. You and Johnny are good kids. You’ve always been straight. Don’t tell me that’s changed.”

“Hypothetically.”

Mitch bit the end of his pen and reclined in his seat, studying her. “If you can make me a decent offer, and if you’re upfront with yourselves about the hard work ahead of you, then you should. Hypothetically? Buying this bar would be easier than Johnny starting his own, but not much considering the state of things. It’s not like I want to see my dad’s place destroyed, but I can’t feed myself off my principles anymore. Once I get my check, it’s out of my hands.”

Lola returned to the front of the house. Johnny poured three shots in his bartender’s rhythm, one at a time and without stopping. Lola stayed off to the side. He said something to the three girls in front of him as he patted his beer gut and laughed. That beer gut had been a valley nine years ago when she’d started dating a tall, skinny, twenty-four-year-old Johnny with darkish hair past his ears—hair that was now down to his shoulder blades and always in a ponytail. The valley was now a small hill. That beer gut had history. She liked it and what it stood for.

Johnny wouldn’t survive a new owner. He’d been doing things his way for too long. And she sure as hell wouldn’t stick around without him. Nobody liked change, especially not Johnny, and it was on the horizon, speeding their way.

The ride home that night was quiet. Lola went over the numbers in her head again and again. If Walken bought Hey Joe, she figured they could be out of their jobs within weeks. She listed alternatives. They’d both have to hustle, because even though Lola had been thinking lately she might like to try something new, they couldn’t survive on Johnny’s wages alone. She’d have to work while she figured her shit out. Fall classes had already started, so school was out of the question for a few months at least.

She looked over at Johnny as he pulled into their apartment complex. He’d been preoccupied, but not about losing their jobs. It was as if he expected everything to just figure itself out—the way he expected getting married, having kids and owning a business would happen on their own. He was thirty-three. They’d been driving through a tunnel for the last eight years, and they were about to come out of the darkness. She couldn’t see what was on the other side, but at least she was trying.

“Johnny?” she asked when they’d parked and he reached for the handle.

He looked back. “Yeah?”

“You’re my best friend.”

“It’s late, babe.”

She smiled, a little resigned. “I know. But you are. When we’re young, we think we’re invincible. Then we get older, and it’s like we realize not everything works out all the time. If you want certain things, you have to put in the effort for them. Or even make sacrifices.”

Johnny put his hand over hers on the seat. “What’s bringing this on?”

She squinted out the windshield. “Money was a big deal to my mom. She would say ‘The toaster’s broken. We got no money, so we have to live with broken toasters and ripped screen doors that won’t even keep out a fly, forget about a robber.’ I had no idea who’d want to rob us. We had nothing. She said that was naïve and stupid, because desperate people were everywhere.

“She told me money was the reason my dad left. There wasn’t enough. So I believed money and happiness were inextricably linked until I met you and decided love was more important. I was in a dark place, but you came in and saved me. Since then, I’ve tried hard to convince myself money isn’t important at all.”

Johnny sniffed. “Now you realize it is.”

“Mitch said something to me today. He said, ‘I can’t feed myself off my principles anymore.’ It’s kind of the same with love. Those things are so much, Johnny, but they aren’t everything like I wish they were. Money can give us stability and freedom. It can give us choices.”

Johnny released her hand and ran his palms down his pants to his knees. “Life is easier with working appliances,” he said flatly.

“If someone buys the bar, we’ll probably lose our jobs.”

“I know.”

“Do you know? You’re more concerned about Hey Joe being glamorized than you are about how we’ll survive.”

“I don’t see the point in worrying about it until we know more,” he said. “Something could still happen.”

“Something like what?” Lola asked. If Johnny said it out loud, she wouldn’t have to. Not knowing if he wanted her to accept the offer was almost worse than if he’d just come out and tell her to do it. She was stuck, and she had no idea which door would lead to their happiness.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But there’s still time.”

“There isn’t any more time,” Lola said. “Are we stupid not to take the only exit we’ll ever get? Buying the bar isn’t just keeping our jobs. It’s following your dream. It’s building a life and having a steady income and saving a legacy. All in one night.”

