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Thank You for Your Services: Neat

Ten years earlier.

The first time I tasted bourbon, I spit it back into the glass.

Not delicately. Not a demure little cough into a cocktail napkin. I spit it like a kid who'd bitten into a piece of fruit and found it rotten — a graceless, sputtering rejection that sent amber droplets across the bar top and drew exactly the kind of attention a nineteen-year-old with a fake ID does not want.

"Jesus Christ," said the man next to me, pulling his sleeve out of the splash radius. "First time?"

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and stared at the glass like it had insulted me. The bartender — a woman in her forties with forearms like rope and zero patience for underage theatrics — raised one eyebrow but said nothing. She knew the ID was fake. I knew she knew. We had an understanding built on the fact that I tipped well and never caused problems.

Until now.

"It's fine," I managed, eyes watering. "Went down wrong."

The man smiled. Not at me — about me. There's a difference, and even at nineteen I could feel it. He was older. Early thirties, maybe. Dark hair pushed back from his forehead with the kind of carelessness that takes twenty minutes in front of a mirror. A blazer over a t-shirt, which in this neighborhood meant either finance bro slumming it or adjunct professor with pretensions. His watch was expensive. Finance, then.

"You don't drink bourbon," he said. Not a question.

"I drink bourbon."

"You drink vodka sodas. Maybe a glass of rosé when you're feeling grown up."

He was right, and I hated him for it with the specific, white-hot hatred that only teenage girls can generate for men who see through them. I picked up the glass and took another sip — smaller this time, controlled. The burn hit different when I was braced for it. Not pleasant, exactly, but present. It demanded I notice it. Every other drink I'd ever had was designed to be easy. Sweet, bubbly, forgettable. This one had teeth.

"See?" he said. "You've got to let it bite you first. Then you decide if you want more."

I should have rolled my eyes and turned away. That was the move — the safe, practiced dismissal I'd perfected in the year since I'd started sneaking into bars with Amy Whitfield's older sister's driver's license. Men talked to you constantly in places like this. They materialized at your elbow like pigeons descending on a dropped sandwich, all confidence and cologne and the unshakable belief that you'd been sitting there waiting specifically for them.

I didn't turn away.

His name was Daniel. He bought me a second bourbon — Woodford Reserve, not the well shit I'd originally ordered — and told me to sip it slower this time. Let it sit on my tongue. Find the vanilla first, then the oak, then the heat underneath.

"Drinking bourbon is about patience," he said, signaling the bartender for his own refill. "Most people rush past the burn to get to the buzz. But the burn's the whole point. That's where the flavor lives."

I remember thinking he was full of shit. I remember thinking his eyes were very green. I remember the way his knee pressed against mine under the bar — light enough to be accidental, consistent enough to be anything but.

And I remember the exact moment I felt something shift.

It wasn't sexual. Not yet. It was more like a lens rotating into focus.

He was leaning toward me. Not dramatically — he wasn't closing distance in any way I could have called him on. But his body had oriented itself around mine like a compass needle finding north. His shoulders angled in my direction. His drink sat on my side of his personal space. When he laughed — which was often, because I was being cleverer than usual, sharpened by the bourbon and the adrenaline of being somewhere I wasn't supposed to be — he dipped his head toward me, and I could smell his cologne mixing with the whiskey on his breath.

He was performing for me. This man — this adult, with his expensive watch and his blazer and his encyclopedic knowledge of barrel-aging processes — was performing. And the stage was about six inches from my face.

I was nineteen. I had a fake ID, split ends, and a statistics exam in fourteen hours. And this man was working to impress me.

I took another sip of bourbon and held it in my mouth. The burn barely registered this time. I was too busy noticing things.

The way his eyes tracked the movement of my lips on the glass. The way he'd started touching his own jaw while he talked — some unconscious mirror of the way I'd been resting my chin on my hand. The way his stories had gotten more impressive over the last twenty minutes, escalating from amusing workplace anecdotes to the apartment he'd just bought in Tribeca, the car he kept in a garage downtown because parking in the city was "its own kind of masochism."

