/lit/ - Literature

>>16914925
the barman appears and he's telling us it's last call but i glance at my watch and it's only ten o'clock. i switch to english and point out that they're supposed to close at eleven, but he says they're closing at 10:30 tonight so it's last call and would we like another? and i ask her, in russian, and she bounces the question back to me and she looks good and i'm having fun and i'm thinking, why not? i tell the barman we'll have two more, the same, and anya tells me he looked very disappointed as he walked away, but i didn't notice a thing.

i had thought she looked older when we met, standing tall behind the bar, eyes like a deer, i was drunk but i remember saying that, she looks like a deer! like a baby deer! to my friends before i eventually approached and asked for her number, which she wrote for me on a folded up white piece of paper. i took a photo of it and threw it in the trash in the toilet. if alina finds that in my pocket i'm finished.

but now, sitting next to me, she looks smaller, less cervine, she has crooked teeth, in fact she's not even a barmaid but just a friend of someone who hired her for some temp work after her shop closed down due to covid. still, she's wildly sexy, sitting next to me in a cream-coloured cable-knit sweater and tight black jeans. long pink nails, kind of 90s, honestly not my thing, and they've grown out, probably needed to be replaced three weeks ago, but i'm feeling optimistic and the photos she sent me earlier were incredible so i'm paying no attention to her nails.

we talk about photography and modeling and traveling, and we haven't quite finished our second drink but they start turning out the lights, trying to get us to leave but actually creating a romantic mood and i tell her this, joking, too nervous to pronounce the words with confidence in russian so i say it in english, but the only part she understands is that i want to kiss her, and then we're making out, and i pull away and she asks me, what are your plans for tonight?

i bite my lip. my plans for tonight. it's really happening. for the first time in my life a girl wants to come back to my place and i live with a girl and i have to sort a solution. i tell her i'm staying with a friend and he and i are having a fight because he invited some girl who was loud and we resolved that nobody can have any guests to the place and i'm thinking this is completely unbelievable and this is where it ends, but she just says we'll need to stop at a shop by her place, not sure if she's hinting at alcohol or condoms and i ask what for? and she tells me, well what the hell do you think we're going to do? and i answer dumbly, "walk." she smiles. we'll need alcohol, she tells me.