Chapter Thirteen
Bethany picked him up at five-thirty.
She drove the way she always drove, too fast, too close to the curb, the yellow sports car announcing them to anyone within three blocks.
Amani had his hand braced against the dash for the last two turns and his feet throbbed every time she hit a bump, which was every bump, because Bethany drove like the road had personally offended her.
"You sure about this?" she asked, pulling into the staff lot.
"I've been sure for a week."
"You've been sure for a week and you've been able to stand for about four days of that week, so forgive me for asking."
They got out together. The sneakers were soft-soled, the kind that didn't press too hard against the gauze, and walking on them was manageable if he kept his steps short and didn't think too hard about the deeper cuts on his left heel. For some reason, shifting wasn’t helping him heal the way it should’ve.
The silver scar at his neck was understandable, but his feet should’ve been different.
He was wearing the hoodie and the loose jeans, nothing like the bartender who'd worked the place for three years in tiny shorts and bare feet, but he was here, and here was the part that mattered.
"Mom says eat something first," Bethany said as they walked in.
"I ate."
"She also says take your antibiotics."
"I took them."
"She also says—"
"Bethany."
"—that she loves you and she'll be watching the security feeds from home.
" Bethany grinned. It was the first real grin she'd given him since he'd come back, not the careful, calibrated version she'd been wearing, but the actual one, the one that showed too many teeth and made her look exactly like their mother.
"Break a leg. Not literally. Your feet can't handle it. "
She headed for the front desk. Amani stood in the elevator and breathed.
It smelled the same. Leather. wood polish, and the faint, persistent undertone of sweat mingled with cologne that no amount of cleaning ever fully erased.
The industrial ventilation hummed overhead.
Somewhere in the building, a door opened and closed.
The sounds were familiar in a way that should have been comforting and instead made his jaw tighten, because everything familiar now came with a shadow version of itself, the same sounds, but filtered through a body that had learned, in a ranch house in the desert, that familiar did not mean safe.
He walked to the bar. His bar. His feet throbbed with every step but he'd gotten good at compartmentalizing that, filing the pain away in a drawer in his head that he didn't open unless he had to.
He stepped behind the bar and put his hands on the wood.
The wood was cool and smooth under his palms. Ye stood there for a long time with his head down, just breathing, just being in the one place in the world where he had always known exactly who he was.
The bottles were where they always were.
The glasses were clean. The garnish trays were prepped.
Bethany must have done them. He could see where she'd organized things differently, the limes in the wrong compartment, the cocktail umbrellas in the jar instead of the drawer.
Small things. Things that shouldn't have mattered.
He moved the limes back where they belonged and put the umbrellas in the drawer and his hands were steadier than he expected them to be.
“Oh my god!” Reza rushed toward him, looking like he was going to give Amani a hug, but he stopped. “You’re back. Bethany said it would be soon, but not that it was tonight. Oh my god.” He bounced with that endless energy most otters had. “I’ve missed you.”
Amani grinned and nodded. “I’ve missed you, too, Reza.
” He held out his hands and forced himself to accept the hug that would make his friend and co-worker feel better.
Somehow, he didn’t react. Deep inside him, he wanted to scream and run away, but he kept that deep.
He made it through the first step to returning to normal.
He was ready. Or he was as close to ready as he was going to get, which would have to be the same thing.
The regulars noticed. They noticed. He'd spent three years behind this bar in tiny black shorts and no shirt, amber-eyed and grinning.
Instead, he was standing in the same spot in an oversized gray hoodie with the sleeves pulled over his hands and jeans that hung loose around his hips and sneakers instead of bare feet.
He looked like a different person. He looked like someone who had wandered into the wrong building.
Some of them stared and then looked away quickly, worse than staring. Some of them came to the bar and ordered their usual and said nothing about the clothes, which was better. A few, the ones who didn't know him well enough to know when to shut up, asked if he was feeling alright.