He was building a case. Stacking evidence of his value like a lawyer making closing arguments.

And I was the jury.

Something clicked in my chest. Not my heart — something colder and more mechanical than that. A gear engaging. A system booting up. I looked at Daniel with his green eyes and his expensive watch and I understood, with sudden devastating clarity, that I was the most powerful person at this bar.

Not because I was beautiful — though I was, in the careless half-finished way of teenagers who haven't yet learned how to weaponize it. Not because I was smart, though the bourbon was making me feel like I was. I was powerful because he wanted. He wanted with a gravity that bent everything around it, and I was the object at the center, and I hadn't even done anything.

I just existed, and it was enough to make a grown man buy top-shelf whiskey for a girl who'd spit out her first sip.

"You want to get out of here?" he asked, and there was a roughness in his voice now. A want that had stopped hiding behind charm.

I looked at him. I let the silence stretch — not because I was unsure, but because I wanted to see what the silence did to him. It did a lot. His pupils dilated. His fingers tightened around his glass. He held perfectly still, the way animals do when something vital depends on the next three seconds.

I did that, I thought. Just by not answering.

"Where would we go?" I asked. My voice came out different than I expected. Lower. Slower. Like the bourbon had seeped into my vocal cords and aged them.

"My place is ten minutes from here."

"Is it nice?"

He blinked. "What?"

"Your apartment. In Tribeca. The one you've mentioned twice." I sipped my bourbon. Held his gaze. "Is it nice? I'm deciding if it's worth the cab fare."

Something happened to his face. A flicker of surprise, then a recalibration — I could literally watch him reassess me, upgrading me in real time from cute college girl at a bar to something he didn't have a ready category for. And in that recalibration, I saw my power reflected back at me like light off a blade.

"It's worth the cab fare," he said quietly.

I set my glass down. I was halfway through the Woodford and I could feel it — warm in my chest, loosening the muscles in my shoulders, dissolving the low-grade anxiety I'd carried into the bar like a backpack full of rocks. But it wasn't the alcohol making me brave. The alcohol was just clearing the view.

"Then let's go."

His apartment was nice. Obscenely nice. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Hudson, a kitchen that had clearly never been cooked in, the kind of minimalist furniture that costs a fortune to look that empty. He gave me a tour with the practiced ease of a man who'd done this before — shown a woman around his space, watched her take in the evidence of his success, waited for the impressed exhale.

I didn't give him one.

Not because I wasn't impressed — I was nineteen and living in a dorm room with a mini fridge that smelled like old hummus, so yeah, I was impressed. But something about the bar had taught me the value of withholding. Every reaction I didn't give him was a question he had to answer harder. Every silence I held was a space he rushed to fill.

"Drink?" he offered, pulling a bottle from a cabinet. Bourbon again — Blanton's this time, the kind with the little horse on the stopper. "Or are you going to spit this one out too?"

I laughed. A real laugh — I'll give him that. He was funny, in the way that men who are used to getting what they want are often funny. Confidence is its own kind of comedy.

"Neat," I said, because I'd learned the word twenty minutes ago and it felt like armor.

He poured two glasses and carried them to the couch — a massive grey sectional facing the windows. The city sprawled below us, glittering and indifferent, and I sat down with my legs folded beneath me and my bourbon in both hands like a chalice.

He sat close. Not touching, but close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him. The energy in the room had changed — denser now, charged, like the air before a storm system moves in. We both knew why I was here. The bourbon was a courtesy. A civilizing gesture before civilization got set aside.

"How old are you really?" he asked, swirling his glass.

"Twenty-two."

"You're not twenty-two."

"Does it matter?"

He looked at me. Long and searching, and for a second I thought he might do the right thing — might do the responsible, respectable thing that a man his age should do when he suspects the girl on his couch is closer to a teenager than she claimed.

"No," he said. "I guess it doesn't."

I took a sip of Blanton's. It was smoother than the Woodford. Richer, more layered. I let it sit on my tongue the way he'd taught me and found the vanilla, the oak, the slow sweet burn that built rather than bit. I closed my eyes for a moment and just tasted it, and when I opened them, he was staring at my mouth.

