Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

I t had been a perfect opportunity, Penny thought, and then it had all gone wrong.

There was Ashley Torben, amazonian beauty, six feet tall if she was an inch, finally overcoming what was apparently an unholy terror of Gwen Booker and dropping by to say hi. Penny understood that terror, honestly: she'd been tongue-tied and shaking with nerves the first time she'd met Gwen and recognized her as child star Emma Hart. But she'd overcome it brazenly enough that they'd been in a band together for almost two years before Gwen found out that Penny had recognized her. The point was, Penny got it. Meeting superstars was kind of a lot.

Although how Ashley, with her incredible cheekbones and deliciously full mouth and big soft eyes could possibly be overwhelmed by anybody, Penny didn't know. Ashley looked like the kind of woman people would stop on the street to smile after, or maybe mistake for a supermodel, or maybe offer themselves as personal servants for the rest of eternity just to spend some time with her. She was so tall. Slim. Strong arms that could sling beer trays around effortlessly. Jeans that she really knew how to wear.

Penny might, she admitted to herself, be nursing a terrible crush on the new pub manager. All she needed to do was be able to talk to the woman and find out whether Ashley might be interested, too. So Ashley finally coming over to say hello was the opportunity Penny needed, and the fact that she only had three beers—one for herself, Gwen, and Sandy, the band's second singer—was not an obstacle. Penny was more than willing to sacrifice her own beer as a way to chat Ashley up.

She had not, however, planned to sacrifice it down her shirt.

Penny couldn't help the shriek as beer flew out of the glass and over her her clothes. Her shoulders caved in, like she could avoid getting soaked that way, but mostly that just provided a space right between her boobs for the beer to funnel down. Her shriek turned into a giggle, then another shriek as beer reached her belly button and soaked the waistband of her jeans. "Cold! Sticky!"

Gwen, languidly, said, "Hot and sticky is better," underneath poor Ashley's spluttered sounds of horror and apology.

Shoulders still hunched, Penny said, "One time," first to the beer soaking her shirt, then to Ashley's incredibly apologetic deep brown eyes, "one time I'd just gotten a glass of milk, and as I turned away from the fridge, the entire bottom fell out of the glass."

Ashley blinked at her in frantic confusion, continuing to make small, squeaking apologetic noises. Penny nodded and went on. "The whole bottom. I don't know how it was constructed that the bottom could fall out like that, but it did. It was one of those 'time slows down' moments, and I saw fluid mechanics in motion. The middle of the milk blooped—up, I think, it's been ages since it happened—and then blooped back down and I could see the middle of the column drop with individual droplets rising and forming and falling around it. It was genuinely incredible. And then it all hit the floor in a giant splat, obviously."

She looked down at her shirt again. "This was almost exactly like that. Except foamy. But I could actually see the whole wave of beer just rising up there, cresting, collapsing, like it was in slow motion. Sploosh . Nothing I could do to stop it."

"I am so sorry, " Ashley interrupted shrilly.

Penny had the impulse to give Ashley a hug, although given that she was covered in beer, she was fairly confident Ashley wouldn't actually appreciate that. "It's okay. Seriously." She offered a hopeful smile. "I'm not going to melt, and I wasn't wearing my seven thousand dollar leather Prada jacket, so?—"

Ashley, faintly, said, "Oh my God," as Gwen said, "You don't have a seven thousand dollar Prada jacket," in exasperation. Ashley looked back and forth between Penny and the singer, eyes wide with confused dismay, and Penny, in the most reasonable tone she could manage, said, "Which explains why I wasn't wearing it, doesn't it? Honestly, Ashley, it's okay. It's just beer. I'm going to go wash my shirt out, but it's fine, okay?"

"Come back to the staff bathroom," Ashley whispered. "I can get you a brewery t-shirt to wear."

"Oh!" Penny brightened. "That'd be great. I was thinking, at least I'm not wearing a white shirt, but yeah, that'd be great, thank you!"

