Bugmen

"You're obnoxious," he mutters. "You know that?"

Lisa and Vicky and the other one, the chick I had sex with but whose name I can't remember. A short-skirted triumvirate with one goal: the seduction of yours truly, Ramsey Holiday. Not, to be fair, a great challenge. Still, they're serious about their work and get started immediately, leaning on the bar a foot away and squishing their boobs into its sticky oak.

"I like his curly hair," says Vicky, applying lip gloss as she studies her pouting reflection.

"I like his beard," says Lisa, not be outdone. "Sexy."

The Groupies possess a narrow range of obvious plays. Tonight's is the oft-used "Pretend To Ignore Ramsey While Talking Loudly About Ramsey."

"I like his legs," says the other one. "From all that pumping up and down on his fancy bike."

Something stirs in the southernmost reaches of my belly. The way to this man's heart is by referencing his Cinelli fixed gear bicycle.

Bob's groan reminds me of the gases escaping our dead old lady. "I'm going to play pool with Freddie." He shuffles toward the fruit machine's master.

"Another Stella." I wink at Kelly. "I do love watching your hands squeezing a tap." She rolls her eyes but smirks: Kelly is also a notch on Ramsey's Danish design bedpost.

I stalk to the bar's far end and my own personal stool, ass in slo mo. Beneath the clack of pool balls, a Groupie gasps.

Um.

"What's this now?" My ass is paused, left cheek on the upswing. The stool is occupied. Not simply occupied: that lucky stool is having its face sat on by an angel.

Ramsey Holiday checks his hair in the bar mirror; he breathes into a cupped hand. An acceptable level of Stella-based sourness.

"I'm going in," I say in a posh fighter pilot voice.

The closer I get, the more otherworldly she becomes. This is the kind of beauty that destroys lives, cities, empires, a woman for whom armadas are created and prison sentences endured and death embraced. Faced with her loveliness, my friendship with Bob The Brilliant doesn't stand a chance.

She looks in my direction. She's drinking what passes for a cocktail at the Oldport Arms: an alcoholic slurry of ice and spirits speared by a toothpick, the toothpick in turn impaling a preserved cherry. It's an abortion of a drink but because she's drinking it, I want it too: she infuses the bar with a soft-focus gentleness, her hair sighs as though accompanied by a zephyr. She so hot and I'm so nervous; I'm not sure I could even get an erection in her presence, so—

Is it clear what I'm trying to say here?

"How did I not see you?" I say. She doesn't appear phased by the creepiness of my question. Probably, the shit of men has been lost so often in her presence, she thinks we're always this bizarre.

She nibbles on the preserved cherry. "I saw you though."

Bingo — no way, that easy? "And what did you think?"

"I thought you looked like a bit of a dick."

I blink. This is not how the laws of Ramsey's sexual physics work. Unless—

"Wait a second." I waggle a finger at her. "Are you negging me?"

She face shrugs. I am lost in her lips. To look at her is to peer through a microscope: every detail vast and in focus.

"I'm not a dick," I say. "People often think good looking people are dicks."

"Yeah? You think you're good looking?" Husky voice, but with a rough local accent. Huh. Saccharine perfume too, like a teenage girl's discount deodorant. I'd hazard Revlon. These tiny flaws give me confidence: she's human after all.