Cocktail Hour by Tara McTiernan Page A

against each other in a mini-clap.
    “Okay, don’t get too excited. I’m not that much fun.”
    “Oh, yes you are! You are the coolest. All right. Now we have to get a drink. I’m buying. Well, unless we can find some gentlemen here who want to buy them for us,” Chelsea said, straightening up and trying to put on the cool act again unsuccessfully, one eyebrow arched as she peered at crowd around the bar.
    “No way. I’ll buy my own drink, thank you. I just had a very unpleasant experience I’d like not to repeat.”
    “What? What happened!”
    “Please. I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s just go to that end of the bar,” Sharon said, pointing at the opposite end of the bar from where Dean was sitting.
    “Really? You don’t want to talk about it?”
    “Trust me.”
    “Okay?” Chelsea said in a doubtful voice and shrugged. “I want a strawberry daiquiri. I wonder if they make those here? And you’re letting me buy you a drink. I dragged you out here. It’s the least I can do.”
    “Fine. Just no men.”
    “You’re funny,” Chelsea said, shaking her head wonderingly while starting to move ahead through the crowd, staring at particularly handsome men and turning her head quickly when they glanced her way.
    “I’m a regular laugh-riot,” Sharon said wryly, following.
    Once they had their drinks, Sharon at last holding her anticipated martini and Chelsea holding a raspberry-flavored cocktail that was the closest thing to a strawberry daiquiri that the bar offered, Chelsea raised hers in a toast. “To finally getting together for drinks! At last!”
    “Here’s mud in your eye,” Sharon said, raising her glass up and then pouring half of her drink down her throat.
    “Whoa! You can really drink that thing,” Chelsea said, her already-large blue eyes growing huge.
    “Only when a nail is being pounded right through my forehead,” Sharon said and sighed, feeling the pleasant burning sensation of the vodka hitting her stomach and then spreading like a warm fog through her body.
    Chelsea took a tiny sip of her bright-red candied-looking drink that was also in a martini glass. “Mmmm, this is good! Not a strawberry daiquiri, but close. Wait. What? You have a headache?”
    “Not anymore. Or I won’t in a few minutes. Nothing like a libation to smooth out the wrinkles of life,” Sharon said and took another sip. She knew she should probably slow down, but it just felt so good, especially after the afternoon she’d had. She would just have this one – she still had to drive home.
    Just then it was as if a breeze had passed through the room, a whispering wave of movement. Sharon looked up from her glass to see a striver nearby curling his upper lip with lust and staring at the entrance. She turned to look. A drop-dead gorgeous woman with long flowing dark hair wearing a fire-engine-red dress that hugged enviable curves was poised with her hand on her hip just inside the door. The group of women clustered at the door had all drawn back, as if not wanting to have their attractiveness compared to the woman’s – which was understandable as they would all fall pathetically short.
    “Oh! Good!” Chelsea trilled. “It’s Bianca! Now the party’s really starting.”
    Sharon turned to look at Chelsea. Chelsea was friends with this arresting and somewhat haughty-looking woman? It seemed an unlikely pairing. “You know her?”
    “Sure! We went to Stamford High together. We’ve been friends for…ever?”
    The woman had spotted them and was crossing through the packed room toward them, her walk smooth and slinking like a cat’s. The crowd continued to peel back for her, the striver-sea parting. Sharon wanted to shake her head. She’d never seen anything like it: this universal visceral reaction to a person.
    By the time the woman reached them, the temperature of the room seemed to have risen ten degrees and with the heat came a tickling watched feeling.  Sharon glanced around the bar and saw the