18. Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Eighteen
Abs helped Liam dress to look his best. He wore a tight green tank under a black mesh shirt, tight pants he knew would split right up the back the moment he tried the move on the bar he’d been practicing all day long.
“God, why can’t I just steal cars?”
“You can steal cars, but you can’t only steal cars.”
He grumbled, “That’s what I meant.”
“I know, but we’ve all been there, Cosmo. When you’re doing it with the crowd all watching and cheering you on, it’s different. They’re gonna just love you.”
Cosmo. The name he was becoming used to. The name meant he was part of something bigger than himself. He never thought the day would come that he wanted that so badly. To want to be part of a family.
Watching Abs smiling however, it reminded him of his little brother. The shining blond hair and big eyes of that kid that followed him everywhere.
The kid that wanted to go with Liam and their dad that fateful day. But Liam had wanted to go alone with their dad. He’d wanted to be away from his other siblings, just for a little while, to maybe feel a little special. Being special and unique was a hard road in a family with so many kids.
The regret had chased him all his life after. If he’d just let his baby brother come along…
“You okay? Where’d you go?”
Liam smiled sadly. “Somewhere I’ve been maybe too often. Time to live in the present.”
“Are you ready?”
“Yeah. Yeah, let’s go.”
The crowd was bigger that night than the previous weekend, and Liam felt his stomach knot. Those faces, all eagerly waiting for the hot bartenders to do their tricks and perform for them, and the others were waving, kissing cheeks in the crowd, and Hippy even let a couple of guys slap his ass before heading behind the bar.
Goldie immediately climbed onto the bar with a microphone Murphy handed him. “Dear people of Murphy’s Pub, welcome to the weekend!”
A cheer that could break all the windows in the place came out and Liam flinched a little. Abs was clapping for his best friend, and Haze was already taking drink orders. Liam figured he could jump in and do the same, so he started at the end of the bar and got orders for ten bottles of beer, two pitchers, and seven shots of Crown Royal.
While he got the order ready, Goldie went on, “Give generously to your bartenders, drink up, have fun, and be safe!”
Liam knew it was coming, but he still laughed as all but he and Haze got on top of the bar with Goldie and they danced in sync.
Four at a time on the stage was usually the norm. Haze was the best actual bartender, able to pump out drinks so quickly, it seemed supernatural. Liam kept up much better than the first time, and as soon as he pushed the drinks to the patrons, he was getting bombarded with more.
After the song, the others got off the bar to help catch up, all while smiling, flirting, and talking to those hanging over the bar to order drinks.
Liam got into a rhythm, getting shots poured, pitches of beer overflowing, getting the Irish dark beer poured into the large mugs, pushing them to the patrons with a smile.
Tips were getting left for him to stuff into his pockets, but the time that he’d have to do his own time on top of the bar was quickly approaching.
“Hundred-dollar shot for Cosmo,” Hippy yelled. “Get up there and pour that hundred dollar shot, Cos!”
It was time. It was his turn to do the dance and pour the double shot, and he felt himself freeze. Goldie wouldn’t allow that, and he got behind Liam and lifted him like he was half a sack of flour. “Get to it, buddy.”
After taking one glance back at them, they all nodded, encouraged him and with that, he swallowed and nodded back at them. He climbed up onto the bar from where Goldie held him and he moved onto the balls of his feet, trying to think over the din of the crowd, all cheering wildly and chanting his name.
“Cosmo, Cosmo, Cosmo, Cosmo!”
He cringed inwardly, but once he looked up, across the room, there stood Taran, and suddenly the rest of the crowd was gone, and it was only him, the guy that had come into his life like a sledgehammer.
Surging with the desire to not fuck up in front of Taran, he fell smoothly to his knees as the man who’d offered the hundred dollars shot backed up to the bar, bent backward so the top of his head was laying against Cosmo’s knees.
He was handed the bottles, and he looked to find Taran in the crowd, but there were too many between them for him to see the man. Still, just knowing he was there was enough.
