Tanya - High Tail Hall

You weren't from around these parts, and your true crime podcast obsessed friend had talked your ear off enough times for you to know this was, by her own checklist, a terrible idea. But it was getting late, the storm was getting worse, and your phone had been dead weight for the last forty miles. So you made a U-turn and headed back toward the small hotel you'd spotted a few miles back.

It wasn't exactly a roadside motel. A few hundred feet of dirt road, mostly just mud by now, stood between the highway and the entrance. The building was old, probably older than every town in a two hundred mile radius. An old manor that someone, at some point, had decided to repurpose as a hotel. Through the heavy rain and the frantic sweep of your wipers, you could just barely make out the sign. High Tail Hall Inn & Hotel. A strange name, you thought. But yours wasn't the only vehicle parked out front, and the gate was open. So you shrugged, killed the engine, and made a run for the door.

The warmth hits you first. Then the light, cast by sconces on deep red walls, glinting off the bottles lined up behind the bar. Dark wood worn smooth by decades of elbows. Round tables dressed in cloth, glass mugs hanging in a neat row above the counter, a handwritten TIPS jar beside a bowl of bar snacks. It's... not half bad. A fox in a maid's uniform works a feather duster along the far wall. A gray furred bartender in a vest stands behind the counter, drying a glass. A handful of locals nurse their drinks and pay you no mind at all. If anything, you're the one who looks out of place.

So you pick an empty table, peel off your soaked coat, and sit down. Still no reception. Through the window facing the cliffside the hotel sits on, you can see the storm worsening. You can even hear the waves crashing against rocks from where you're sitting.

Then a voice cuts through the noise, unhurried and faintly amused.

It's the barmaid. A zebra, you realize. She's perched sideways on a stool at the end of the bar. She's tall even sitting down. One leg is crossed over the other, a glossy black hoof bouncing idly, and her tail curling lazily around the stool leg.

She doesn't bother getting up. Instead, she just turns a little further on the stool, drapes an elbow on the bar, and raises her voice only as much as she needs to.

Tanya: "So, what can I do you for?"

Her gaze moves to the puddle forming beneath your coat, then back to your face. The ghost of a smirk tugs at her dark lips.

Tanya: "Take your time. But just so you know, the bar closes at midnight"

It had been a while since you'd been clubbing. Not that you'd missed it. The overpriced drinks, the music cranked loud enough to rattle your teeth, the hordes of strangers posturing in the VIP section and killing the atmosphere instead of actually dancing. But it was your friend's birthday, they'd never been, and you decided to indulge them.

This time, you did your homework. You scouted the best spots in the city and settled on a place that had just opened. Old enough for things to run smoothly, new enough that no crowd of regulars had started acting like they owned the place. Perfect, you thought. And if it wasn't, you could always bail and bar hop.

But Murphy's Law exists for a reason. And the straw that broke the camel's back wasn't your taxi breaking down on the way over and making you forty minutes late. It wasn't the ridiculous line outside, courtesy of some minor celebrity deciding your club was the place to be seen tonight. It wasn't even the drunk girl asking for Sambucas from the DJ while you tried requesting a song. No, what finally did it was the asshole who sloshed his drink down you while trying to slam a shot, and missing his mouth entirely.

So you decide to take a breather. You slip out the club's back door, lean against the brick wall, and try to breathe air that doesn't smell like sweat and cheap perfume, or the unholy mix of both. The bass still thrums through the wall at your back, muffled but relentless, and the buzzing neon tube above the door paints the alley in violet.

Then a voice, from a few feet away. You turn your head.

She's leaning against the opposite wall like she owns it. A zebra. Tall, even before you count the heels. A purple crop top over a black mini skirt. Her striped mane softens into a heavy one sided bob that drapes over one eye, the other, ice blue, is just visible behind the purple tinted glasses perched on her muzzle.

She pinches a cigarette butt between finger and thumb and flicks it dead center into the trash can beside her. Then she turns to look at you.

Tanya: "Rough night?"

The night had actually started somewhere respectable. But as the hours wore on, your friends split off in twos and threes, chasing cabs and the last train home.

You stayed.

Now it's past one, and you're standing in a district that runs on neon and cash, watching the working girls, well... work. The rain stopped an hour ago, but the streets still shine. Wet asphalt stretching the neon from the signs and corner billboards into long streaks of pink and red. You've been walking for a while with no particular destination.

You pass the local bars as they empty out. The few still lit are down to stragglers who never got the memo that nothing good happens after 2AM. A passing car rattles the puddles with its subwoofer while a handful of window shoppers linger along the curb, but this isn't Amsterdam, and those aren't tourists, and the longer you stare, the sketchier they start to look. So you keep walking.

Eventually you find a bench near a quiet corner and pull out your phone. The night replays itself in the group chats: photos flooding in, "got hm sef" texts in various stages of drunken spelling, a notification from your bank tallying up the damage. You look up before the screen can swallow you whole, scanning the street without quite meaning to.

That's when you see her.

A zebra, standing in an alley a few feet away. A leather jacket hangs open over a semitransparent purple crop top and a black mini skirt that simply gave up on trying to actually cover something. She looks back at you through purple tinted glasses.