“So what’re you saying?” Johnny asked. He wouldn’t look at her. “You want my permission to sleep with another man?”

Lola turned in her seat to face him. “I don’t look at it that way,” she said. In fact, she had been very good about not looking at it that way. When she thought of Beau, she didn’t let her mind stray too far to the man she’d thought he was before he’d tried to buy her. That was the man she’d thought about during sex with Johnny. Just as she’d had his attention, he’d had hers. But that wasn’t the man he’d turned out to be. “All I see is what that money could do for our future. I could do this, for us, and it would never mean a thing because you are what’s important to me.”

He was quiet for a few tense seconds. Suddenly, he slammed his fist against the steering wheel.

She bit her lip. “It’s not that I want to—”

“I know,” he said. “It’s not you I’m mad at. It’s the situation. It’s me.”

“You?” He didn’t continue. Lola looked at her hands in her lap. She assumed he was mad at himself for even considering the offer, but she was afraid to ask. “Just please tell me what you’ve been thinking this last week. You’ve been so hot and cold. I can’t figure out what you want, so you have to tell me, and you have to be honest.”

Johnny ran a hand over his face and blew out a breath. “You want honesty?”

“Yes.”

“I keep thinking about that life,” he said. “I want something of my own. We can’t live paycheck to paycheck forever, but I don’t know how to get out of it. I can’t ever seem to catch up.”

Lola took his hand again and squeezed it. “I’m relieved that you’re also worried. Sometimes I feel like I have to be the one to fix it.”

“I want to fix it, Lola, but I don’t know how.”

Suddenly she wanted to go back to ignoring the problem. She almost wished she hadn’t dragged them into this conversation. “Maybe we don’t have to,” she said. “You’ll keep on managing Hey Joe. It won’t be the same, but you’ll learn to love it. I’ll graduate from bar wench to cocktail waitress. Or maybe we get new jobs in a different dive bar. Things would be tight while we transitioned, but they’d settle and we’d get back to where we are now.” Lola’s voice softened with defeat as she spoke, but she hoped Johnny wouldn’t pick up on it.

“Because where we are now is the best option,” he said. “You don’t think I’ll ever be able to give you more than this. Not without someone else’s money.”

“That isn’t what I said.”

“You might as well say it. I’ll never be more than what I am in this moment.”

“I’m trying to be realistic,” she said. “If we want more, then I have to do this. If I don’t, then this is how things will be. It was enough before Beau came along, but is it enough now? I don’t know, Johnny. I don’t know the answer to any of this.”

He threw open the car door, jumped out and looked back at her. “You want to do this because you think it’s our only chance.”

Lola also got out of the car. Their doors slammed at the same time. “Don’t turn this around on me because I have the guts to say what we’re both thinking,” she said, hurrying to keep up with him. “This could be our only chance. It’s not like I want this.”

He kept walking.

“I know you want me to do it,” she said, raising her voice. “Why don’t you man up and tell me the truth?”

He turned around and pointed a finger at her. “You want truth so goddamn bad? The money’s all I think about. And the things I could finally do. I’m six-foot-two, two hundred pounds, but I’m half a man because I can’t take care of you.”

Lola reached for him. “But you do take care of me.”

“No, I don’t,” he said, stepping back. “Five nights a week we get off work while the rest of the world sleeps. We work our asses off, and we’re still struggling to get by. If I lose this job, I’ll have to start all over somewhere else. I have no other skills. You think you have nothing now? It’s about to get a lot worse.”

“When did I say I had nothing? Would I like a washer and dryer of my own so I don’t have to schlep down the street? Would I like to quit this job one day and try something else? Yes. But that doesn’t mean I have nothing. If I do this, it’s for the things that can’t be bought—like our future.”

“If this, if that. I’m tired of this shit. Just make a decision.”

“I can’t, Johnny,” she said, shaking her head. “You have to do it.”

“This has to be your choice. I’m not going to send you into another man’s bed no matter what I want.”

She put her hand to the base of her throat. “Want?” she choked. “Are you saying you want me to do this?”

“No.” They narrowed their eyes on each other in the dark as the silence thickened. “I’m saying I won’t stop you.”