Alligator - Lisa Moore [51]
Frank has never given a hot dog away.
The taxi drivers understand this perfectly.
There are people outside the door of the Ship Inn trying to cool down or having a smoke. She has a rhinestone in her belly button. She’s slender, her arms are golden, her neck is golden, and there’s an elastic riding over her hip, a part of her red thong and it makes him crazy to think about sliding a finger under that elastic. He’d like to take that elastic in his teeth. Her arms are raised over her head, and her face is turned down and to the side and she’s biting her lower lip to keep from smiling to herself because she’s so sexy.
If he could tell half the things about himself she would fall in love with him.
If he could have some of her time.
Just to tell her a few things.
He watched her dance with the guy who is the town simpleton, delayed person, and the delayed guy has on glasses that make his eyes googly and he is a type of thin that speaks medication and he breathes through clenched teeth, and spittle comes out but she doesn’t seem to mind. She dances with her eyes closed and when she opens her eyes she smiles at the delayed guy. What is that smile, good-natured? It is without condescension and that’s why he is starting to fall in love with her.
When the song ends the delayed guy goes to the bar and this is the moment Frank should ask her to dance with him.
He feels the moment getting bigger in his chest.
He is very close to just walking right up to her.
She lifts her arms and gathers her hair and twists it and piles it on the top of her head and he sees her bare neck and he should ask her right now and she drops her hair and gives it a shake and it falls in a curtain down her back.
The band is starting up — a retro band, joyfully ironic and smouldering with self-satisfied mirth. The girls love them — and she’s just standing there almost all alone and he could go right up to her now. She turns slightly and the rhinestone catches one of the stage lights and winks and sends out a blue laser for half a second and the music begins and it’s Meatloaf, “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”
She sort of rocks her hips.
She’s looking like she might dance to Meatloaf and he should just put down his drink and go up there and if she said no that would be okay. If she said no he could just walk out but he knows she wouldn’t say no. He knows she would say yes if his feet would just move but they are stuck and his chest is bursting now with the want to ask her.
She bites her lower lip when she dances as if the look on her face would be full of such profound sexual pleasure, it would be dangerous to let it show, so she bites her lip instead.
If he doesn’t ask her to dance right now: but he doesn’t. And a guy touches her shoulder and she lays her hand on his arm and she is laughing and her hips are rocking and the guy touches her hip he lays his hand right over the red elastic thong on her bare hip above her low-slung jeans and her arms are over her head and her hair hangs down over her face and a red light from the stage falls all over her bare arms.
The floor is so crowded nobody can move.
Frank charges out of the bar, furious. Some people sharing a joint on the sidewalk open their eyes wide at him and he looks like he might kill them, except he also looks like he doesn’t see them. He takes the stairs two at a time to Water Street.
He strides along Water Street and the couples go past, guys holding on to elbows or an arm draped over a girl’s neck and their reflections in the big windows of empty storefronts stretch and lurch past.
There’s music on George Street and the taxis try to drive through the crowds. The crowds take their time. Some girl lies over the hood of a car and the driver leans on the horn. Frank feels the drumming from the band through the soles of his sneakers. The girls have on miniskirts and little T-shirts with spaghetti straps. The straps slip off their shoulders and they have shiny bra straps and some of them are Americans from the cruise ship. Everybody tanned, mildly drunk, the