I Werewoman 1 Page 3

  Once I finished sending my reply to Katie, I flipped through the open apps on my phone to get back to Twitter and started silently scrolling through the #historians tag while Brian and I ate. For the next quarter of an hour or so, the two of us sat quietly opposite of each other, messing with our smartphones and working through our meals. Every once in a while, Brian would find something in one of his Discord groups or favorite subreddits to share with me, and he would hold out his phone long enough for me to get a look at his screen and comment on whatever he had found, or I would come across something on Twitter to share with him over Discord and received some sort of grunting acknowledgement from his side of the table, but largely we just sat there in silence together and focused on our phones. It was relaxing for me. As an introvert, although I could make myself come across as pleasant and sociable when I had to be, I really appreciated those times when I could sit with someone in companionable silence and just let my mental reserves quietly recharge. Brian was the perfect friend in that regard.

  Halfway through our quiet dinner, I got up from our table to refill my soda and to pick up a few more slices of pizza. On my way back to the table, my phone buzzed an alert at me from inside of my front pants pocket, and fishing it back out of my jeans again once I’d reached our table and set my tray and glass down, I unlocked the screen to see that I had an actual SMS text message from my boss, Marty.

  Oh, dang, what’s going on with Marty? I wondered, seating myself in front of my tray once more and having a couple bites of the new, freshly baked cheese pizza slices that I’d snagged for myself before opening up the text to see what was up at work.

  Chapter Two

  M: Can you come in tomorrow morning for the lunch rush? 7:05 PM

  I frowned at the message from my boss. A party tonight, and lunch shift tomorrow morning? Ugh. I mean… I guess I could, but…

  I felt a tug from my conscience and sighed, shrugging and nodding my head reluctantly at the phone (as if Marty could see me.) My boss had generously covered several of my shifts earlier in the month when I was down with a nasty flu bug—as much as I didn’t want to work the morning shift tomorrow (especially not after spending the evening at a party the night before) I felt like I owed him a little flexibility now that I was capable of it. Blowing out a deeply frustrated breath, I tapped out a quick response.

  R: Sure, no problem. What happened to Tina? 7:07 PM

  I went back to browsing twitter for a few minutes while I waited for my boss to get back to me, but I could already guess what had happened to the pretty Suffolk University senior who was normally scheduled to work the lunch shift on Fridays. I mean, it seemed to happen pretty much every week, lately. A few minutes later, though, my phone buzzed with confirmation.

  M: Sick, again. Thanks. See you at 10. 7:10 PM

  R: See you then. 7:10 PM

  “You know, honestly, Marty should just fucking fire Tina,” I growled across the table at my roommate, who raised his eyes from his phone in an expression of bemused sympathy. “She’s sick every other weekend. There must be someone else in the city who wants the job more.”

  “Tina called in sick again?”

  “Yep,” I jabbed my fork into one of the few remaining pieces of Roasted Chicken left on my plate and stuck it into my mouth.

  “Annnnd you gotta go in tomorrow for the lunch shift?”

  “Yep,” I grumbled around my food as I chewed it.

  Brian sighed and looked back at his phone. “When you gettin’ up, then?”

  “Nine-thirty,” I grumbled, washing down the last of my food with a few final gulps of my soda.

  “Alright,” Brian pouted slightly, and I felt slightly bad for him. I mean, worse for me, but still… slightly bad for him. I knew from prior experience that he’d been hoping that—even if it wasn’t with Gabrielle—he’d be able to hook up with someone at the party tonight. Normally, that wouldn’t be a problem: I could stay out late while he went back to our dorm with whatever girl he managed to make a connection with, that was no big deal. I’d watch the stars or something, or read ahead in one of my classes, or watch some streaming video on my phone on one of the comfortable couches in the overnight lounge at the Library—whatever. He’d have done the same for me in return, and we both had, at various times. But if I was getting up at nine-thirty the next morning, I’d want to be in bed by like two, at the latest, which meant there wouldn’t be a whole lot of time for him to get it on with any girl in our dorm before I had to come in and crash. If he was gonna get lucky tonight, he was going to have to take the lucky lady somewhere else for the evening.

