Over the Hill White Knight Ch. 01

Colorado had gotten weird since I'd been there last.

Not bad-weird, just weird. When I'd served along the Front Range close to twenty years earlier, it'd still been a state full of snow-bunnies, ranchers, and mountain men sprinkled around all of the military bases. Don't get me wrong, the state was the same in a lot of ways: the plains east of the mountains still just felt like western Kansas, and you didn't have to travel far west into the mountains to feel like you were utterly alone in the universe. But the Front Range had blown up, changed. Gotten weird.

Good weird.

I'd only spent a week there, talking to my old Army buddy's estate lawyer, driving around town to rouse old memories instead of dwelling on new ones. George -- Georgie -- had never had any kids and had left a string of broken marriages like burning tank hulks in the desert. I guess the only person for him to leave his property to was old Army buddies like me. Hell, I'd been through a lot of the same shit in my personal life, but I'd managed to leave 22 years in uniform with only two failed marriages, bad knees, sleep problems, endless migraines, and a few fractured vertebrae in my lower back and neck. Poor Georgie had gotten some rare cancer from burning oil drums full of human shit and God knows what else downrange.

The funeral had been small. The local Division sent out an honor detail, with the flag and the bugle. I mostly managed to keep it together when the Captain knelt and offered me the flag on behalf of a grateful nation. Mostly. As many of the old group of us that came up together and could make it were there, all of us looking ten years older than we should've. A few were already missing -- Georgie hadn't been the first -- and a handful were still wearing the uniform. We'd all grabbed a beer, some steaks, and, like so many times over the years, scattered back into the four corners of the Earth.

Except for me.

Fresh out of uniform, fresh out of another bitter divorce, left with a storage unit full of sentimental knick-knacks from a life working for Uncle Sam, a nice retirement check, and an even nicer disability check from the VA. All that and the old house and bar Georgie had bought when he'd gotten out a decade before me.

But enough about that sad shit. In the week I'd been back on the Front Range, living on a folding chair and an air mattress in Georgie's empty house while I waited for my meager possessions to arrive, I'd noticed just how weird everything was. The cowboys and the hippy backwoods adventurers, the high-country hunters and the service members, they were all still there. Joining them, though, was a clusterfuck of others that reminded me of the absolute grab-bag of Americans I'd served with. Hipsters that wouldn't look out of place in Brooklyn. Potheads from everywhere else in the country that had moved to the 'promised land' when the state legalized recreational use. Every flavor from Southern California, from nu-hippy to valley girl. The Hispanic population had grown, too, and with the bases getting bigger, the eclectic population of retirees and discharges from the military added even more diversity.

Like I said, good weird.

Georgie's house and the bar were in a commercial district that had obviously once been on the edge of town. The house was old -- like, 1920's farmhouse old -- but Georgie had been good with his hands before the cancer made him too weak. The essential parts had been repaired or replaced, but enough remained to give it the old feel. There was probably some silly HGTV word for the style, but I didn't care much. It was a house, and it had fallen into my old lap, right as my entire previous life unraveled like the cheap boot socks I'd been issued at basic.

"Thanks, Georgie," I chuckled and toasted with the cold Coors in my hand.

Joints popping, I struggled out of the folding chair and over to the window. His old bar was maybe a half-mile away, with only a few cars in the huge dirt parking lot. It had probably been built around the same time as the house, which gave it the look of an old Honky-Tonk. However, some of the fading signs and the decades-old lighting made it look like it was trying to be a dance club. Beyond that, big signs for craft beers and hatchet throwing betrayed some weird hipster vibe that meshed even less with the other aesthetics.

Weird. New Colorado weird.

I hadn't been over there yet, too busy dealing with Georgie's estate, closing the last few chapters of my life back...well, home wasn't the right word. Where home was supposed to have been. Hell, I thought to myself, home was the Army, with guys like Georgie, but that was gone now, too.

I banged my first against my chest, feeling that familiar emptiness open up and clamp down on my throat. "Enough of that sad shit, old man," I grumbled to myself, finishing the beer. My mood had been high when I saw the old crew, but it'd just been a brief light in the gloom of my absolutely bungled transition to civilian life.

