Vodka Espresso

27. barcelona

August, 2017

Ingrid and co. were due to meet Shannon Brennan and relieve her of her son the following morning, but until then, the three women first had to decide what to do that night. They debated over wine in their hotel room.

"What am I going to do in a nightclub?" Sienna argued. "I don't even know how to hit on guys anymore! And Agata, you're engaged."

Ingrid wiggled her eyebrows. "You might find yourself a dude to breastfeed."

Sienna blushed. "Not funny."

"She's not wrong, though," Agata put in. "Some guys just have the weirdest fetishes."

Sienna pouted into her wine glass.

Ingrid threw her head back laughing. "Some fucked-up creeps out there, let me tell you!"

"You're one to talk," Agata chided and Ingrid winked.

Sienna had settled on a smile. "Go on, then. What was your weirdest experience with a man?"

Ingrid emptied her glass and reached for a refill. "Well, it'd probably have to be... I mean, foot fetishes are fairly common, right? But there was this guy once..." She brought a hand up to cover her face. "He asked me to stick my big toe into his asshole while he tossed himself off."

Sienna spat out her wine and Agata grimaced, one eyebrow arched disapprovingly.

"And did you?"

Ingrid stared at the ceiling as if it could rewrite her bygone past. "He gave great head, so I said, fuck it. I did, yeah." She sounded disappointed in herself.

"That's disgusting," Sienna commented. "I think I'm going to be sick."

"How high were you?"

"Very," Ingrid answered Agata's question. "I couldn't stand the sight of my feet for days, until I got stoned again."

Coincidentally, that second time was also the time she nearly overdosed and Ingrid pondered, chuckling to herself, that it would have been a real shit way to die.

*

Ingrid had rented a small sedan from the Barcelona airport and early on Saturday morning, after having just chatted and slept the night before, she and her friends drove out to the address provided by Mrs Brennan. It was a nice residential neighbourhood, not far from the beach, but decidedly not touristic.

Mother and son were waiting in the car park of an apartment complex and Ingrid pulled up quite a way from them. All three friends walked over and introduced themselves, then Agata and Sienna went back to the car with Cillian and his luggage.

"I don't know you," Shannon Brennan said to Ingrid once they were alone, her voice icy. "What happened to, erm... what's her name? Yvonne?"

"Yvonne's on holiday with her husband," Ingrid explained calmly.

"Is she, now?"

"While your husband is on a business trip in Belfast. So here I am. I thought I'd make a girlfriends' weekend of it."

"Are you sleeping with him?" Shannon blurted.

"What if I was?"

The older woman snorted. "And he had the nerve to call me shameless! Sending his mistress to pick up his son..."

"I'm not his mistress, Mrs Brennan," Ingrid said, coolly. "I'm nobody's mistress, in fact. The term mistress implies that I live off someone, like a leech. I don't. I take care of myself. On my own income. Your little Latino lover, on the other hand..."