"You're a quick study," he said, and his voice had dropped into a register that vibrated somewhere below my navel.

"I'm an excellent study."

He kissed me. Or — no. He moved toward me, and I let him arrive. There's a difference, and I was learning it in real time. His mouth was warm, bourbon-sweet, and more tentative than I expected. Asking permission with pressure instead of words. His hand found my waist and rested there — didn't grab, didn't pull. Just rested.

I kissed him back, and it was fine. Good, even. He tasted like the Blanton's and smelled like that cologne and his hand was warm through the thin cotton of my shirt. But the real sensation wasn't physical. It was intellectual. I was cataloging. Noting the way his breathing changed when I moved my mouth to his jaw. The way his whole body tightened when I shifted closer. The small, involuntary sound he made when I pulled his lower lip between my teeth.

Every response was data. Every reaction was a map. And I was drawing the borders in real time.

Here's what they don't tell you about the first time you realize you're powerful:

It's not sexy. Not at first. It's closer to vertigo — that swooping, nauseating moment when you look down and realize you're standing at the edge of something with no railing. The ground is very far away. The wind is very strong. And no one is going to catch you if you fall, because no one even knows you're up here.

Daniel undressed me like he was unwrapping something expensive. Careful, deliberate, savoring. He kissed my collarbones. He murmured against my skin — you're beautiful, you're incredible, fuck, look at you — and each word landed with the weight of an offering left at an altar.

I lay on his eight-thousand-dollar sheets and watched him watch me, and I felt it again. That cold mechanical click. That gear engaging.

He wanted me so badly he was shaking with it. I could see the tremor in his hands as he undid his belt. His pupils were blown wide, almost no green left. This man — who owned this apartment and drove that car and moved through the world with the comfortable certainty of someone who'd never been told no in a way that stuck — was trembling because a nineteen-year-old girl was lying in his bed.

And I thought: Oh.

So this is how it works.

He lowered himself over me and I could feel him hard against my thigh, radiating heat. His mouth found my neck and his hand found my breast and my body responded because bodies do, because nerve endings don't check credentials. His thumb circled my nipple and his teeth grazed my pulse point and something tightened low in my belly — not the cold mechanical click this time but something warmer, something that didn't ask my permission first.

I filed it. Moved on. Kept the drone hovering.

But my mind was elsewhere. My mind was observing the geometry. The way he was above me but I was in control. The way every sound I made — the gasps, the small moans, the whispered yes and there and more — functioned as a dial I could turn. Volume up, and he sped up, worked harder, devoted himself more furiously to the project of my pleasure. Volume down, and he faltered, searched my face, adjusted his approach with the frantic attentiveness of a man terrified of losing his audience.

I was the audience. The critic. The review he couldn't stop refreshing.

When he pushed inside me, my jaw dropped open and stayed there. Not a gasp. Not a moan. Just my mouth falling open like a hinge had broken, because the physical reality of being filled — truly, viscerally filled — was still new enough that my body didn't have a rehearsed response for it. The stretch burned. Not like bourbon. Worse. Better. A blunt, splitting heat that started at the point of entry and radiated upward through my pelvis, my stomach, the base of my ribs. My hands flew to his shoulders — not to pull him closer, not to push him away, but because my hands needed to be somewhere and I hadn't told them where.

He groaned like I'd given him something sacred.

"You feel—" he started.

"Don't talk," I whispered. Not because the words bothered me. Because I wanted to see if he'd obey.

He obeyed.

He stopped mid-sentence and fucked me in silence, and the only sounds were the obscene wet rhythm of our bodies and my breathing and the distant wail of a siren twenty-three stories below. His forearms braced on either side of my head, muscles straining. I watched his face contort with the effort of holding back — waiting for me, prioritizing me, making my pleasure the condition of his own.

I had the architecture. I had the drone. I had the cold, clinical observation deck from which I intended to witness the entire transaction.

And then my left hip flexor cramped.

