Club Storyville by Riley Lashea Page A

I didn’t have to see Ariel pass in the halls or hear her voice or remember her smell or the taste of her lips.
    “Ladies, your drinks,” the waiter returned, and I flushed again at the feeling he must know what I’d been thinking. “And some water.” He shared a glance with Ariel that had some significance, I was certain, but, as Ariel thanked him and told him we needed more time with the menus, I convinced myself I didn’t care to know the secret they shared.
    Tilting her menu to the side, Ariel reached for her glass, and, peeking over the top of my menu, I watched her lips close over the rim. Watching her tip the glass just enough for the deep copper liquid to get past her lips, she made it look painless, and, trying to look as if I knew exactly what I was doing, I picked up my own glass to do the same.
    Though I could smell the burn as I raised the liquor to my mouth, I managed a nonreactive sip, even suppressing the urge to clear my throat when the liquid ran hot down it.
    “What do you think?” Ariel questioned, eyes rising from her menu.
    “It’s good,” I said, sliding my glass back onto the table, but, though it wasn’t horrible, as Nan’s brandy had been the one time I begged to try it a few years before, or like the beers Scott and I drank the night before he went off to war, it was still mostly untrue. Sweet tea was good. Lemonade was good. Alcohol, I knew, was meant for something different, so it only had to be good enough to be drinkable. “Now, I want to try yours.”
    Despite the abruptness of my demand, Ariel seemed little surprised by it, looking across the table at me with calm curiosity, as if trying to gauge how serious I was, before sliding the glass over.
    Determined, beyond reason, to prove something to her, though I wasn’t sure what it was I was trying to prove, I didn’t pay attention to how much more the vapors burned as her drink neared my lips until it was too late. The liquid already in my mouth, I was forced to swallow it, and it felt like fire chasing razor blades down my throat.
    Eyes instantly watering, my urge to cough was out of my control, and I reached for the water, realizing I had been the punch line of a joke before it had happened.
    “Setting liquor on fire burns some of the alcohol off,” Ariel explained as I blinked back tears, regretting my decision to try to be worldly and sophisticated and whatever else I was desperate to make her see in me, and not regretting it at all. Because, just before she took her glass back and lifted it for another drink, the slightest hint of a smile flashed across Ariel’s lips, and it was the first time I had seen her smile all day.
    O n down the line, Ariel asked a passing steward for the time and our location, and when he told her it was almost eight o’clock and we were closing in on Hiwassee, she raised the shade again.
    Toward the front of the train, I could just see the colors starting to spread across the land as Ariel ordered us more drinks to give us good reason to linger at our table. When the cars before us curved suddenly southward, though, I realized why she had declared I would want to be on the western side at sunset.
    Passing the open spaces of rural Virginia, only the occasional farmhouse springing up from the Earth, a thousand colors painted themselves on the trees and green crops, like a work of art coming to life against the rocking of the train, a lullaby of sorts that tempted me into a dangerous sense of serenity, as if I could be at ease in Ariel’s presence.
    Convinced I felt her eyes on me, I turned my head, but not quickly enough to catch her. Ariel’s eyes on the window, it was like they had never abandoned the hues that deepened over the field. It was an ongoing lesson I just had to accept - if Ariel didn’t want to be caught, she wouldn’t be. So, though I knew she had looked, that her gaze had been on me only moments before, I had no proof but the sensation of her on my skin.
    N ot long after the