"It's the least I can do," the tall woman said, still in a whisper. "Come on, this way."

Ashley turned to elbow her way through the crowd. Penny followed after her, grateful that people actually got out of her way. Even in heels, she was at least eight inches shorter than Ashley, and had spent a lifetime squirming through the small spaces between people instead of just brazening it out and expecting people to move. Mostly because no matter how brazen she was, she was also still barely over five feet tall. She muttered, "Bane of my existence."

There was no reasonable way Ashley could have heard that through the noise in the bar, but the tall blonde cast her a stricken look anyway. "I really am sorry."

"Oh, I wasn't talking about you!" Penny said, startled, as Ashley pushed open the staff door and gestured her through. "I was talking about being short. Oh, wow, it's so much quieter in here." She managed to lower her voice by the end of that, although she'd started out very loud. "Uh, sorry, I didn't mean to be shouting at you."

"You're not short, you're—" Ashley broke off as Penny gave a loud, disbelieving snort.

"So speaketh the Amazon. You're what, six feet?"

"Six one," Ashley said almost apologetically. "Here, this is the staff bathroom. I'll get you a t-shirt."

"Six one! I'm five two! Look at this!" Penny toed her boots off and stood flat-footed on the tile floor, something she absolutely would not have done in a more public bathroom. Hands on her hips, she glared up at Ashley, then gestured wildly at the difference in their heights.

Ashley Torben visibly bit the inside of her cheek, trying to keep from laughing, the effort making her warm skin tones absolutely glow. Her mane of dark blonde hair was tied in half a casual up-do, keeping it out of her dark eyes and away from her broad, strong cheekbones, although a few tendrils, tucked behind her ears, fell to frame her square jaw. "Okay," she said in a voice obviously still fighting laughter, "okay, you're kind of tiny. I was going to say it looks good on you."

"But now you've seen the truth of the matter, which is that if I take my shoes off, I actually disappear like a bug," Penny said with a dramatic sigh. "Like I said, bane of my existence. Do you wear heels?"

Ashley, startled, glanced at her own feet. "Hardly ever. Not because of the towering over people thing, because I do that anyway. They're just not very comfortable." She brightened. "I have an amazing pair of clogs that have like three-inch platform soles made of cork and I love those. They're not heels, but they're tall shoes, at least."

"All my shoes are tall," Penny agreed. She put hers back on—they were clogs, too, actually, and had somehow been spared the beer that had dripped down a lot of her front—and went to the sink to strip her shirt off and stare at the reflection of her bra in dismay. Most of the cups were stained a darker berry red than their usual shade. "It's a nice color. Too bad about the beer smell."

"I am so sorry !" Ashley fled, presumably to get a t-shirt.

Penny yelled, "It's fine! Accidents happen!" after her. The bra came off for a thorough rinsing and a scrub with soap from the dispenser, although she paused to put her beer-wet shirt back so she wouldn't jiggle quite as much while she scrubbed. Ashley came back with a shirt clutched in her hands and offered it silently. Penny shook her head. "I'll wait until I've washed this, at least. That way I'm not splashing water all over the new shirt. Thanks. You don't have to wait for me," she added ruefully. "I know you've just taken over managing the place and I'm sure you've got better things to do than watch people wash bras in your bathroom sink. Think the hand dryer has enough power to dry this thing?" She lifted the dripping bra.

"It's lace," Ashley said in a funny voice. "Not padded cups. It might."

"Are you a padded-cups girl? I can never get them to fit right." Penny squeezed as much water as she could out of the lace and squished it out of thin padding around the underwires before draping the bra over the hand dryer and stripping her beery shirt back off to plunge it into the sink.

"Sorry!" Ashley spun around to fix her gaze on the bathroom door.

