They weren’t going to the opera. They were supposed to be going to a musical stage adaptation of the Patrick Swayze eighties movie Road House, but she had just bought an embroidered silk cape at a thrift store and she was determined to wear it. It was silver, with a red lining and a rhinestone clip at the neck, and it grazed the back of her knees when she walked. She had paired it with a black sleeveless shift, hot pink tights, and her silver twenty-eight-eye Doc Martens. She had recently dyed her hair black with a white skunk stripe down the middle, and the whole look was very Cruella De Vil meets Daphne Guinness. It was perfect for a fringe theater performance. It was not ideal for a strip club.

Leo breezed past the doorman, while Susan stalked sullenly behind him, through the wood-paneled entryway into the dark bar. Posters on the way in advertised the chance to meet girls “up close.”

She did not like to go to strip clubs with Leo. It wasn’t that she had anything against strip clubs per se. She just didn’t like the way that everyone at the strip clubs seemed to know her boyfriend. Leo’s father owned some of those clubs. Leo did business at some of them. But there was more to it than that. Leo liked these clubs. He liked them in a way that Susan knew she could never fully understand.

It certainly had nothing to do with the decor.

You couldn’t smoke in bars in Portland anymore, but the club still reeked of stale cigarette smoke, and no one had bothered to collect the black plastic ashtrays that were still stationed on every surface. Candles flickered, Italian-restaurant-style, in red glass jars on the tables. Colored Christmas lights festooned the ceiling, some blinking, some not, every string a different style from the last, seemingly hung at random, as if the whole mess had been left behind by a rowdy bachelor party of drunken elves. Rope lights outlined the bar and the stages, the PVC tubing affixed with a staple gun. All that gaudy lighting, and the place was still too dark to see properly. Leo knew where he was going, though. He led Susan around the line to play Keno, past the first stage, toward the main stage at the center of the room. The club was bustling with the usual suspects. A dozen testosterone-fueled frat boys gathered around two tables and chanted encouragement to a poor asshole wearing a candy bra over his shirt and pounding a beer. Men in suits hunched over cocktails, ties loosened, wedding rings in their pockets. A few couples leaned close, giggling. Some Portland Timbers fans were so drunk that one of them nearly tripped over his scarf. And then there were the creepy guys, the ones who sat along the stage racks, their caps pulled low, nursing beers and clutching cash in their hands.