  “Sorry man,” I apologized, shrugging half-heartedly. “Not like I asked for it. Blame it on Marty.”

  “Oh, I do,” Brian darkly shot me a frustrated smirk. He saw me finishing my meal and downed the rest of his apple juice in one quick shot, cleaning up his tray and rising from his seat at the same time I pulled myself out of mine. “Tell Marty he owes me a drink.”

  I laughed at that, turning in the direction of the nearest trash and tray receptacle. “Yeah, sure, okay, good luck with collecting on that.”

  ✽✽✽

  Thirty-five-year-old Boston Irishman Marty ‘Martin’ Byrne was the owner and sole manager of Books On Tap, a unique 2009 foundation in the Cambridge district of the greater Metro area that served undergraduate upperclassmen, graduate students, and working academics from the colleges and universities that made up the Cambridge Dozen, a set of twelve local secondary schools and graduate institutions, give or take – Marty’d counted thirteen the last time he’d posted the ‘Official List:’ “a right, round baker’s dozen,” or so he’d laughed.

  Just off the corner of Brookline and Massachusetts, the ‘bookpub’ offered local collegiates—and card-carrying-alumni—a cool place away from campus to eat, drink, study, and socialize in a repurposed old warehouse right in the center of Cambridge, the intellectual hub of the area. The interior had been converted into a wood-paneled tavern with industrial accents. The walls were lined with bookshelves carrying a mixture of both the hot bestselling titles of the day and a steadily growing collection of used material in over two dozen different sections. Comfortably worn-in old couches (rescued or donated from local campus student lounges and dorm halls) shared space with a triad of pool tables, two permanent chess boards, and a series of dart boards just a handful of steps away from the bar and its taps. There were group seating booths around ovular tables beyond the gaming spaces. ‘Quiet’ study alcoves were lined up along the farthest wall from the bar, nearest to the front door and the street. The seating there was partially removed from the variable buzz of pub chatter by the whirring rush of powerful ceiling fans pumping away overhead.

  During the day, the place hummed with quietly contained, studious activity. Patrons came either singly or in small groups to study, eat, and drink, away from their frenzied campus atmospheres. The kitchen staff only made one and a half dozen items, but they made them fairly appetizing, and there was a pretty solid lunch crowd. At night, larger groups of students, alumni, and even faculty academics would assemble to drink, talk shop, blow off steam, hold gatherings, and casually mingle with members of their preferred sexual orientations. Sometimes visiting speakers and authors would come to give talks or hold roundtables on weeknights (Marty reserved the weekends for local musical talent), and trivia events were common. The place constituted an eclectic mix of studied academia and collegiate camaraderie, right at home in the center of the Greater Boston Metro. It was a chill place to get some some studying done, a fun place to hang out, either alone or with your friends, and a ‘wicked pissa’ of a place to work—or so the locals told me.

  —yeah, yeah, alright. Leave me alone, I suck at using local colloquialisms conversationally.

  Marty was a great boss: a fun guy to work for, relaxed about the rules, tolerant of mistakes, and supportive of his student employees, with their crazy, over-complicated schedules. One year earlier, as a fresh-faced first year graduate
student, I’d leapt at the chance to work at Books on Tap. I’d been a patron of the bookpub since being informed of its existence, shortly after I arrived in the city at the start of my first term, and I loved the place. It had become my favorite refuge away from the organized—and frequently disorganized—chaos of campus. I came to drink and debate with friends, I came to study—and like, I wasn’t exactly a dab hand with women or anything, but once or twice I even met a girl there. As soon as I saw a flyer advertising for an open spot on the wait staff, I tore the whole flyer off of the bulletin board and raced across town to put in my application straight away.

