Grabbing Bree’s hand, I pulled her to the bar and settled myself on a tall elegant stool, complete with velvet cushion.  The stage was empty, and just a few patrons, a mixture of male and female, sat at tables, eating and drinking.

“Well, this stinks.  I thought I was going to see some strange cooch climbing up some poles,” Bree chuckled, as she slid her body over a stool.

“Dancers don’t come on ‘til ten, love,” a deep voice called out from nowhere.  Bree and I both looked at each other, and then scanned the bar for the person who belonged to the voice that answered us.  We came up empty.  Her eyes met back up with mine, wearing a furrowed brow.

“Wow.  Impressive.  Hairy McTittieBounce’s Bar has an invisible bartender,” I chuckled.  “Well, Mr. Invisible Bartender, we need the strongest drink you can make.”

A head of thick sandy blond hair rose up from behind the bar in front of us, and the prettiest face you ever saw was attached to it, complete with a pair of clichéd baby blue eyes.  No, not pretty, beautiful.  Blah, like a damn Ken doll.  God, men weren’t supposed to be that pretty.  Handsome, yes.  Pretty, no.  But, this guy?  This guy was beautiful.

It kind of made me want to roll my eyes and gag.  I might have, if my face didn’t hurt so much.

The moment he laid eyes on us, the Ken doll’s eyebrows arched up to his hairline and he made a little strangled gasp-like sound. “Are…Are you okay?” he asked me.  A light British accent tinted his words.  Well, wasn’t that a bowl of yum.  A beautiful man with an accent; it was going to be impossible to get Bree out of here.

I offered him my best smile, which caused one of the cuts on my lip to bleed again and he quickly handed me a wad of cocktail napkins. “Are you saying I don’t look okay?” I gasped in mock horror, and then tried for a wink with my less swollen eye. “What? Do I have something hanging from my nose?” I asked, laughing absurdly and patting my lip with the napkins he had offered.

I had to crack jokes and laugh at myself, because the reality of the situation was too much for me otherwise.  Life is tough; you have to endure the bad with the good, because the alternative is so…final.

I will endure this.

Next to me, Bree put her head down, covered her head with her arms and giggled into the wood.  The bright purple welt across her cheek was darkening by the minute and didn’t help her look any better.

The Ken doll paused to examine my face and reached out his hand, touching my chin lightly, while I tried not to flinch, “Well, it can’t be too bad if you’re both laughing about it, yeah? You need me to round up some boys and give somebody an arse kicking?” If my cheeks weren’t so discolored with bruises, he probably would have noticed the hot blush that surged right under my skin.

“Um, no.  Thank you, though.  Just a few drinks, okay?  Anything that will numb all this puffy loveliness we got going on,” I said, slowly leaning my face away from his hand.  Why in the world would a man think it would be comfortable for a woman to be touched when she looked as battered as I did? 

“Sure, you bet, love,” he mumbled, walking away to grab a bottle each of vodka, rum, and tequila off the top of the shelf.  From the middle shelf, he pulled out some gin and another bottle of something I couldn’t read and some lemon-lime soda.  Then he just started pouring everything together.  I was almost illegally above the limit of drunkenness just watching him make the damn drink.   He placed two small cocktail napkins neatly in front of us and went back to mixing, I toyed with the idea of telling him to save his fancy little beverage linens, because I didn’t intend on taking my drink from my lips long enough to set it down, but I didn’t.  Mostly because I didn’t want anyone really to know the pain I was in.

“Dibs,” Bree whispered softly next to me.  As if I had a chance in hell with her around, me Miss Plain Jane Smarty Pants compared to her Miss Lottie too Hottie.  Don’t misunderstand me, I was attractive, but Bree fell into the blonde-bombshell-outrageously gorgeous adjective pile when people described her, and I got thrown aimlessly into the awkward-yet averagely-decent-looking-brainiac pile.

Snorting out a laugh, I nudged her with my elbow.  “Sure, he’s all yours.  He’s way too pretty for my taste.  Besides, I think I’m done with men for a while.”  Rubbing my clammy palms down the pant legs of my jeans, I bit at the one tiny part of my lip that didn’t hurt, “I’m feeling kind of buzzed and I didn’t even drink yet.”

“Adrenaline. Loss of blood.  Don’t change the subject, I’m still calling dibs,” she whispered.

Nope.  I think it’s freedom.

The bartender slid two glasses full of his dark concoction across the lacquered length of the bar, “Here you go, loves.  This drink is called an Adios, Motherfucker.  Which, I hope to God you both said to whomever the hell put their hands on you,” he said, leveling a pair of serious-as-hell blue eyes at us.

Adios, Motherfucker.

Bree held up her drink to mine and clinked her glass against it. “To new beginnings,” she whispered.

“To freedom,” I whispered back.

Adios, Motherfucker.

I watched as the beautiful bartender walked away from us, moved around the bar talking to the other patrons and grabbing plates of food off their tables.  He carried them through a door into a back area and reappeared with other steaming plates of food to serve.  There were no other employees around.

We sipped our drinks in silence, both of us most likely trying to forget the last twenty-four hours of our lives.  But, man, I wanted to forget a lot more.

Bree’s eyes followed the bartender like a little lost dog, “So what do you think?  Want to stay for a while?  The scenery is nice.”

“Oh, sure. Yeah.  I always wondered what it would be like to live in a freezer.”

“It’s not that cold.  And we’re far enough.”

“Jen…dammit…Bree….what the hell kind of name is Bree anyway? It’s like twenty degrees and it’s October.  Across the damn world would not be far enough.”

