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The first time Sylvia ever met Dallas, she hadn’t liked him.
She hadn’t really met him yet, technically, but she’d seen him at Buck’s one day.
The thing with Dallas Winston is he’s a hood, through and through. He’s loud and crass, half the time obnoxious. He drinks before he probably should and smokes to look tough. He’s dangerous, mean. He always picking fights and he always, always wins.
See, that’s the thing about Dallas Winston and that’s the thing Sylvia hates.
But that’s also the thing that draws her to him.
She watches him through the smokescreen of Buck’s bar, walking around and laughing with people, getting them to stay. Buy another drink. Play another game.
Forget about the curfew, stay for just a few more hours.
Buck watches from the bar, cleaning glasses with a smile on his face.
Dallas Winston is good at his job. And Buck lets him stay.
She could never imagine having a place of her own at 13, but there Dallas is.
He’s tough, he’s mean, he’s resourceful, and he doesn’t have to rely on his mom’s shitty husband to provide for him. He doesn’t have to wake up at night to his stepfather standing in the kitchen doorway, staring with a gleam in his eye that’s downright scary.
No, Dallas Winston is untouchable and Sylvia fucking hates him for it.
His stupid smirk, the way he’ll make nice with someone only to talk shit the second someone brings them up.
She pretends she doesn’t do the same thing because that makes it a lot easier to hate him.
She sees him, every time she goes to Buck’s, he’s there.
He doesn’t stay for the whole night, going up to his room. Sometimes with a girl on his arm and sometimes not.
She hates him for it.
She hates him all the way up until she’s 14, and she can’t bring herself to hate anyone other than her stepfather, her mother, and Christian.
Christian being the sleazy guy she’d shacked up with after getting kicked out.
She can’t spare the energy to be mad at Dallas for being better than her when she can say the same about anyone walking down the street.
She can’t spare the energy to be mad at Dallas Winston when she doesn’t even see him. She doesn’t leave the house at all that summer except for when Christian puts her in a short dress and heels that make her teeter down the sidewalk, bringing them on a date night where the girls at the host stand will look him up and down and ask ‘Is this your daughter?’
She can’t bring herself to be mad at Dallas Winston when she’s being groomed to be a trophy wife before ever hitting fifteen.
She can’t bring herself to hate anyone except the echoes of her past and the man whose house she inhabits.
It happens so fast, her boyfriend, opening her up and taking, just like he does every night. It happens so fast and she’s staring at the ceiling, her eyes locked on the smooth surface.
She barely even notices until she’s curled up on the ground, arms around her stomach and there’s a baby on the floor. But not one that ever really grew.
Not one Christian could marry her for. Just a heap of blood on the floor that she clutches to her chest and cries.
Until she eventually remembers who she is. She is Sylvia fucking Alvarez, and she is not going to cry over what could’ve been with a man she doesn’t like.
She creeps to their room and grabs one of the outfits Christian had always liked her wearing.
He looks rough, having spent the last three days knocking on the bathroom door incessantly and threatening to break it down before going downstairs to use the bathroom there.
But he’s asleep and she can sneak out of the house, quieter than she’d ever had to be before.
She goes back to Bucks, blood still smeared on her thighs and still noticeably upset.
It’s night, the sky is pitch black and she’s in a nicer part of town.
There’s a woman who pulls over when she catches sight of Sylvia, on the side of the road.
“Sweetie, are you okay?” she asks, and Sylvia can’t say anything because a sob will rip from her throat.
She just nods and keeps walking, staying away from main roads until she finds her way to Buck’s bar.
There is no party.
She goes in anyway.
Buck fixes her with a concerned look and she feels nailed to the doorway.
“You been missing for a while.”
She glares. “Good thing you ain’t my father. Get me a drink.”
Buck scoffs. “Sure thing, little Miss Newly-Fourteen-and-Looks-it-Too.”
“I been fourteen for three months now, so shut your goddamn trap, Buck!”
Buck rolls his eyes and walks away for a couple seconds, coming back with a water.
“You look like you need it.”
Sylvia wants to put her head down on this bar and cry, but she doesn’t.
“Please Buck. What the fuck do you care if I drink some liquor? You’re making money, aintcha?”
“I ain’t letting a fourteen-year-old girl drink herself to death in my bar.”
Sylvia lets out a short, high laugh that she knows usually made people think she’s mean.
