Turbulence
an excerpt

Darby was almost finished with her day shift when a young man walked into the bar and made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. Or at least couldn’t refuse twice. Darby had a very good sense of how to refuse. Max Max, a ridiculous bar with a ridiculous name and ridiculous prices that made the coroprate monkeys that dined there feel better about going to what was essentially an upscale Hooters because of the sizable dent it made on their credit card statement, gave her more than enough opportunity to refuse. Every day she refused things. The businessmen (because, truth be told, the clientele was almost all business men, and the very occasional business woman who arrived in a power suit and liked to pretend she was a man) who came in every day would take one look at Darby, and be at a loss to not take another. They’d take another, and another, and then she’d look at them with her huge liquid brown eyes, and they would drown in them and offer her the world. Or they’d offer her their worlds, anyway. Worlds of red Ferraris (or at least nice BMWs, if they weren’t yet at midlife crisis age) and wives and children and the opportunity to be the most pampered little mistress in the world. They never said any of this out loud, of course. She just knew. What they really offered her was theater tickets, and rides in said Ferrari, and pretty jewelery that would “set off her eyes like stars in the sky.” And she always said no.