Not metaphorically. Not poetically. A vicious, seizing knot that shot from my inner thigh to the base of my spine and made my whole left side clench without warning. My leg locked around his hip — not a sexy wrap, not a cinematic leg-hook, a spasm — hauling him deeper than either of us planned. The angle shifted. He hit something inside me that I didn't know was there, some furious cluster of nerve endings that detonated on contact, and I heard myself make a sound I'd never made before. Not a moan. Not a gasp. A bark. Short, guttural, ugly — the sound of a woman whose body has just committed mutiny against her mind.

"Oh f—" I bit it off. Swallowed the word. But the damage was done.

The drone crashed. The observation deck went dark. For three full seconds I was nothing but the body — the cramping thigh, the involuntary clench, the devastating fullness of him wedged at an angle I couldn't control and couldn't escape. My fingers dug into his shoulders hard enough to leave marks I wouldn't see but he'd feel tomorrow. My back arched off the mattress not because it looked good but because my spine was trying to outrun the sensation and failing.

Three seconds. Maybe four.

Then the architecture rebuilt itself. I blinked. I breathed. I found the ceiling and stared at it and willed the drone back into the air.

But in those three seconds, Daniel had felt me clench around him with a force that had nothing to do with performance, and it dragged his orgasm out ahead of schedule. He made a sound against my neck — not a groan, a whimper, high and broken and humiliatingly honest — and his hips stuttered out of rhythm, slamming forward twice more in a graceless animal staccato before he went rigid and pulsed inside me. I felt every spasm of it. Every helpless, shuddering contraction. He came with his face buried in my hair and his hands fisting the sheets beside my head and that whimper still leaking out of him like a prayer he couldn't stop saying.

I lay perfectly still beneath him and watched the ceiling and felt my hip flexor slowly unclench and thought, very clearly: I didn't do that on purpose. My body did that without me. And it still destroyed him.

He was still twitching inside me when the aftershocks of something — not an orgasm, not quite, more like the ghost of one, the shadow it casts on the wall — rippled through my pelvis and made my breath hitch. Just once. A single, involuntary catch in my throat that I pressed my lips together to silence.

I hadn't come. Not really. Not the way I would learn to, years later, with deliberate precision and exacting standards. But my body had done something — something it didn't consult me about — and the residual hum of it was still vibrating in my teeth when he finally lifted his head and looked at me with an expression I would spend the next decade learning to produce in other men.

Ruined. Grateful. Afraid.

Afterward, he wanted to cuddle.

He pulled me against his chest with one arm and reached for his bourbon with the other, and the gesture was so practiced, so domestic, that I almost laughed. This was his script. The closing credits. Hold the girl, sip the whiskey, say something vaguely profound about the view, and wake up in the morning to do it all over again.

I let him hold me for exactly ninety seconds. I counted.

Then I untangled myself, sat up, and reached for my own glass on the nightstand. The Blanton's had warmed to room temperature. I drank it anyway — one long, slow sip that I held in my mouth until every note resolved.

"You're not staying?" He said it lightly, but I could hear the edge underneath. The bewilderment of a man whose script had been deviated from.

"I have a statistics exam at eight."

"It's barely midnight. Stay. I'll set an alarm."

I looked at him. Daniel, in his beautiful apartment, in his beautiful bed, with his beautiful green eyes that had watched me like I was the most extraordinary thing in his curated life. He wanted me to stay. He wanted to wake up next to me and make me coffee and feel like this — whatever this was — extended beyond the edges of the night.

And I understood, with the same clarity that had struck me at the bar, that the moment I stayed was the moment I stopped being powerful. Because power lived in the space between wanting and having. In the pause before the answer. In the door that might close.

I'd walked through the door tonight. I'd given him what he wanted. But I could still control the exit.

"Goodnight, Daniel."

I got dressed while he watched from the bed, propped up on one elbow, his expression cycling through confusion and admiration and something that might have been the first faint stirring of obsession. I let him watch. I took my time with each piece of clothing — not seductively, just unhurried. Sovereign.

At his front door, I paused.

"Thanks for the bourbon lesson."

"Are you going to give me your number?"

