find a flask (we're playing fast and loose)

where the gin is cold (but the piano's hot)

i told myself i wouldn't write a sequel to "come on, babe (why don't we paint the town?)" and so instead,,,

well.

i wrote two sequels.

funny how the world always manages to pull one over on a writer, lol. i hope you enjoy part 2!

~*~

Admittedly, Jack's hope of tracking down the club Claire and—shit, what was her friend's name? Margot, right—Margot had gone to were slim. He wasn't going to deny that. Even besides the fact that Jack was an older man and unfamiliar with the newer nightlife establishments across New York...

Actually, that summed up Jack's conundrum to a T.

If only he had telepathic powers.

But, Jack decided, he at least had the next best thing, and that was his intimate knowledge of Claire's preferences, from the places she loved to the places she abhorred. Process of elimination would by no means be the quickest option of search, but it did have potential to be the most efficient.

Not to mention it was the only option of search Jack had.

Difficult as it was, Jack managed to keep his mind off of Claire and her red dress and anything she was—or wasn't—wearing underneath for the remainder of his time at the office. Whenever his attention started to stray at the thought of pushing up the hem of her dress and sliding his hand over Claire's bare thighs, the simple reprimand that clocking out late would provide him with even less time to find Claire proved sufficient at getting Jack back on track.

For the most part.

God, that dress. And he hadn't even seen it in person yet.

When it finally came time for Jack to head home, he must have broken several speed limits in his rush to get there. He might've broken more if he'd been on his motorcycle, but unfortunately his Yamaha was in the shop for repairs, leaving Jack with a good old-fashioned rental car.

Still, he reasoned, a rental was better than having to hail a taxi, because at least he wouldn't have to explain to a cabbie why he'd be going in and out of clubs all night.

Once home, Jack changed into a t-shirt and jeans, an outfit at least somewhat less conspicuous than his black suit and red tie. He sat down at his messy desk, pushing aside a stack of papers to begin jotting down on a yellow notepad the possible locations where Claire might be.

With his memory and the help of a map he found shoved between a set of law books, Jack narrowed down the list from God knew how many to around ten. Some nightclubs were easier to eliminate than others—Claire rarely liked to travel more than 20 minutes from her apartment if she'd be drinking, for example, so not the club on the opposite side of town, plus Claire was probably not at a lounge specifically catering to gay men, yadda yadda—but the narrower Jack's criteria got, the more difficult he found it to strike through names.

Fine, he decided, capping his pen. Ten would have to do. Surely it wouldn't take him more than an hour or two to comb through this list, right? And, if he was lucky, maybe he'd find Claire and her red dress in one of the first three clubs, allowing him to even sooner spend the rest of his night in utter bliss.

Jack did not find Claire in any of the first three clubs. Nor did he find her in any of the second three, which meant by the time he'd gotten to the third set of three, Jack had rarely felt more desperate—and worse for the wear—in his life. Dare he say, he was borderline haggard.

Okay, so maybe he was exaggerating a smidge. But going in and out of so many clubs was draining both Jack's wallet and his mojo, if only because each entrance and the consequential search of scantily clad crowds while loud music pounded his hearing into oblivion served as a painful reminder that Jack's days of wild nights spent dancing were long, long behind him. The clubbing scene had looked a little different when he was young, but one thing remained the same: a 50-something-year-old man stuck out like a sore thumb in a crowd of lively, brightly dressed 20- and 30-year-olds.