Penny laughed, though a trill of disappointment went through her. Apparently Ashley was either too polite, or too disinterested, to ogle. Not that Penny generally wanted to be ogled, but if it was Ashley ogling, she would make an exception. "Yeah, because you've never seen boobs before, and nobody's ever seen mine. It's fine. I promise, after being in a band for ten years, I've gotten really comfortable with randos seeing my boobs. Not that you're a rando! It's just, you know, backstage and stuff! I'm going to stop talking now!" Maybe if she drained the sink, it would suck her down into it and she wouldn't have to face having made a complete—well, tit—of herself in front of the Thunder Bear Bar manager.

Ashley coughed like she was trying to cover a laugh. "Want me to try drying your bra?"

"That would be great," Penny mumbled. "I've almost got the shirt clean, I think, but it's going to take forever to dry. No, wait, don't you have work to do?"

The other woman was already putting Penny's bra under the dryer, which kicked on with enthusiasm. Ashley raised her voice to say, "They can hold down the fort without me for fifteen minutes. You can probably dry off with some of the paper towels. I really am sorry. I'm not usually clumsy."

"I don't usually try to thrust beers on unsuspecting women in bars, either, so I think we can say we're both at fault."

There was an audible pause. "Do you thrust them at suspecting women?"

"I wouldn't say thrust ," Penny said in an attempt at dignity. "And I'd prefer to say I offered them to interested women, not suspecting ones. That makes me sound like they have reason to be suspicious of me. Okay, is it too weird to hang my shirt up in front of the window or something?" She'd wrung it out, and was now eyeing the small, open bathroom window near the ceiling.

"I kind of want to see you try."

Penny sniffed. "I'll have you know we short people have our ways. They involve turning the garbage can over and climbing on it, if necessary."

"Or asking tall people to reach it for you." Ashley smiled over her shoulder at Penny, realized she still didn't have a shirt on, and turned pink along her magnificent cheekbones. "Er, sorry."

"I shall spare you the terrible vision of my naked flesh and put a shirt on," Penny promised, and did so. The Thunder Bear Brewery had a pretty good icon, a big grizzly-type bear with a slash of stylized lightning that stretched across her boobs in an appealing way. "Better?"

Ashley glanced at her again, expression sheepish. "I just don't want to be rude. I think the bra's drying. The underwires might take a while, though."

Penny shuddered. "Nothing worse than damp underwires. Okay, there are lots of things worse than damp underwires, but in the moment, you know?" She ended up flinging her shirt over the top of one of the two stalls in the bathroom, mostly because it would be up against the wall at the window and it could dangle across the stall bar. "Somebody is going to get dripped on because of that, aren't they?"

"There are two stalls," Ashley pointed out. "If they're either desperate or dumb enough to use the one with the wet clothes hanging over it, they won't mind a few drips. Do you want to feel this?"

"My hands are all wet and wrinkly. I don't know if I'll be able to tell if it's dry." Penny took some paper towels and dried her hands, then felt the bra carefully. "Underwire is definitely still wet. The lace is pretty good, though. I can wear it if I have to. Yay me for lace bras."

"I don't know how you wear them. They itch." Ashley shuddered.

"People always say that, but it's never bothered me. But I can wear wool against my skin, too."

Ashley twitched so hard it was almost a jump. "Really? Augh! I can't even think about it without itching!"

Penny, without exactly thinking it through, said, "Well, if you've got an itch, I'll scratch it," then heard what she'd said and laughed out loud. "I mean, um. That didn't come out the way I meant it."

"Hahaha no I'm sure it didn't." Ashley actually just about said 'hahaha,' it was so staccato and fake and clearly uncomfortable. "I think I just heard something out there that needs my help sorry bye!" She thrust the bra back at Penny, and hurried out of the bathroom.

"Okay," Penny said into the silence, and to her damp bra, "that went well. Oh, no, wait, it was the other thing. Not well. Dang. No, that's fine. I didn't need a tall, hot, blonde girlfriend anyway. Just a dry bra and a rock and roll tour. There will be tons of hot babes on tour," she promised the bra, and finished drying it.