"Fuck this feeling sorry for myself," I made my mind up to finally visit the place. I plodded around the creaking hardwood floors, pulling on old jeans and one of my few T-shirts without Army logos or unit crests all over it. The sun was still up over Pikes Peak, but winter was right around the corner, so I pulled on a nice black wool peacoat I'd bought while stationed in Korea.

Shoving copies of some of the legal documents in my coat pocket, I set out into the bright mountain afternoon. I'd forgotten how much the high-altitude sun hurt my light blue eyes, and I knew I'd be needing to buy some sunscreen for the short buzz-cut that only partially hid a receding hairline and a head more than half silver. A yawn hit me suddenly, and I rubbed my jaw and scratched at my beard. Another bright spot in all of this was the fact that I didn't have to shave for the first time in two decades. I'd let my beard grow out more than the scraggly Christmas beards of years past. It'd come in half silver and half red, even though my hair had always been brown. The strange combination came from my Danish ancestry, genetics that had also given me 6'8" of height and the shoulders of a professional strongman.

The ground along the edge of the road crunched loud in the crisp air under my old Tiger sneakers. Like I said, this area used to be out on the edge of town, where strip malls met prairie, but the city had grown past it. A confused mixture of cheap apartments, self-storage places, and small commercial lots surrounded my new house and business in a tangled, unplanned mess of access roads and parking lots. That only made the eclectic bar and its huge dirt lot stand out even more.

"Probably going to get an offer to buy the land right away," I grumbled to myself as I walked. Would I sell? How important was this place to Georgie? I didn't know a damn thing about running a bar.

There was a guy at the door lazily sweeping the small covered area for checking IDs. He had that ex-college football player look you see at places where bouncing is serious business. That perked me up a bit; maybe, despite the schizophrenic theme of the place, it had a booming client base?

"We're closed till six," the guy said as I approached without looking up. He had a faint Hispanic accent.

"I'm the owner," I replied, blowing air into my cold hands.

"What?" The bouncer's head came up. He looked to be half-black, half-Hispanic maybe, "You ain't George."

"I'm an old Army buddy of his," I said. The guy was only a few inches shorter than me and obviously not used to looking up at someone while talking. "George, uh, George died a few weeks ago. He willed the bar to me."

"Oh shit," he said, slowly shaking his head. He rubbed his shaved scalp with a calloused hand, "He seemed like a good guy. Only met him a few times. He never really came around much since I've worked here. Must've been too sick."

"Yeah," I said, my head going back to a dark place. "Y'all have a shift manager I can talk to?"

A strange look crossed his face, but he nodded, "Yeah, he should be inside, in the back. Ask for Brett."

"I'm Ivan, by the way."

"Paolo."

"Good to meet you."

Bars always look strange when they're well-lit and empty, and this one wasn't any different. Beyond that, the interior reflected the outside's confused message. In one corner was a dining area complete with a few booths and high tops. Crammed up against them were a dozen pool tables and dartboards. The opposite corner held a slightly raised dance floor with a railing around it that wouldn't be out of place in a square-dancing bar. Hipster-influenced ax-throwing lanes butted up against the big double doors I assumed went to the kitchen. Wedged amongst it all were two large bars, replete with dozens of taps and shelf after shelf of liquor bottles. To top off the confusion, dance-club-style neon lights crisscrossed the ceiling but thankfully hadn't been cut on yet.

More employees milled around, prepping the bar for work hours, and I noticed something else that raised my hopes for keeping this place. Four somethings, someone's, actually. Two female bartenders and two waitresses swished around the place, prepping tables and glasses, though I thought there'd be more.

The two waitresses were about as wildly different as I could think two attractive women could be. One was short, college-aged, and East Asian, maybe Korean, wearing a short black skirt and a black crop top. She was pale and had dyed her waist-length hair a dark, deep blue. Round, rich brown eyes flicked up to look at me as I pushed through the doors. I'd been stationed in Korea years before, and her warm, round face had the telltale signs of the plastic surgery many Korean women thought was vogue to make them appear more Western; round eyes, fuller lips, and a more pointed chin. She was curvier, though, than most Koreans I remembered, with a perky and plump butt that dangerously stretched her skirt. Maybe C-cup tits were strategically augmented by a push-up bra until they were nearly bursting from the scoop neck of her crop top.