  The opening I’d applied for was a bartending spot up front, face to face with the customers. Now as mentioned, I regularly experienced a good bit of social anxiety, so working face to face with strangers on a regular basis wasn’t exactly my favorite idea of something to do for money, but the bartending spot was a tipped position, and Marty was offering fifteen an hour plus the tips, so I knew if I was any good at all at the job I’d make pretty sweet bank. I didn’t figure I had much of a shot at the job, since, well: A) I didn’t know the first thing about bartending when I first applied for the position, and B) all of the other employees who were working up front were pretty college girls—something I definitely wasn’t. But I really loved the place, and I wanted the job real bad, so I said as much to the taller Irishman when we sat down together to go over my application. To my good fortune, the big ginger man seemed to take a liking to me. We were both surprised and excited to discover that the two of us shared a passion for Classical History, and after he hired me, we stayed up late a handful of times, drinking and chatting on the subject well after closing the pub down for the night.

  As clueless as I was about bartending when he first hired me, Marty patiently trained me on the basics for six weeks (I dropped quite a few bottles and glasses and mixed up more than my fair share of orders in that period) before declaring that I was finally ready to tend on my own. It was rough going at first, because the customers were decidedly not patient with the painful awkwardness of the new guy while I was finding my feet, and a couple of times I made such a mess of things that I didn’t think Marty would be able to justify keeping me on. But Marty gave me time to correct my mistakes, and, eventually, I got through the gauntlet, and I got better. After I survived my initial sink and swim period, my new boss even paid for me to receive professional certification while on the job, and he set me up with a flexible schedule that balanced my needs as a student with the bookpub’s needs as a business.

  For about nine months, this arrangement had worked out quite well for both of us. I liked my job, I liked where I was working, I liked my boss, and I wanted Books on Tap to do well, so I worked hard for Marty. I had to take the summer off to head to Manhattan for my studies, but Marty had counted on that, and he hadn’t minded. Whenever I was in town, I was a dedicated employee who was both responsible and timely. Once I found my footing the regulars came to appreciate me, and newcomers enjoyed the prompt and friendly service with which I welcomed them. The bookpub did well when I worked, and I averaged more than a decent take home wage in hourlies plus tips. My schedule gave me the hours I needed in balance with the time it took me to get my studying done, as well as enjoy a little socializing on the side. I was super careful not to exploit the flexibility Marty built into my schedule any more than I absolutely needed to, so whenever I did need to take off early to get some extra studying done, or swap shifts with someone at the last minute so that I could attend a lecture or conference or cram session, Marty didn’t begrudge the leeway. He knew that when he needed me to cover for an someone else, I could usually be relied upon to pull through for him.

  Thus, working lunch tomorrow morning.

  ✽✽✽

  Once we dumped our garbage and returned our trays to the receptible tubs, Brian and I parted ways for a few hours: he headed off to his evening seminar (ARCH 521: “Tombs, Temples, and Towns: Tracing the Past in Ancient Egypt,” 7:30 to 10:00 PM, M/T/W/Th) and I climbed aboard the building elevator to ride up to our dorm room several levels up on the 12th floor, high above the dining hall in Marshall Tower, the central spire of the Warren Towers student resident complex. Since I only had a couple of hours to left myself this evening before I was expected at the party on the rooftop, and since the free time that I’d been counting on taking advantage of the morning on the next day had suddenly gone up in a puff of smoke thanks to Tina and her recurrent ‘Friday’ sicknesses, I needed to get in as much reading ahead of classes next week tonight while the time was available to me.

  Unfortunately, it took me quite a bit longer to get going on my homework than I might have hoped. As I got back to my room, my phone lit up with an incoming call from my mother, who was calling to let me know that she and my father were already making plans to spend the Thanksgiving and Winter Holidays this year with my older sister and her new husband down in Phoenix. Julia was expecting a child sometime in the Winter, and Mom wanted to make sure that that she was on hand when the baby came. As far as I was concerned, she wanted me to make sure I cleared my Winter Residency with the Campus Housing Staff well in advance this year, given the headache that they’d put us through the previous year when I’d forgotten to tell anyone that I was staying on Campus over Winter Break until barely a week before classes let out.

