The Last Best Tip Read online

  The Last Best Tip

  …and other vampire tales

  Cassandra Duffy

  Sapphic Pixie Tales

  Other Sapphic Pixie Tales From Cassandra Duffy:

  The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head

  Astral Liaisons: Lesbians in Space!

  Demons of Paradise

  Fabled Fang Girls

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any matter whatsoever without the written permission, except in the cases of brief quotations in critical articles or reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, locations, and events are meant to be fictitious. Any similarity between any persons living, dead, or undead is completely coincidental. The events are fictional, although you should feel free to try to re-create anything you think you’re limber enough for, especially if you have a willing partner in crime.

  ©2011 Cassandra Duffy

  Cover Design by Katiie Kissglosse

  Edited by Nichole Mauer

  Special thanks to Alex Potvin and Rebecca Murphy for their generous loaning of Cami, Brianna, Barry, Melvin, and Lewis.

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note

  The Last Best Tip

  An Eternal Night of Overtime

  Haunted House on Top

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  Crushes, dream jobs, relationships, and apparently strap-ons are funny things. I love funny things. I also like vampire things. Like most ladies right now, I’m a total fang-girl. The phrase “fang-girl” is something I made up to describe female fans of vampires right now. It’s kind of a bastardization of the term “fan-boy” which generally describes young men who are slightly creep fanatics of certain genres of science fiction/video games/comic books. Ladies right now are no less silly in our fan-hood over vampires, so I thought we could use an equally catchy moniker. Let’s revel in our fang-girly-ness!

  This is a novella, actually it’s a novella with two short stories attached to it, but even then it shouldn’t be mistaken for a novel. Like most summer trysts, when the heat is too oppressive for a long love-making session, it’s short, intense, hopefully satisfying, and over before you’re likely to succumb to heat stroke.

  The characters in the final story are borrowed from a lovely couple who allowed me to use them after I read an advance copy of their upcoming book and begged profusely. I lay no claim to Cami, Brianna, Lewis, or Barry. I want to thank Alex and Becky gratuitously for allowing me to write a story using their lovely intellectual property.

  The Last Best Tip

  Lucy was starting off her shift tired, which was never a good sign. The oppressive, Midwestern humidity of summer in St. Louis was bound to further exhaust her as the night wore on. Starting out ready to be done could only signal a lousy night to come.

  The strip-mall cluster, which was mostly chain restaurants and bars, was perfectly positioned between two cemeteries, a community college, and an upper-middleclass suburb. Across from each other, on the far end of the parking lot, closest to the river, two bars mirrored and faced each other, sharing the fifty or so parking spots at that end of the asphalt expanse.

  Lucy locked her car and glanced longingly at the front of the other bar. If she could see Sasha before work, the night might not be a total loss. The other bar, called the Laughing Skeleton, was a vampire bar, not to be confused with a blood bar. Vampire bars were where normal people went to see actual vampires, usually working at the bar, and occasionally get picked up for sex or being nibbled on should a vampire feel so inclined to stalk prey the old fashioned way. Blood bars were where vampires went to drink among their own kind; the living were not permitted in blood bars.

  Sasha finally made her appearance, pulling up in her dented, white Miata. The pale, lithe vampire with the messy mop of honey-blond hair looked as miserable as Lucy felt. They exchanged a futile glance and shrug, slowly making their way to the street lamp on the cement divide bisecting the parking lot. It had been nearly a week since they’d last spoken, sharing a drink under the street lamp, trying to decide who had the more irritating clientele. Despite their friendly exchanges and shared misery, Lucy wasn’t remotely interested in a friendship with the vampire; she wanted to jump naked into a steaming sexual frenzy with the other bartender, but simply lacked the nerve to say so. If they grew to become friends after licking every inch of each other’s bodies, so be it, but Lucy definitely didn’t need another commiserating friend—she needed to get laid.

  “You look tired,” Sasha said. Her voice was hollow and echoed slightly, like all vampires, and had a hint of a German accent still, even though she’d left Europe more than a century ago.

  “Thanks, you look dead,” Lucy replied.

  They shared a shy smile. Lucy took the bashful opportunity to dip her head and let her eyes wander over the front of Sasha’s shirt where her 16th century Bavarian peasant girl breasts were immaculately preserved for all time filling out the front of her yellow tank top nicely. Sasha’s breasts were nice in their own right, but something about their perfection after five-hundred years really appealed to Lucy.

  “Want to meet back here at three?” Sasha asked, drawing Lucy’s eyes up to hers.

  “Sure, I still have the lawn chairs in my trunk.” They typically sat on the chairs, drinking Southern Comfort in Lucy’s case and steer blood in Sasha’s while Sasha telepathically controlled the bugs swirling around the street lamp to fly in interesting patterns. It was an odd unwinding ritual, but Lucy cherished it.