The other waitress had essentially walked off the cover of some Tattoo magazine. She was pale, paler than pale, with more than half her skin covered in tattoos of half a dozen different styles. She'd dyed her hair a rich pink and done it up in a complex series of braids and bumps on top but shaved the sides as short as my buzz-cut. Genetics had made her skinny as a rail, but a skilled surgeon and a few tens of thousands of dollars had put a pair of obscenely large and perky bolt-ons on her chest. Somewhat natural-looking implants and a Brazilian Butt Lift gave her a perky rear. She'd stretched tight black denim short shorts over that fake and plump ass and a tiny black tank top bordering on just being a bra over her chest. Fishnets and fingerless gloves, along with seemingly endless chains, chokers, rings, and nose and ear piercings, finished the look. She glanced at me with eyes adorned with hot-pink circle contacts that matched her hair, and her collagen-injected lips twisted into a bemused smirk.

The bartenders, too, were about as different as could be. The first one I noticed at the bar on the far side of the space had rich tawny skin and long, straight black hair that reached past her waist in two long and tight braids. She was the tallest, maybe 5' 8." Her face gave off a South Asian, Indian vibe, with perhaps a little bit of Afro-Caribbean, but her large eyes were a rich amber-tan. Rippling muscles filled her still-feminine frame, a masterpiece of an ass sculpted by endless squats and deadlifts spilling out of a pair of white hot pants. A white tank top strained valiantly to contain another pair of surgically gifted tits, not quite as large and conspicuous as goth-girl's, but still noticeably big, perky, and spherical. She immediately gave me the vibe of a female fitness competitor.

The last bartender, though...well, let's just say she's the type of girl Rick James was singing about in "Brick House." She couldn't have been an inch over five feet and was more stacked than any of the women I'd seen in the six continents I'd visited on behalf of Uncle Sam. She'd wedged voluptuous hips and a huge, earth-shattering ass into ripped and acid-washed jeans that looked painted on. A black tanktop was stretched over a pair of tits so massive it made the fabric practically see-through. Looking at her, I was certain of two things: those tits weighed as much as the petite Asian waitress and that she'd been special-ordering bras her entire adult life. Her smooth skin was somehow both a rich, natural bronze and liberally sprinkled with freckles and adorned all over with traditional Hawaiian and Sailor-Jerry style tattoos. Her wary face seemed mostly caucasian but with a hint of native islander features. Her lustrous black hair was done up in a somehow both complex and messy bun. She studied me, and not favorably, with huge, strikingly pale blue eyes that seemed completely at odds with her beachy, island-vibe.

For a moment, all eighty inches and two hundred and ninety pounds of me was intimidated by the four gorgeous women looking up at me.

"I'm looking for Brett?"

***

"Who the hell is this goon walking through the door?" I muttered to myself, seeing the guy who dwarfed all of our bouncers standing uneasily in the entryway. He looked at me, his question still hanging in the air, probably because he thought I looked the oldest. Since I was 37 and the other girls were all 25 or younger, he was right, "Brett? Uh, yeah, you just missed him."

"Not like he's ever here anyways, Kay," Krista mumbled, rolling her bright pink eyes.

"Let me handle this guy," I hissed back at her, and she rolled her eyes again, strutting off to prep another table.

If he'd heard our exchange, he didn't let on as he crossed towards where I was organizing bottles. I assumed he was another of Brett's pervy fucking friends here to do whatever shady shit our manager always did in the back office. "I, uh, I think I'll stick around until he gets back? I'm Ivan, by the way, the new owner," he extended a massive hand.

He spared a moment to check me out, head to toe, though to his credit, he was extremely subtle about it. I wasn't in the mood for any bullshit, though, not with all the other bullshit going on in my life at the time, so I put on my best frigid bitch scowl when I reached out to shake his Neanderthal paw.

"Kala. I wasn't aware there'd been a change of ownership," I said cooly.

"Yeah..." He said, a strange look crossing his face, "I wasn't exactly expecting to be here either. George, the old owner, was an old Army buddy of mine and just bought the farm from cancer. He willed this place to me, apparently, and never told me. Got a call out of the blue from his lawyer."

Well, suddenly, I felt like a bitch, but I shook the feeling off and buried it deep down. George never came around, never dealt with Brett, never made sure the girls and I were safe or making the money we deserved. "I, uh, I didn't even know he was sick. He didn't come around much."

