Chapter 7: The Girl She Has In Mind
The Topless Chick sat at the end of a gravel lot, low and long, its tin roof rusted in orange veins. Jason had passed it a hundred times when it was the Boneless Chicken. The chicken on the sign was still a chicken. The boneless part had gone somewhere he couldn't follow.
He stopped in front of the door.
The rule was stencilled onto a strip of basswood in a font that looked like a printer's default, which bothered him more than the rule itself. Two lines, tidy as a parking notice.
NO HATS. NO SPURS.
NO WOMEN INSIDE WEARING A SHIRT OR A BRA.
Ava read it twice. She had on a cropped cotton tee, and under it a bra cut overnight for a chest that hadn't existed last week. The strap dug a pale trench into her shoulder.
"Wait, is that for real?"
"I think so."
She grinned and pulled the shirt over her head in one motion. Her breasts swung free, heavy and pale, the nipples tightening in the cool that came off the doorway. She knotted the tee around her waist and shouldered the door open.
Inside smelled like lemon polish and coffee. The floor had been waxed to a mirror, and the morning light lay across it in long grey rectangles. Faded rooster decals still climbed the wall behind the bar, relics nobody had bothered to paint over.
At the far end, a stage.
A light stand and two softboxes stood on it, and a crew of three were coiling cable. A small blonde woman held a pose with her hips cocked, glutes flared, chin angled at a camera that had just been switched off. Charcoal compression set. Platinum bun, bangs cut sharp as a blade.
She dropped the pose, rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand, and checked her phone. Her face went blank, then flat, then brittle, in the space of a breath.
Ava's fingers closed on Jason's forearm.
"That's Carrie June. Do you know who that is?"
"You've mentioned her."
"Minibeast is hers. All of it. She's from Jersey and she built it out of nothing." Ava was already moving. "Stay close."
Riley was behind the bar, wiping down the rail. She looked at Ava's bare chest for exactly one second and went back to wiping.
"Coffee?"
"Two, please. Black."
Carrie came down off the stage with her bag on her shoulder. She was four foot eight and moved like she owned the floorboards, which, in some sense, she did. When Ava stepped into her path, she stopped.
"Can I help you?"
"You're Carrie June, right?"
"That's me." Flat. Hardy. A woman braced for something.
"Ava Rose."
Carrie's eyes went to Ava's chest, then up. Something moved behind the tiredness. "Rose. I've seen your squats."
"Everyone's seen my squats." Ava laughed, warm and unbothered, and put out her hand. "Come sit with us. Five minutes."
"I've got a car coming."
"Five minutes."
Carrie looked at her for a long moment. Then she let the strap of the bag slide off her shoulder and sat.
They took the end of the bar, the three of them, with Jason on the corner stool and the women facing each other over the black wood. Riley set down two coffees and a third cup nobody had ordered, and Carrie wrapped both hands around it.
"Was that your shoot?" Ava asked.
"Spring line. Compression." Carrie drank. "It's good work. I'll look at it tomorrow and hate it."
"You always hate it after?"
"I hate everything after." She said it without weight, like a fact, and Jason watched the way she held the cup, both thumbs pressed hard into the ceramic.
Ava leaned in. "Do you compete anymore?"
"No."
"Do you lift?"
Carrie almost smiled. "Do I lift. Look at me."
"I'm looking," Ava said, and meant it, and the two of them sat there measuring each other while the crew rolled the light stand past them toward the door. The softbox caught a thread of dust.