The girl behind the bar eyes me for the fifth time in the last few minutes, and I know I’ve got a shot with her, but somehow, like the rest of this dump, I’m not feeling it… and I know why.
Mackenzie.
She’s ruined me.
Whatever this girl’s name is, she’s gorgeous. She’s five-foot-seven, in her late twenties, with short blonde hair, curves in all the right places and a glint in her eye that tells me everything I need to know about how dirty she is.
But she’s not Mackenzie.
She doesn’t have that sweet line of freckles that travel over her button nose like a silk blanket draped across a sand dune. She doesn’t have hair that blazes whenever it catches the sun like an inferno on the horizon, warming my soul. She doesn’t have skin as smooth as a mountain stream, or eyes as deep and soulful as an ocean full of stars… or one of a myriad of other shitty metaphors that I’ve written down in my diary over the last few days.
She’s got a nice ass though.
I smile back, and she saunters over. ‘Another round, big man?’ she says, winking. ‘On the house.’
‘You trying to get me drunk?’
‘Do I need to?’ she asks, pouring one more out without looking down.
I shake my head, slow and steady. ‘You’d have a hard time trying, ma’am.’
She squints. ‘Military boy?’ she says.
‘When they need me.’
‘Anyone else need you?’
‘Not tonight,’ I say.
‘I’ve seen you here before,’ she says, pretending she’s not certain, raising an eyebrow like it’s a question, but she knows. She looks down at my hand, wrapped around the beer she just slid me. ‘But you had a ring on last time.’
I nod slowly, looking at the groove where it rested for so many years, the skin still white. ‘That I did.’
‘Did you lose it?’
I don’t answer straight away. I don’t need to tell her that I put it away just last night. After a while, I breathe out. ‘Something like that.’
‘Her loss,’ she whispers. For a moment I consider blunting her advance with the truth, but isn’t this what I came here for?
I look back up at her. ‘What time do you get off?’ I say.
‘That all depends on you,’ she grins.
‘Beetlejuice,’ says Willow, folding her arms.
We’ve been arguing for fifteen minutes now, and Harper is just a few crumbs away from finishing her popcorn already. I glance across at her and smile as she waves, kicking her feet with excitement over the side of the couch as she munches and watches us spreading out the four films we’ve narrowed our evening movie possibilities down to.
‘We’re not watching Beetlejuice,’ I say, pulling my nightie down over my knees in protest. ‘How do you even know about Beetlejuice?’
‘Beetlejuice,’ says Willow, her voice laced with threat.
‘Don’t you dare say his name again,’ I say, raising a finger. ‘I am not explaining to your father that you accidentally summoned an undead bio-exorcist from the afterlife whilst he was away.’
Willow’s pained expression slowly cracks as she relents, sliding the VHS aside into the discard pile and leaving just three films.
It turns out that Mr Ledger doesn’t pay for any streaming services. None. Apparently, he’s so trapped in the eighties that he refused to even buy a DVD player when the noughties came a-knockin, sticking instead with an old VHS player for twenty years too long, and a collection of films so ancient that I suspect, much like the Indiana Jones box set trilogy that accompanies them, that they belong in a museum.
’So our choice is now between Goonies, Who Framed Roger Rabbi-‘