“Cosmo, Cosmo, Cosmo, Cosmo!”
Flipping both bottles at once, sending up a prayer that neither landed on the man’s face, he caught them both, spouts down, and he poured the guy a double shot of whiskey from the two bottles.
The crowd roared with delight and the man who’d taken the shot stood, both fists raised in the air, and Cosmo got to his feet, standing tall on the bar as more cheering came, pleading for him to dance.
He’d once gone to a concert with a couple of the guys that he used to boost cars with, and it wasn’t anyone he’d ever listened to before, and frankly, the music wasn’t his cup of tea. Still, the crowd alone, their enjoyment, their cheers had been contagious, and he enjoyed it despite his reservations.
The same thing happened that night. The cheers of the crowd and of his fellow bartenders made him feel like celebrating with them all. The music was loud, techno and pumping, and he couldn’t help it but to move with the beat.
Abs joined him on the bar and together they danced for the crowd, Abs lifting his shirt to show his stomach, so Cosmo did too, and then they shook their asses for the crowd, whipping them up into a fury.
After getting back to the floor behind the bar, the guys all shook his hand and clapped him on the back, but what was better, Taran had fought through the crowd to stand on the other side of the bar from him.
Emboldened, he leaned over and gave him a quick kiss, asking what he wanted to drink.
“You were amazing,” he yelled.
“I…I had fun!”
“Good! That looks good on you. Get me a lager and a shot of Hennesy.”
“You got it, on the house.”
Haze moved over to him as he poured the beer. “Listen, keep the kissing to a minimum. We get better tips if they think we’re single, which…well, most of us always are, anyway.”
“I…I am, kind of, I think.”
Haze’s dark eyes danced with mischief. “Oh, sure, sure. The way you looked at that guy, yeah, you’re single and I am about to grow a third arm out of my asshole.”
When he handed the drink over to Taran, he knew Haze was right. He was no longer single. He felt more for the fucking federal agent than he’d ever thought he could. “See you after?” Taran asked.
“Yeah. For sure.”
Twice more that night he got on the bar to do hundred-dollar shots, and several times he and Goldie did the “spike”, where he threw the bottle into the air for Goldie to catch and pour a drink. Still, after doing those and being quite proud of himself for them, he felt inadequate to the others, who could juggle the bottles, do tricks on their own and with one another.
Like Abs told him, and the others had, they all started somewhere.
He had almost eight hundred dollars in his pocket that night, with more on the receipts from the card machine. Why they needed to rob people he would never understand, but he was in for the penny and the pound at that point.
He met Taran at dawn, and they had a great couple of hours in bed before Liam dragged himself home and slept with Daiq. He woke just after three that afternoon, showered and ate in their little kitchen while Abs came in, whistling at him. “Fun last night?”
“It was. I think I might get the hang of this, eventually.”
“You were great.” Abs took a yogurt from the fridge and asked, “Are you ready for the other thing this week?”
“Murphy said we’d take the two cars I boosted already, so we’re set on my end. What about everyone else?”
Abs set by him while he ate his yogurt and Liam ate his eggs. “The security systems are tricky on this one. Mims found the receipt for the added security around the Parrish painting. It’s got a trip, so if it’s moved, the alarm sounds and the doors triple lock.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah,” he said with a shrug. “It’s the newest thing, and of course, if you can afford a painting that costs that much, you can afford good doors that can’t be jimmied or knocked down. No bullying this one.”
Suddenly, he was nervous as hell. “You guys…you can do this, right?”
“Oh, sure! See, all we need is to bypass the alarm for a few seconds. We get the one painting down and put the one Haze did up in its place. If we can’t do that, we jam the alarm and then let it go off once we leave. They’ll be more suspicious of the painting, but Haze is amazing. Even the experts have a hard time seeing the difference. If they take it to an appraiser, they’ll know for sure, mostly from the aging process, but we’ll be long gone, and the painting will already be somewhere far from Denver.”