"Yeah, I heard. I haven't decided what to do with the place yet."

My resting bitch face intensified. I had to get a read on this guy, understand who he was. He was probably going to be just as absentee as George had been, or so up in our shit he'd drive the bar the rest of the way into the red. My girls didn't need another defunct bar on their short resumes, and I don't think any of us were ready to handle any amount of time unemployed.

It didn't even occur to me that he could be beneficial for the bar. Too many men like him had come and gone in my life, including my abusive piece of shit ex-husband. I had to get to know this Ivan, figure out where he stood. Better the evil you know, right?

It took me a second to realize he'd asked me something, "I'm sorry, what?"

"Care to, um, show me around a bit? If you've got the time," he asked.

"Sure," I responded, making sure to add some annoyed sass to my tone. To be honest, it was a Wednesday night, and there wasn't much prep, but I still wasn't expecting to have to deal with this today. I walked down the length of the bar, and Ivan turned away to look at the rest of the room.

I took the brief moment to check him out, much less subtly than he'd done to me. Ridiculously tall, maybe 45 or so, and built like a fucking meat mountain. I couldn't see much skin, but I got the vibe he wasn't one of those bodybuilding, shredded, no-body-fat types. He had a bit of a paunch, but even his loose-cut jeans couldn't hide the ridiculously thick thighs and perky ass. I couldn't see his arms, but the strength of that handshake and the lifter's calluses on his hands hinted that he was an absolute beef-castle all over. Even his neck was thick, and the first thing I'd noticed about him was the unique beard and those piercing blue eyes.

Shit.

Pull it together, Kala, I thought to myself. It was bad enough I needed to show him around, get a read on him, figure out how I'd exploit him to get my girls taken care of. Why did he have to be so damned hot?

I rounded the bar, and he turned back to look at me, smiling faintly as he waited for me to lead the way. But, dammit, even that crooked smile was adorably at odds with the rest of him. So I led the way, immediately feeling him boring his gaze into my generous backside from the moment I turned around.

***

Jesus, I thought to myself as Kala turned around and headed for the kitchen. Her hips were so big and ass so voluptuous she couldn't help but look like she was strutting as she walked, and her waist and rib cage were so impossibly narrow that I could see a significant portion of her tits from behind. Even worse, the back of her tanktop was shredded and torn, showing her toned back was completely covered in a massive Polynesian back piece.

I forced myself to focus on the tour. The bar was eclectic, I knew that, but even worse than that, it seemed like very little had been maintained after it'd been bought and installed. There was warped wood, peeling decals, and faded and splintered plastic everywhere I looked. The felt on the pool tables was horribly stained. The wall around the dartboards was wrecked. Every time the kitchen doors opened, they smashed into the nearest ax-throwing booth.

I focused on all of that because I needed something, anything, to avoid looking at Kala for more than a moment or two. My eyes couldn't even wander that much, though, since the other three girls were bleeding hotness into the room and pretending to work as they stole glances over in our direction. This was going to be a problem, a problem on top of all the genuine issues with the way the bar had been run and put together.

I'd been married to my second wife for 18 years and never once cheated on her, even though the Army seemed to either attract or generate adulterers in droves. Hell, it was practically part of the culture, and that had always made my blood boil. Anyways, 18 years with one woman and our sex life had gotten stale and stilted despite my best efforts. ABC sex, as an old Kiwi buddy had joked with me: anniversary, birthday, Christmas sex. I say all of that to simply say that I was beyond frustrated sexually. My marriage had imploded while going through the single most significant transition in my life, and I hadn't had the time or inclination to casually date after the papers had been signed.

All that frustration, mixed with four gorgeous new employees? I wasn't trying to get a sexual harassment suit on my first day as the new owner.

I compartmentalized my thoughts, focusing on the kitchens where a half-dozen cooks were wrapping up their prep work for the shift. Before the Army, I'd worked at a diner for a year as a cook and recognized the usual suspects. Felons for whom this was one of the best jobs they could get. College kids forced to work jobs with shifts outside of school hours. Tired-looking twenty-somethings who'd clearly come here from their other job. I nodded, and a middle-aged black guy who'd been watching as we walked through, effortlessly chopping fresh onions, nodded back slightly on behalf of the whole crew.