“A fourteen-year-old girl who ain’t your problem, you mean.”
Buck sighs. “You look rough, Sylv. You don’t just look rough. You look like you’ve gone through the worst hell a person can and still come out alive.”
It strikes her then that he knows. He doesn’t know all the gory details, obviously, but it’s pretty easy to piece together when she comes in, looking like hell and smelling like Bowmore and Marlboros, blood down her thighs and tear tracks staining her face.
And he still isn’t giving her something to drink.
She tears up. Goddamn hormones.
“Please, Buck. Please just cut me a break.” she wants to sob, so she does. No one’s around to judge her except Buck and an older hood in the corner of the bar, smoking a cigarette and pointedly avoiding eye contact. “Please give me a drink.”
He doesn’t.
“I ain’t your fucking responsibility!” she says, slamming her hands down on the sticky plastic bar top. It’s lifting at the edges and she wants to rip it off and throw it at him.
He fixes her with the cool glare only a life spent on the bad side of Tulsa could give a person. “You been my responsibility since you tottled in here after your mom one day when you were still in diapers. You wanna know what your mom was in here to do, Sylvia? She was here to get high and find a good fuck, and she was willing to bring you with her. I kept you behind this bar. I was lookin’ out for you then and I sure as hell ain’t gonna stop now.”
She sits back, the weird foam of the seat letting out a small poof of air as she sits down.
Buck pushes the water towards her. “So, drink your goddamn water and cope without drowning in liquor.”
She glares at him but picks up the glass, gripping it tightly as she downs the water.
“Fuck you.” she says, slamming the glass back down on the table.
He repays her by giving her a Coke and walking away to his back room.
She could easily hop over the counter and pour some cheap tequila into the drink, but she doesn’t. Because she wants more than anything to drink away her sorrows. But she also knows the taste of cheap but still overpriced alcohol isn’t going to do anything but bring back the memory of the stirring in her stomach.
She drinks the Coke.
It’s getting light out when Dallas Winston comes down and sits next to her. That’s the night she really meets him.
Through more than just the whirling smoke from cigarettes that usually lay over Buck’s in a thick, disgusting fog.
He’s just as dangerous as he’d ever been and she isn’t sure he can tell what happened as easily. After all, he’s also just fourteen.
But there really is only a couple reasons a teenage girl would be sitting at a bar, tears still running down her face and sticky blood drying in between her thighs.
Neither are good.
He smiles at her and he looks dangerous. She doesn’t want to get caught up in something dangerous, so she turns her nose up at him.
Not in a prissy, Socy way. In a way that might come across as flirting, if someone were dumb.
She wasn’t going to get caught up again so soon after what had just happened.
She especially wasn’t going to fall for Dallas Winston, who has ‘BAD NEWS’ written on him in big neon letters.
She leaves Buck’s bar that morning and heads to one of her girl friend’s houses, his dangerous smile lingering in her mind like a curse.
It had been three weeks.
School had started back up, and Sylvia was preoccupied from any and all thoughts of Dallas Winston. Between freshman year (because she’s young enough to be going into ninth grade) and figuring out where she’s going to stay each night (she can’t stay on one friend’s couch forever. She tries to limit herself to three days; when she can’t take the pity glances and phantom stares from the kitchen doorway anymore) she doesn’t have anything to spare on thoughts of Dallas Winston.
Until Priscilla drags her out one day. Priscilla is one of her oldest, and one of her richest, friends.
They had an actual guest bedroom that Sylvia had been staying in for the past two days. Priscilla was the type who’d never had many friends and didn’t know how to act when she got them.
That’s why she drags Sylvia out of the house in the dead of night, knowing her parents are home and more importantly, not asleep.
“What’s the best place you know to party?” Priscilla asks through giggles as they make their way down the street on a Tuesday night. She’s drunk on the wine she’d stolen from her pantry. She’d drank around half the bottle while getting ready.
Sylvia’s eyes are outlined with heavy makeup and her short skirt and sturdy boots are making her feel impenetrable. Her bulletproof exterior and her rough-and-tumble persona are pulled tight around her.
“I think I know a place.”
Sylvia’s eyes spark with danger, and she grabs Priscilla’s hand pulling them through the twisting streets of Tulsa and winding up in front of that old shack Buck called a bar.