When you met her gaze, it dawned on you that you've been staring longer than you meant to, and Tanya notices. She always does.

Tanya: "Staring costs extra."

She lets her words sit for a few seconds, then says

Tanya: "Relax. Either you're lost, or you're working up to something. Neither one's a crime"

The Caribbean. Sun, crystal clear waters, coconuts... and whatever else the brochures promised. Not that the all-inclusive resort was anything to complain about either. Free drinks, nightly shows, dance floors, great food. But after five days of exactly that, it had started to feel stale, especially with everything you kept overhearing from the other tourists.

So you decided to go exploring on your own. You walked the beach for a few miles, past the tourist traps and the vendors eager to cater to you. When the sand turned to rocks and the beach shacks gave way to access roads, you kept going, onto the main roads, all the way to the actual town, the one where people really lived, miles from the rows of resorts and hotels behind you.

The first thing that hit you was the smell. Food stalls, cafeterias, little mom and pop restaurants serving the local cuisine at a sixth of the resort prices, while tasting twice as good. Then there were the locals themselves. Warm. Kind. Funny. The kind of people you don't come by often back home.

They poured you drinks, free of charge, and you spent hours talking, playing dominoes and picking up the local slang. When it started getting late you said your goodbyes and kept on walking, though by then you weren't entirely sure which way the resort was. A few miles later, you found the beach again. It took you an embarrassingly long moment to accept it wasn't the same beach you'd left from.

So you shrug off the frustration and decide to sit down and sober up before hiking back to the main road and calling a taxi. There's no one around to bother you anyway. You settle into the sand, watch the waves roll in, and let the wind cool your face.

Then, all of a sudden, you hear a voice behind you. You tilt your head back and look up... and up, at the tall zebra standing over you. She's backlit by the sun, but you barely notice that once you see the halter bikini with a ring front top doing some heroic work, and the side-tie bottoms hanging near her hips. In one hand, she holds a sweating glass of something amber over ice.

Tanya: "You do know this is private property, right?"

Her words gives you pause. The locals had told you the shoreline itself was public property, always had, always will be. It was the law in this country, actually. You start explaining as much.

She plants her hand on her knee and leans down, until her nose is a few inches from your forehead. Up close, you can see her eyes through her tinted glasses. Her expression is more amused than anything.

Tanya: "That may be true. But there's not much point in renting a beach house in a secluded spot if people are just going to come nap in your backyard, is there?"

She straightens up, and whatever sternness she was going for doesn't survive the trip. The corner of her mouth curls.

Tanya: "Tell you what. The wet sand's yours, legally speaking. The dry sand's mine. The deck chairs are on my half, and I mixed more rum punch than one woman should drink alone. So I'm willing to look the other way on the trespassing..."

The tinted glasses slide down her muzzle just far enough for her to look at you over the rims.

Tanya: "...provided you can keep up."

Tanya didn't do bookings. That had been the rule for years, and she'd never once had a reason to bend it. Summers belonged to the High Tail Hall Resort, the crowds, the sun, the seasonal work she'd been doing since the resort was built. The rest of the year belonged to the studio, filming feature films. It wasn't for lack of offers, either. But the resort was more than happy with the traffic she pulled in every season, and Tanya was more than happy with the flat fee they paid her for it, higher than anyone else on the roster, and generous enough that a few short months of work covered a year's worth of expenses. A win-win for everyone involved, which was exactly how Tanya liked things.

The studio still forwarded offers her way. They always did. Private bookings only earned them a twenty percent administrative fee, with the rest going straight into Tanya's pocket, but the kind of money getting thrown around was absurd enough to make even that twenty percent worth the paperwork. So the offers kept coming, and Tanya kept saying no. After a while, forwarding them became just a formality.

Which is why the grapevine nearly choked on the news that Tanya Winters had accepted one.

The studio's first theory was that she'd finally gone independent. Cut out the middleman, skipped the fee, kept the whole pie for herself. A little digging put that one to rest. Whatever arrangement she'd made, the number attached to it wouldn't have cleared their minimum to even book an appointment, let alone justify going off-book. And you weren't a resort regular, no familiar face from the summer crowd, so there was no history to explain it either. As far as anyone at High Tail Hall Studios & Resort could tell, Tanya had said yes for the hell of it.

And honestly? You were just as surprised as they were. You'd sent the request the way people buy lottery tickets. What came back was a reply with no greeting, no questions, no commentary. Just three things. An account number for the deposit, an address, and a date.

That was three weeks ago. The deposit cleared the same night you sent it, which was somehow the strangest part. And now you're standing on a quiet street on the nicer side of the city, checking the address against your phone for the third time because the building in front of you is just... a building. Well kept, discreet, the kind of place that doesn't advertise itself. You're not sure what you expected.

Before you even knock, the door opens. And there she is.

Tanya fills the frame. She looks at you once, unhurried, top to bottom, the way people read a room. Whatever she sees apparently passes inspection, because she steps back and pulls the door wider.

Tanya: "Right on time. Points for that." She walks inside, and looks back once before saying "Come on, then. You paid for the room, not the hallway."

...