"I'm fine," he said. "What can I get you?"
He said it fourteen times in the first hour. He counted.
The drinks were easy. His hands remembered even when the rest of him felt disconnected from the room, pour, measure, shake, pour, garnish, slide.
The mechanical rhythm of bartending was the closest thing to meditation he'd ever found.
As long as he was making drinks, he didn't have to think about anything except the drink in front of him.
Vodka tonic. Whiskey neat. The coyote on stool six always ordered a dirty martini and always complained about the olive-to-vermouth ratio and Amani always made it exactly the same way because the complaining was the point, it was their bit, and that night the coyote ordered his dirty martini and opened his mouth to complain and then looked at Amani's face and closed his mouth and said, "This is perfect. Thanks."
That was somehow worse than the staring.
Amani stayed behind the bar. His feet gave him an excuse, Miriam's orders, thirty minutes on, fifteen off, but the truth was simpler than that and harder to say out loud.
The bar was a wall. Three feet of polished wood between him and the room, and on his side of it he was the bartender, the person who made the drinks, who controlled the interaction, who decided how close anyone got.
On the other side was the club. The bodies, noise, the hands, and the people moving through space without thinking about it, without calculating every angle, every exit, and every set of fingers that might reach for a doorknob or a shoulder or a strand of hair.
He stayed on his side.
At nine-thirty, someone reached across the bar and touched his arm.
It was nothing. A regular, a wolf Dom who came on Fridays, big hands, deep voice, perfectly harmless. He was reaching for a cocktail napkin and his fingers brushed Amani's forearm where the hoodie sleeve had ridden up, and the touch was accidental, light, and lasted less than a second.
Amani flinched so hard he knocked a rocks glass off the bar.
The glass hit the floor and shattered. The sound cut through the ambient noise of the club like a gunshot.
For one terrible, airless second Amani was back in the ranch house with glass exploding inward from the window.
The sound of the gun going off twice. The heavy thud of a body hitting tile.
He couldn't breathe. He couldn't breathe.
He gripped the edge of the bar so hard the wood bit into his palms. The room was tilting sideways.
He needed to be somewhere else, anywhere else, he needed—
"Amani."
Bethany's voice. Close. Steady. She was beside him, when had she come down to the bar? She wasn't touching him. She was just standing there with her hands at her sides. Her face was carefully neutral. She said his name again, quieter.
The room came back.
The club. The bar. The broken glass on the floor. The wolf Dom looking mortified, already backing away, his hands up in the universal gesture of I'm sorry, I didn't mean to.
Amani exhaled. "I'm fine."
"You don't have to be," Bethany said.
"I know. But I am." He made himself let go of the bar. His hands were shaking. He shoved them into the hoodie's pocket where no one could see them. "Just startled me. I'll clean it up."
"I'll clean it up. You sit."
He wanted to argue. The old Amani would have argued, would have said something sharp and bratty about being perfectly capable of cleaning up his own messes, kitten.
But the old Amani had never flinched at a touch from a regular and the old Amani had never shattered a glass because someone brushed his arm and the old Amani was four blocks and five days away from where they were standing now.
"Okay," he said.
He sat on the stool behind the bar, the one Lady Leo kept there for slow nights, the one he'd never used because sitting down meant not being in motion and not being in motion meant not being useful and not being useful meant not being himself.
He sat on it and watched Bethany sweep up the glass and wipe down the floor and he pressed his shaking hands flat against his thighs under the bar where nobody could see. He breathed.
Sero came in at ten.
He didn't come to the bar right away. He went to his usual stool, third from the left, the one that had an unobstructed view of the main floor and the private room hallway and the bar, the reason Sero liked it, and he sat down and he waited.
Amani saw him. He'd been dreading this and needing it in equal measure.
Sero was the one person in the building who would understand, and that understanding was exactly what made it terrifying.
It was one thing to be seen by people who didn't know.
It was another thing entirely to be seen by someone who did.