“You make it sound so easy. It cannot be that easy.”
Abs laughed and told him, “You’ve never seen us in action. You will. You’re gonna be surprised and delighted, dear Cosmo.”
“I’ll trust you.”
With a side-eye to Liam, Abs whispered, “Well, that’s a start.”
It was a start, and he felt like…like he may trust them more than he’d ever wanted to.
The second night, he felt like an old hat at the tricks. Getting better at throwing the bottle over his head, having Goldie catch it. They did it numerous times, and he didn’t get even one concussion.
The shirt he wore that night was cropped in the middle and showed his stomach perfectly. There were men hanging over the bar just to stare at his middle, and it made him a little nervous, but they soon left him a fifty-dollar tip, and their leering wasn’t so annoying.
After he did two hundred-dollar shots, he and all five of the others did their dancing on top of the bar, and the tips and orders poured in after. The first night that his nerves weren’t jangled, and he actually started having fun.
Taran came in again, ordering a Cosmo with a wink. “My new favorite drink,” he confessed.
“As it should be!”
“When do I get to meet this cat you’ve talked so much about?”
“How about this week?”
“I’ll hold you to that.”
Haze was near him and said in his ear, “You’re falling hard for that guy. You know that, right?”
Brushing it off, Liam said, “No, I’m not!”
“Sure. You look just like Mims does with his love-of-a-lifetime boyfriends. You know the new ones every week? But for you…it’s not a week-long thing.”
“I’ve never had a long-term thing, like ever. I wouldn’t know what one looked like.”
Haze pulled him over and pointed to the gigantic mirror behind the bar. “That’s what it looks like.”
Liam stared into that mirror, shocked at the smile on his face that he sincerely didn’t know was there. It was bright and wide, and it scared the shit out of him.
Goldie saw him and squeezed a shoulder. “Pretty man, pretty man. It’s good to see you happy. I hope we’re a little part of that, or is it just the other pretty man at the end of the bar?”
Liam’s knee-jerk reaction was to deny the entire thing, but that wasn’t true in the least. It was…all of them. “Never mind,” he said, laughing, and got back to work.
As fun as it was, it was exhausting. He’d done a lot of jobs that were labor intensive, but nothing was like a night in that pub. Constant movement, constant noise, shouting, music, laughter—it was a lot. He sat with the others that night, counting his tips and ready to crash for a week.
“This just might get me those good natural brushes I need,” Haze said before yawning.
Liam saw the pile of cash in front of him. “What paint brushes cost that much?”
“Oh, dear, here we go,” Mims said, laughing.
“Artists, Cosmo, are the fountains! We are the base, the mechanics, the stony continence.”
While the others rolled their eyes, Haze got up, seemingly recharged, and walked around the table, grabbing shoulders, patting cheeks as he explained what Liam guessed was the tenth time at least he’d said it.
“But what is a fountain without the water? It’s a stony piece, a statue, and there are a million statues that people pass by daily, and barely glance at. The fountain, however, is different. People make wishes at fountains; they listen to the delicate pouring of the water over stone and it sooths a chaotic world!
“So, Cosmo, dear, the water, that is as important as the fountain. The water, my friend, is as important if not more so! Our tools are that water, whether it be a violin, a paintbrush, a computer where a writer taps out words to intrigue the imagination. We are simply the stone, but the water is where our beauty lies!”
Liam laughed a little and asked, “So…your paintbrushes make better…water?”
Goldie snickered, but Abs groaned. “Have you not learned to not ask the man questions like that?”
“Guess not.”
“Would you want,” Haze began again, doing more circles around the table, “murky, algae ridden water to careen oh so delicately down your stony body, Cosmo? Or the purest, brightest water that would make you shine?”
“The…second one, I guess.”
“Exactly!”
Triumphant that he’d made his point, he sat back in his chair, grinning.
“This bunch is so weird,” Goldie said. “Get out now, Cosmo. We rub off on folks.”
“I’m finding out I’m as weird as or weirder.”