“Germs don’t live in cold environments?  We could dye your hair black.  I could use a whole new hairstyle and look.  It will be like playing hide and seek.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m serious.  We have plenty of money and no one would ever look for you in the middle of the woods.  They’d try looking in major cities and that’s if anyone is even looking,” she whispered.

I almost spit my drink all over her. “So you think nobody will be looking for me?”

“All I’m saying is that we could blend in here and the bartender is really gorgeous.  What do you think? He seems nice, right?”

“Oh, yeah.  I’m such a great judge of character.  Please.  I wouldn’t know a sociopath if he tore off my arms and beat me with them.”

“You ladies need anything over here?” The Ken doll asked a few minutes later, as he wiped down the top of the bar.  My eyes zoned in on the sinewy muscles of his tanned arms as he dried off the condensation from our cool drinks in smooth circular motions.

“Oh, yes.  Yes I do,” Bree mumbled low.

“Yeah, actually,” I said, as I nudged Bree under the counter of the bar to shut her up,  “Do you know of any hotels or anything nearby?”

 He offered me a small sad smile. “Love, you’re in the middle of the Adirondacks.  You have one campground with a trailer park, a few ranger posts and secluded houses, that’s about it.  You both look like you need a hospital, or a cop. Not a hotel.  There’s a small town about thirty minutes drive north, where most of the people around these parts live, near the prisons, where the jobs are.”

“Yeah?  What kind of jobs can you find there?” Bree asked, completely ignoring the advice to visit a hospital and kicking me with her foot.  Oh God, she really wanted to set up camp here because of the pretty Ken Doll.  Ugh.

“Regular town jobs.  There’s the prison, a school, supermarket, library, and the local POLICE.  There’s also that hospital I mentioned, that you so sweetly ignored. Why are you asking about work? Are you girls looking for a job?” he asked, wrinkling his brow.  Crap, this did sound like the beginning of a bad horror movie…

I knew if I didn’t ask, Bree would. I could plainly see where her mind was going, right into his bed.  “Think you could use two waitresses, just for a few days a week?  My behind is way too big to jiggle up there,” I pointed to the empty stage.  “I’m Lainey, by the way.  And, this is Bree.”

“Lainey and Bree?  Are you sure you don’t want to dance?  Those names are perfect for it,” he laughed flirtatiously.  “I’m Dylan Grayson and you’re hired, but not until that, um, space alien thing you got growing on your face heals.  It’s not really working for you.  I’m sure you’re both very pretty under all that war paint.”  He flipped his bar towel over his shoulder and walked through the back door again.

“I’ve never waitressed before,” Bree sighed next to me.

“I did, for a while in high school,” I replied, finishing my drink.  “Let’s try to find a place to stay tomorrow, maybe at the trailer park, and try to get rid of that ostentatious Porsche.” I held up my shaking hands and watched my fingers tremble.  “Waitressing isn’t so bad, pretty easy once you get the hang of it.  I mean it’s not like being a neurosurgeon or anything.”

“Yeah,” she whispered, as she leaned her head on my shoulder, “and living in a trailer sounds like loads of fun.”

When our glasses were empty, Dylan walked over and slid over two refills.  He leaned his elbows against the top of the bar and smiled at Bree, “So where is it that you come from?”  I had to hand it to her, even bruised up she could get a man’s attention.  I hoped he wasn’t married.

My head softly fell against my arms and I drifted away from their conversation.  Heaviness spread across my shoulders and down both my arms, weighing me down, pulling me under like a fierce riptide drowning me, overcoming me; destroying me.

I stared blankly at Dylan’s lips as he smiled at something Bree said.  My vision blurred and I wrapped my arms tightly around my waist trying to focus on the way his accent lingered on each word, but he was just too pretty to watch.  Too bright and shiny…  “She just had a little run in with an old boyfriend, that’s all…everything is fine now…She’ll be fine…yeah, we need a place to stay…”

“Ladies room?” I asked, barely above a hoarse whisper.  Dylan stared wide-eyed into my glazed expression and quickly pointed to a back hallway.

The bar stool crashed against the floor, making a horrible clanging and banging sound as I pushed off and rushed into the hallway.  Racing into the bathroom, I locked myself into a stall and emptied my stomach into the toilet.  A cold burst of sweat broke out across my forehead and I dropped hard against my knees on the cold tiled floor of the bathroom, trying to brace myself up with violently shaking arms.

I slid down against the vileness of the cold porcelain and squeezed my eyes tightly, swallowing down the hard knot of disgust.  Panic tightened my chest into fast pounding explosions and desperation to stand up away from the dirty-filthy stench of my insides and the white watery bowl that held them was overwhelming.

Life as I knew it was over.

My life.

Over.

That woman I once was, Samantha Matthews, was gone.  Left for dead.

Everything and everyone I ever knew…Everything I had ever worked for…gone.  Just.  Like.  That.

Poof.

Gone.

What happened?

It was building like an unstoppable freight train in the pit of my stomach and I clenched my fists tight.  I couldn’t focus on clear thoughts. Frantic visions clouded my mind and my brain went off like a gunshot, fast and lethal.  Thousands of images, words, and emotions fired out of my mind like a machine gun.  Adrenaline surged through my body and my heart pounded unevenly. The dark gloves of panic gripped my entire body and squeezed.  My head hit the floor with a wet thwack, and the edges of my vision blurred like reels of an old movie.

“Fuck you, Samantha,” he says coldly, when he finds me in the living room with all my packed bags.  I won’t even face him.  I can’t look at him at all.

I choke out a laugh, “No thank you.  I don’t want to catch anything.”  Jen will be here any minute; I hope there’s no traffic.