  “Actually, I thought we could go somewhere,” Sasha said. “I’ll explain more later.” Sasha leaned in, brushing her breasts against Lucy’s bare arm, to whisper in her ear. Sasha’s breasts were cold against Lucy’s skin, and her breath practically frigid against her ear. “Think of me tonight and I’ll hear you.” It was an odd comment that left Lucy’s mind feeling fuzzy.

  She opened her eyes, wondering when she’d closed them, only to find Sasha was back across the parking lot, walking through the front door of the Laughing Skeleton. She’d covered the fifty feet across the crowded parking lot in the time it took Lucy to open her eyes. The comment reverberated in Lucy’s head and she wondered exactly how much of her thought process the vampire would be privy to. As she made her way toward her own bar, a sinking thought occurred to her—most of her thoughts about Sasha while at work involved baby oil and rolling around on rubber sheets, which probably wasn’t what the vampire had meant.

  Lucy had thought she was a naturally kinky person, at least until she compared herself to the clientele of her workplace. In the lady’s room of the Swing Set, she dolled herself up a little with a fresh coat of lipstick and spray of vanilla perfume, steeling herself for the night ahead. As with the vampire bar across the way, the Swing Set’s staff was the idealization of what the customers wanted, but couldn’t seem to catch the attention of.

  Theories circulated among the entirely gay, five-person night crew of the Swing Set about why swingers did what they did. Lucy and Lara worked the bar while the three men, Toby, Michael, and Gabe roved the floor as mostly-shirtless waiters. By making sure the staff was all Kinsey-Scale sixes, and attractiveness scale nines and tens, the owners of the Swing Set ensured none of the staff was likely to sleep with any of the customers, but the customers would all want to sleep with the staff. Lucy watched the three, rippling, fetish-wear adorned, gay men with their perfect hair, glass-smooth skin, and pristinely trimmed facial hair working the crowd of mostly overweight, entirely middle-aged, Midwestern swinger couples. With how often the older women pinched bottoms and writhed up against the three fabulously gay men, Lucy was glad she had th
ree feet of oak serving bar with copper railing between her and their husbands. The primary theory, and the one Lucy personally subscribed to, was that swingers were sexually charged nerds who didn’t get access to sex at an early enough age, and thus formed loose affiliations like the Swing Set to gain access to other sexually charged people, who all turned out to be other, fairly kinky, nerds. As with her former belief of being kinky, Lucy had once believed she was a nerd; she was less sad to learn that while she might be on the scale, she definitely didn’t qualify in the way most of the swingers did.

  She mechanically filled a drink order for Gabe, who seemed to be getting the worst of it that night, and gave him a wan smile when he pleaded with his eyes for mercy before heading back out to the grabby floor. The male wait staff’s theory was that breeders, especially Midwestern breeders, took to boredom in their matrimonial relationships like most coyotes take to claw traps on their legs: they could lie back and accept their doom, gnaw their own limbs/bank accounts off to escape, or try their best to live with a trap stuck to their leg, which was what the Swing Set was supposed to be. Lucy didn’t much care for this gloomy view of marriage; after all, what was the point of fighting so hard for same-sex marriage if it just turned out to be a coyote trap?

  A portly fellow with a head picked clean of all hair save a tiny little three-quarters ring around the sides and back, and his oddly shaped wife who was wearing her brightly dyed red hair in pig tails, sauntered up to the bar. If Lucy had to guess, she would have put them in their early fifties, and she wondered exactly how many leather outfits they owned between them because they were wearing a new set of form-fitting fetish-wear that she’d never seen before, and it wasn’t even the first time that week that they’d showed up in something freshly off the rack. The woman was a vodka tonic with extra lime and the man was two fingers of gin on the rocks with a splash of bitters, what the locals called a Hoosier for some reason. They had names, and it would only take a glance at the credit card to know it, but Lucy was fine with thinking of them as their drink orders.

  “Is tonight the night you come out from behind the bar and let your hair down?” the wife asked.

  “My hair is down,” Lucy said through a forced smile as she mixed their usual drinks.

  “There’s a pool running on you,” the husband said with a greasy wink. “We’ll split it with you if you help us win. What do you say to 60/40?”

  Lucy’s stomach said retching was the appropriate reaction, but she knew what she was supposed to respond with according to the bar’s code of flirty-but-unavailable… “How much is the pool up to?” she asked perfunctorily.

  “500 big ones,” the wife said.

  “A 60/40 split on half a grand to…” that was all Lucy managed to get out before Lara came over and saved her.

  “How much is the pool up to on me?” Lara asked in her lovely, effervescent voice that spoke to men and women of their favored high school gym teacher—encouraging yet strong.

  The correct answer, the one Lucy was supposed to give, was: Let me know when it gets to X number of dollars, where X represented a sum twice or more the value originally given in answer to the ‘how much’ question. Lucy couldn’t tell if she was angrier about the proposed 60/40 split, as if 100% of the money would have made it remotely worth while, or the fact that a room full of three-dozen fairly well-to-do suburbanites could only come up with $500 between all of them when it came to getting into her pants.

