Maelstrom

Chapter 1: Welcome to Asylum

Friday night

It was Friday night at Asylum, and the club was doing its damnedest to live up to its name. The press of gyrating, inebriated, scantily clad young bodies was stifling, the pounding music loud enough to seize control of every listener's heartbeat, and not for the first time in my extremely short career at the club, I was grateful for the relative ease of movement and modicum of control that my space behind the bar afforded me.

My next customer almost fell on top of that bar to place her order. The woman's friends were jostling for a spot at the rail, too, but didn't have the slimmest hope of widening that tiny gap. The breathless girl flashed me a giddy grin bedazzled by the purple glitter dusting her cheeks and said something that was completely lost in the pulse-driving beat of the hottest club in New York.

I cupped my hand to my ear and turned my head just a bit. "Can ... B52s?!" the girl shouted, struggling to keep her spot amongst some rather aggressive bangled elbows.

Newbie, I thought; only someone unfamiliar with the club scene but trying to look practiced ordered a layered shot on a night like this. If I weren't so confident of the bouncers' collective competence, I would suspect that the glittering girl in front of me had used a fake ID to get in. With one full eyebrow lifted, I held up five fingers.

"Five dollars?" the woman shouted, reaching for the tiny rhinestoned bag at her waist.

New AND cluelessly optimistic. "How many?" I swirled my index finger to include the woman and her gal pals, who had finally abandoned their attempts to get a place at the bar and were jumping and screaming behind their lucky friend while scoping the dance floor.

The customer finally got it, holding up six fingers with a gigantic smile that spoke of long years of early orthodontic intervention. I rewarded her with a half-grin of my own as I slammed six shot glasses up onto the bar and ran a long-fingered hand along the edges so they formed a perfectly straight row, each one touching its neighbor. At least they were all having the same thing, I thought as I grabbed the Kahlua and the Baileys from the shelf behind me. I nearly collided with Chauncey, one of the barbacks, when I turned around again; his scowl turned to a smirk when he realized who'd nearly knocked the stacks of clean lowballs in his arms to the ground.

"You must stop running into me like this, Lex, or I'll think you're after some of this," Chauncey winked.

"If only you were about 14 inches taller, Chaunce, I wouldn't be able to keep my hands off of you."

He blew me a quick air kiss before moving to the next station to restock the glassware, and I fell off my tiptoes and back to my well. This was only my second week at Asylum, and I'd discovered that weekend nights were a whole new level of crazy, so I didn't quite have the rhythm down. Soon, Lexi-baby, I swore to myself, you'll get it soon.

I flipped the Kahlua bottle with practiced flair before pouring the coffee liqueur down the line of shot glasses in a single smooth motion. My bottle-handling skills – and an impressive letter of recommendation from the manager at Maelstrom, the popular NYC nightclub that my resumé said I'd been working at for the past eight months – were part of why Stefano had hired me on the spot when I'd walked into Asylum last Thursday afternoon. Of course, I knew that my natural blond hair and perfect tits were probably two of the other reasons, but I preferred not to dwell on that.

I took one of the bar spoons from the small bowl of ice I kept just above my ice bin, twirled it quickly in my fingers, and held it upside down over the rightmost shot glass. The glitter-freckled clubbie watched me pour the Bailey's over the back of the cold spoon and into each partially filled shot glass, fascinated, as I had meant her to be.

After traveling the length of the row with the Irish cream, I tossed the spoon into my prep sink, pulled out another from the bowl of ice, and grabbed the Cointreau from my well. To those in the know, it spoke volumes that a club used all "call" liquors in their wells, instead of the cheap crap most bars used for mixing. The Cointreau bottle was a little more difficult for a busy bartender to handle than a standard fifth of triple sec, but I figured that the brand recognition was important to soften the blow of the club's exorbitant drink prices. Using the same cold spoon method, I finished off the shots, left to right this time, with the heavy orange liqueur, producing six 1oz works of art that I knew would probably disappear down six oblivious gullets in approximately six seconds.

"Seventy-two!" I yelled, my words almost lost in the multi-throated scream that greeted the next song. My customer clicked open the tiny disco ball that was passing for her purse and pulled out a crisp hundred. I quickly tapped the appropriate colored squares on the touch screen perched on the counter behind me, checked the spring action of the cash drawer with some hard-won flat abs, and counted out the change, breaking it into two tens, a five, and three singles to make more generous tipping effortless for my party girl patron.

I turned back around to see said party girl and one of her equally glamorous clubbing buddies taking the last two B52s from the bar. I held out the stack of bills for the woman to take, but the bouncy brunette just waved a jewel-manicured hand at the money and waggled her fingers in a bubbly goodbye before shimmying off to join her friends on the dance floor, somehow not spilling the shot she held precariously over her bobbing head.

I shoved the $28 in the rapidly filling tip jar behind my touch screen. The skull adorning the front of the jar, two unlikely painted roses nestled in its eye sockets, grinned back at me, encouraging me to keep it up. Tips like that – and the sheer number of them on a busy night like this one – were the reason that the bartending and waitressing jobs at Asylum were some of the most sought-after in the entire city.

From the corner of my eye I scoped the box balcony jutting into the club on my left. Though the two smaller VIP balconies squatting over the main entrance at the front end of the bar were packed with revelers and the retinues of a couple of local NBA stars, the one on the left – the one reserved for the club's owner – was still empty, as it had been every night I'd worked here so far. It was still early, though, I reassured myself. Someone worth noting – maybe even the club's new and annoyingly elusive owner and some of his shady colleagues – might still show up.

I brought my gaze back to the wave of human flesh crashing against the bar and singled out the next lucky sot to receive my skilled attentions. I couldn't let myself get too distracted when there was still nothing to see. Though big tips weren't the real reason I'd been so determined to snag a job at Asylum, if I wanted to keep that job, I knew I had better keep slinging drinks.