I smiled. It was the first time all night I'd smiled at him with nothing held back, and I watched it land like a physical blow — his lips parting, his eyes widening, his whole body leaning toward me like a plant toward light.

"No," I said.

And I walked out.

The cab ride home was fourteen minutes. I sat in the back seat with my forehead against the cool window and my reflection staring back at me — flushed, wrecked, alive in a way I hadn't been three hours ago. My thighs were sore. The left hip still ached where the cramp had seized it, and I pressed my thumb into the muscle absently, feeling the knot beneath the skin. My lips were swollen. I could still taste the Blanton's on the back of my tongue, and I held onto it like a secret.

The city blurred past in streaks of light and I replayed the night frame by frame. Not the sex — not most of it. The architecture. The way I'd felt his want like a tangible force. The way I'd learned, in real time, that I could direct it. Amplify it. Withhold it. That every interaction between a person who wants and a person who is wanted is a negotiation, and I had spent nineteen years not realizing I was sitting at the table.

But I also replayed those three seconds. The cramp. The bark. The ugly, involuntary clench that had cracked the architecture open and dragged a whimper out of a man twice my age. I replayed it with clinical interest and something else — something I didn't have a name for yet. Not shame. Not pride. Something in between that tasted like bourbon: complex, contradictory, burning in a way that made you want another sip.

My body had a vote. That was the lesson underneath the lesson. I could build the walls and man the observation deck and hover above the scene with my clipboard and my cold mechanical clicks. But the body had a vote, and sometimes it voted loud, and sometimes the loudest vote in the room was the one you didn't cast on purpose.

The trick, I decided — pressing my thumb harder into the knot, watching the city lights smear — wasn't to eliminate the vote. It was to make sure it never swung an election.

I stopped at a liquor store two blocks from campus. The clerk didn't card me — he never did — and I walked the aisles until I found it. Woodford Reserve. Not the Blanton's — I hadn't earned the Blanton's yet. But the Woodford. The one that burned first and revealed itself second. The one that demanded patience.

I carried it back to my dorm room, poured two fingers into a coffee mug because I didn't own proper glasses, and sat on my twin bed in the dark.

I sipped it slow. I found the vanilla. I found the oak.

And I began to build my walls, one sip at a time, with the methodical satisfaction of a woman who'd just discovered she was the architect all along.

I never saw Daniel again. I didn't need to. He'd served his purpose — not as a lover, not as a lesson in bourbon, but as a mirror. The first mirror that showed me what I actually looked like to the men who looked at me.

In the years that followed, I refined the blueprint. Learned which reactions to give and which to withhold. Learned that a well-timed silence could bring a man to his knees faster than any lingerie. Learned that leaving first wasn't just a strategy — it was a philosophy. A way of moving through the world with your center of gravity locked inside your own chest, immovable, untouchable.

The bourbon evolved with me. Woodford in college. Maker's Mark in my mid-twenties. Blanton's when I got my first real promotion and finally felt like I'd earned the little horse on the stopper. Each bottle a milestone. Each glass a ritual — two fingers, neat, held in the mouth until the burn became flavor became warmth became quiet.

People think bourbon is a man's drink. I find this hilarious. Bourbon is the most feminine liquor on the shelf — all patience and complexity, all hidden sweetness beneath a surface that bites. It doesn't try to be easy. It doesn't apologize for its heat. You either learn to love it on its terms, or you don't get to love it at all.

Sound like anyone you know?

The Sauvignon Blanc came later — a concession to weeknights and hangovers and the simple reality that a woman can't drink bourbon every night without becoming a cautionary tale. But the Sauvignon Blanc is functional. Maintenance. Background noise.

The bourbon is for the moments that matter. The first sip alone in a new apartment. The last glass after a victory at work. The quiet ritual of sitting in the dark and remembering that I chose this — every wall, every rule, every door closed at exactly the right moment.

And if sometimes, late at night, I think about a man's hand cupping my face like something precious — if sometimes I hold my bourbon and wonder what it would feel like to stay —

Well.

That's what the burn is for. To remind you that the thing worth tasting isn't the sweetness.

It's everything you survive on the way there.

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