  Lara had them well in hand, allowing Lucy to take a moment at the opposite end of the bar to compose herself. Lucy watched Lara flirt with both and pull a $20 tip from the $15 bar tab. Lara walked over to Lucy and held out the $20.

  “For you,” Lara said with a wry smirk. “You’re worth far more than $500 in my book.”

  “So that’s why you’re only offering me $20?” Lucy snarked back.

  “Fine, I’ll keep it.”

  Lucy was about to retract her statement and apologize, but the bill had already disappeared down the front of Lara’s bustier. Lara was an attractive stem—the term arrived at when combining ‘stud’ and ‘femme’—which united attractive masculine and feminine qualities in equal parts. She quite often got requests to fuck both members of a couple with a strap-on. This, like most things, she seemed to take in stride; oh how Lucy envied her cool demeanor, and even cooler spiked purple and black hair.

  “How do you do it?” Lucy asked.

  “I view it as a business transaction,” Lara explained. “They get to say perverted shit to me, but it has a per-minute rate that has to be paid at the end of the conversation or they get the cold-shoulder next time they come to the bar.”

  Lucy pulled herself out of the hiding corner she’d leaned into and returned to her duties. Lara gave her shoulders a reassuring squeeze when she passed bye. “Go get ‘em, tiger,” Lara whispered to her.

  The next couple to the bar was tall, gawky, lacking in chin strength, but with an overwhelming abundance of nose. Lucy thought the fact that they were Mr. and Mrs. Crane seemed like a particularly cruel joke for the world to play on them; she also couldn’t get past the fact that two people who looked so much alike would want to marry each other. They both drank chardonnay and they both managed to be shy and lecherous at the same time.

  Lucy smiled, the Cranes smiled back. “The usual?”

  “We were at the flea market the other day, you know, the one in St. Charles? And we saw the loveliest geisha costume that would be perfect for you?” Mr. Crane said.

  “You’re what…a size six?” Mrs. Crane asked.

  “Try size four and I’m Chinese.”

  “They have geishas in China,” Mr. Crane incorrectly corrected her.

  “I’m going on break!” Lucy announced loud enough to let the whole bar know and then stormed off the main floor, through the kitchen, and out the back door. In the relative safety of the alleyway, she leaned against the chain link fence guarding the back of the strip mall from the empty field teenagers used to smoke cigarettes and ride dirt bikes in.

  “You’re not thinking about me,” Sasha’s voice echoed through her head.

  The trick was surprising, but carried a relaxation with it rather than alarm, which Lucy thought would have been more natural of a reaction to a vampire invading her mind to speak. “I’m having a hard night,” Lucy muttered.

  “It’s only been an hour.”

  “That’s an hour too long,” Lucy said. “Don’t you get sick of it? The people you can’t stand wanting something from you that you can’t and don’t want to give?”

  “Sure, I spend my entire night taking drink orders from people’s necks,” Sasha said. “I don’t know why they think pointing their exposed neck at me will entice me to bite them. That’s not even where I like taking blood from.”

  A creeping smile spread across Lucy’s face. “Where do you like taking blood from?”

  “If you’re a good girl, go back inside, and don’t get fired tonight, I might show you,” Sasha said. “Think about me, won’t you? Who am I supposed to talk to before and after shifts if you get fired?”

  “Okay, but I’m only doing this for you,” Lucy said, dragging herself away from the fence that made her job feel so much like a prison. “And because I can’t pay my rent with dirty looks.”

  Lucy returned to the bar. The interior was the schizophrenic combination of every bodice-ripping romance book cover known to man and the scents were a battling mixture of humid Midwestern sweat, candles, and bodies soaked in cologne and perfume. Worst of all, was the couple waiting at the bar for Lucy to take their order. Lara was giving them the cold shoulder because the husband was a tightwad and the wife wasn’t allowed to speak unless granted permission. As much as Lucy hated to admit the origin of her baby oil fantasy of Sasha, the gargantuan gorilla of a man and his diminutive wife were the source. The husband looked like any run-of-the-mill businessman who had taken a little too much time trying to look and act like a professional wrestler, while the wife was petite, mousy, a
nd awkward. The husband had made a pointed comment several weeks back about wanting to see Lucy and his wife strip naked and wrestle on the bed in baby oil—don’t worry, he assured her, they had plastic sheets and they would both get a piece of the prize no matter who won—then he pointed to his crotch as if Lucy couldn’t glean that was the ‘prize’ he’d intended. Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, the dominant role the husband wore in the club was pretty much only for the club. Michael, the lone moustache-adorned waiter, found out that he was a stay-at-home dad and house husband while his wife was a corporate lawyer; apparently the Swing Set was her place to feel weak and protected and his place to not be emasculated by her. Lucy thought this remarkable bit of relationship survivalism should temper her dislike of the duo, but somehow it didn’t.