  Twenty minutes later, just when I was hanging up with mom, the RA for my floor knocked on the door and asked me to let him in for one of his rando ‘spot inspections.’ Of course, the ‘asking’ part was only a nicety; I didn’t really have any choice in the matter. Officially Campus residence hall policy forbade students (regardless of age) from keeping any Alcohol on campus premises, regardless of whether it was otherwise legal for said persons to drink or possess it. Unofficially, it was well known that the graduate students living in Warren Towers routinely concealed bottles of wine and wine coolers, cans of beer, and so on all over the place, and normally, no one from the administration bothered themselves too much over it. But ever since a third-year engineering student had walked himself off the edge of a roof while intoxicated late in the spring of the previous academic year, the Housing Staff had imposed a random inspection and strict no-tolerance policy.

  By time I was finally alone in the room, shoes off, lying flat on my back atop the twin mattress of my bed (which was smack against the right-hand wall of our tight, ‘double-occupancy’ dorm room), over thirty minutes worth of valuable study time had been lost. Pulling my paperback copy of The Cambridge Ancient History: Vol. 11: The High Empire, A.D. 70-192 off the top of the stack of books that I’d piled onto the floor beside my bed, I held it up over my face, flipped it open to the assigned section for this weekend, and began poring over the text as swiftly as I could.

  And of course, that was when my phone plonked away at me with a new notification from Discord.

  “Gahhhd! Fucking!—who is it now!?” I grumbled at the empty room, rolling over onto one side and snatching my phone off the pile of books on the floor by my bed. With a quick swipe and a snarl, followed by a few taps, I unlocked the screen and pulled down the notification tab. A moment later, I sat straight up in bed, flush with fresh excitement, all trace of frustration and annoyance gone. The notification I’d just received came from a KPOP-themed Discord Server I belonged to, a fan server for Roe Eun-Chae and the other members of Deep Breath, where users from around the world could share their favorite pictures and videos of the group and the lovely ladies who belonged to it with other fans, talk about the girls’ music or modelling work, and so on. One of the server’s administrators had just posted a new YouTube video of Roe and sent out an alert to all the server’s members.

  Thoroughly intrigued, I closed the book in my hand and set it aside. I quickly convinced myself that I could easily take… oh, wow, fifteen minutes? Hmmm… yeahhhh, sure, I can take fifteen minutes to watch a video. No big deal.

  Tapping the video’s play button, I then broadcast the playback up onto the 36” flat
screen tv that Brian and I had set up against the windows of dorm room, on top of our black double-stacker minifridge. Once the video started rolling, I leaned forward across the foot of my bed and carefully set the phone down on top of my desk so that I wouldn’t bump it and interrupt the playback. Finally, scooting back up into the bed, I sank back against my big foam reading pillow and settled in to enjoy myself.

  In the video, the twenty-three-year-old South Korean beauty, seductively clad in a pair of skin tight black leather stretch pants and a black-and-red leather bustier, standing on top of treacherously high heels, with her silken burgundy-brown hair whipping sensuously around her face and rippling down her back, was solo dancing on a deserted stage as part of some South Korean pop show. Or at least, that’s what the notification I was looking at said. I couldn’t speak or read Korean, so I couldn’t make out any of the fine details from the text or signage or commentary on the video, but from what I could glean from the video’s context, it looked like Roe was participating in some sort of dance contest, competing against several other reputedly ‘sexy’ female KPOP artists in front of a live studio audience. She was dancing to the music of some of the ‘sexier’ female KPOP hits which had been released over the past few years. Music from acts such as Troublemaker, Hello Venus, Hyuna, LAYSHA, and BLACKPINK played in the background as the beautiful young woman in front of the camera danced and swayed.

  I thought Roe looked absolutely stunning; she twisted and gyrated and wiggled her deliciously sexy body across the stage and spun herself around on a gleaming metal pole affixed to the floor with a confident, sultry smile on her glossy burgundy lips. Her performance captivated me. Every shake of her hair, each gyration of her bottom, every time her bosom bounced or one of her hips popped, I was completely riveted. Watching her dance, I thought that in that moment Roe was the sexiest, most beautiful girl I had ever laid eyes on.