She grips Priscilla’s hand tight until they're both through the doorway and breaking off.
There’s almost no one she knows there, save a couple girls who pull her aside and making conversation like they hadn’t tried to trip her down the stairs just a week ago, asking if she had another baby she needed to get taken care of. (Turns out that old hood at the bar wasn’t as tight-lipped as she would have thought the way he couldn’t even take a good look at her.)
“What’re you doing with Prissy?” One of them asks, and the others laugh like the little minions they are. As if they weren’t also wearing dresses that feel to their knee and decent makeup.
She feels her fist curl up as she reaches up and tips the glass of cheap whiskey one of the girls is holding over, spilling it all down the front of her dress. The stuff smells like rubbing alcohol, it ain’t the kind you can wash out easily and it ain’t the kind that can be explained away.
“Explain that to your ma and your daddy when you get home, will ya?” She asks, a sweet smirk on her face as she walks away, ignoring the gasp that is shortly followed by the sound of over-dramatic crying.
She rolls her eyes and leans against the wall.
Just like every other time she’d been there during a party, Dallas is spinning his way through the floor that look graceful and tough all in one. And he’s headed right to her.
He leans right up against that wall and looks at her with a satisfied gleam in his eyes.
“That was pretty tuff, back there.”
She snorts. “Whatever, Dallas. Go back to whatever hole you just crawled out from.”
He smiles and she’s pretty sure that grin could cut diamonds.
“C’mon, girl, I gave you a compliment.”
She scoffs. “Sure didn’t seem like one.”
“Really?” He asks, and his eyes spark in the way that shows he’s been captivated by her. “I thought I did pretty good.”
And it’s true. She’d seen what he usually considered compliments, and that was one of the better ones.
“If you’re into that, I guess.” And she’s not even sure what she’s talking about. She’s just sure that somewhere along the way they started moving toward the bar and she’d swiped a drink off a table that she’s using to hide her smile behind.
They’re near a pool table and he gets real close all of a sudden, alcohol on his breath. “Yeah? You ain’t into that?”
She shakes her head and she’s sure neither of them knows what they’re talking about, they’re just talking.
She’s about to shake her head when there’s the general sound of a scuffle outside and Buck barks out a “Dallas!”
All of a sudden, he’s looking over and sighing, leaning close and whispering he’ll be back before strolling casually out the door and there’s more fighting outside. He does eventually come back, with a bloodied nose and a hit to the face she’s sure will have turn into a bad shiner by the time morning rolls around.
He’s about to get to her but Priscilla taps her shoulder.
She looks scared out of her mind and her white shirt is soaked.
Sylvia can feel the blood drain from her face because that’s a red stain, and it ain’t the kind that can get out easy. Thankfully, it’s cherry red so she doesn’t have to worry that her friend has been stabbed.
“There was a fight.” Priscilla says helplessly.
Sylvia sighs and pulls Priscilla into a one-armed hug. “I know, babe. Let’s get outta here, huh?”
Priscilla nods and they start walking to the door. Dallas raises his eyebrows and she shakes her head.
He stops them. “Let me at least give ya my number?”
His accent isn’t as strong as when he first moved to Tulsa, but she can still discern the weird mix of northeastern accents under his cowboy exterior.
“I know it already.” She says, and blows him off, more focused on getting Priscilla home.
“I’ll give it to ya anyhow.” he says, and he slips a napkin into her purse.
She smiles and takes Priscilla, tucking her further into Sylvia’s side and starting her way back to the house.
It’s made a hundred times harder by the revelation that Priscilla is a sad drunk who really seems to love crying into Sylvia’s shirt and a million times harder by the revelation that the lights are on when they get back.
It's a mess of screaming and defense and crying, but eventually, Sylvia finds herself, once again, kicked out. The piece of paper holding the number to Buck’s place is burning a hole in her purse. She goes to a payphone and dials it off the paper, even though she already knows it by heart.
It makes her feel less helpless.
It's Buck who answers the phone but Dallas she eventually gets to. Dallas who eventually greets her when she gets back to the bar with his dangerous smile. Dallas whose room she goes up to. Dallas who doesn’t even try and get in her pants.
Because it’s always Dallas and his stupid fucking danger. He draws her in with it, even from across a room.
Dallas is dangerous. And Sylvia likes danger, even though she’s sure nothing real will ever come of it.
It’s fun to pretend.