The mother lode

A cringing performance, but she felt she was in. Now she just needed to seal the deal, so to speak, and she could think about asset stripping.
It doesn’t matter where she met him, a bar, a party, a hotel lobby, they were all the same to her - all places where she might meet the rich.
She almost let him go. She almost sidled by, without even allowing him the pleasure of her smile. Just as she approached she heard him order surely the cheapest scotch they had on the bar.
What kept her interested was what was clamped to the arm he used to point out the bottle of Chivas Regal, sitting forlornly at the side of the Johnnie Walker. She admired the man’s gold watch for a few seconds. Certainly his attire spoke of money, but why go for the cheapest drink? Was he simply putting on a front? Was he grifting too?
She had to ask about the drink. Unembarrassed he laughed and said he hated it. The conversation continued and he explained that he loved fine Scottish single malts, that he loved them a little too much, on occasion. So he would always start the night with the cheapest blended whisky he could find, something to make him feel a little ill, in order to remind him not to over-indulge.
The story was good enough for the woman. She invited the man to a booth and eyed him carefully. Not bad looking, not too old, in good shape. Better than so many others. She listened to him intently and played with the collar of his shirt, almost out of gratefulness.
He overindulged that night and she took him home in a cab. Wondering if it was worth playing the long game over this one, she insisted on helping him up to his apartment. He’d said it was the penthouse, but she had to see for sure.
Sure enough, the button press came with the turn of a key and the lift doors opened upon a lavish and spacious apartment suite. She put him to bed, left her number in eye-liner on his pillow, and exited with a feeling of elation which she tried her best to dampen. She kept it in check until she opened the door to her own apartment, but by then the scream could be suppressed no longer.
The mother lode. The mother lode was going to call her in the morning.

High Apartment

The cheap scotch nearly knocked him sick. He opened his wet mouth wide and allowed one ice cube to slide down the tumbler glass and plop perfectly between his teeth, onto his fat tongue.
There he held the cube for a moment before sending it, with a flick of the neck, to the back of his throat. The shock of the snap from the ice alleviated any feeling of nausea.
He glanced over the transcript of the latest dream. He had taken to getting up and writing down immediately, everything he could remember from his dreams, before consciousness wiped them out and they became relics of memory, or the stuff of déjà vu.
His desk, his room, was a mess. With a slight kick of his heels the chair rolled back until the hard wall stopped it. A path through the clutter had been cleared to allow this regular smooth meeting of chair and wall.
Standing, to pull up his pants, the man knocked the blind which flowed upwards, accompanied by a razzing sound, and away. Moonlight bathed the room.
The man moved a few steps, switched off his desk lamp and just enjoyed swimming in this new spotlight, this fresh ambience.
He barely touched the blind. He wouldn’t have touched it tonight, on purpose, but now that it was open and redundant he was struck by its pointlessness as a visual barrier.
No buildings were level with his floor, none higher. He could wave his penis at the window all night and who would care?
“Probably why I keep it closed,” he said aloud, tending to the fiddly process of closing the blind before he bothered to pull up his jeans.
Then he shuffled on, towards the fire-escape; towards the roof and the air.
The cool night air relaxed him and he sucked it in to his lungs. He enjoyed the sound of the traffic far below, and the hum of planes far above. He enjoyed the fact that he could hear no human voices up here; no people talking inanities, discussing the weather (which was pleasant this evening), and re-arranging the minutiae of their lives.
He thought about throwing a small piece of broken brick from the roof, or maybe a coin. He could imagine it hitting something below. But he reconsidered, as there were few people on the streets at this time of night.
He lit two cigarettes and laid them down upon a low brick wall. The man was standing amid the remains of a roof terrace that had been ripped up and conquered long before it had the chance to become overgrown. All that was left now were memories of the life that once grew here.
His thoughts were stuck on falling, that sucking hungry pull that mankind fights so hard against; the benevolent force which keeps us standing still on this ridiculous spinning flying rock of ours.
He’d read, just last week, of a woman who was killed by a man who fell through her skylight. If he wandered to the edge of his building, he wondered if he might see a skylight window below, someone who might be able to see him, or something to aim for.
He decided against looking. The wind was getting up and he hadn’t brought his shirt, he saw goose pimples on his arms and rubbed at them. The two cigarettes were about burnt out. He took these one by one, dropped each on the flagged floor and crushed them under his sandaled foot.
Then he headed back inside and down the short flight of stairs to his apartment; remembering, of course, to shut the fire door behind him.
“One more, before bed,” he said, passing into the lounge and moving towards the drinks cabinet.
He treated himself to a large one, an expensive one. With two ice cubes.