Chapter Nineteen
The Saturday night crowd was bigger than usual and they were short two servers.
Maya had called in sick and Felix had quit three days earlier over a scheduling conflict that was really about a breakup with one of the other staff members, and the timing was terrible because Saturday was always their heaviest night and Lady Leo was in a meeting with a vendor and Bethany was handling the front desk solo.
The bar was backed up four drinks deep. Amani could see from behind the counter that Reza was slammed at the well.
The two remaining servers were drowning.
He could stay behind the bar. He had every reason to.
His feet were healed enough for a full shift but the floor was different.
The floor meant walking, moving through the crowd, navigating the press of bodies and the noise and the unpredictable geography of a room full of people who might reach for you without warning.
The bar was his wall. Behind it, he controlled the distance.
On the floor, the distance controlled him.
He watched a server drop a ticket. Watched the other one nearly collide with a Dom carrying a glass of red wine near the leather furniture.
Watched the drink orders pile up and the wait times stretch and the regulars start looking toward the bar with the patient-but-fading expressions of people who came here because the service was exceptional and the service was not being exceptional tonight.
Amani loaded a tray.
He told himself it was fine. He'd done this a thousand times.
Delivering drinks was muscle memory, and the floor was just the other side of the bar, and the people on it were the same people he served every night.
The hoodie was armor enough. His hands were steady.
They weren't, but the telling was sometimes enough to make it almost true.
He came around the end of the bar. The open end.
The gap where the wall stopped and the room began.
He stepped through it and the room was suddenly larger than it had been from behind the counter, wider, louder, more dimensional.
People on all sides. Bodies moving in patterns he couldn't predict.
The air was thicker out there, heavy with cologne, warmth, and the electric undercurrent of a space where people came to be touched.
He delivered the first round. Table four, near the stage. Two whiskey sours and a gin and tonic. His hands held. The regulars smiled at him. One of them said welcome back. He said thanks and moved on. His heartbeat was elevated but manageable. He was fine. He could do this.
Second round. The booth along the east wall.
A group of six, mixed couples, celebrating something.
He set down their drinks, and made small talk.
The noise of the group pressed against him from all sides, but he kept his feet planted, and his voice even.
He managed it. If he kept moving, the room couldn't close around him.
If he kept moving, nothing could settle.
Third round. The low tables near the private room hallway.
Four drinks on the tray, navigating through a cluster of people standing between the seating area and the bar.
Someone stepped backward into his path. He turned sideways to avoid the collision.
The turn put his back to a section of the room he couldn't see.
His shoulders locked. His breathing went shallow. He kept moving, he kept moving.
He set the drinks down. Smiled. Took the empties. Turned to go back to the bar.
An arm wrapped around his waist.
It came from the left. Warm, heavy, familiar in the way that the regulars were familiar, someone who had been coming to KK for years, someone who knew him.
The arm pulled him into a half-embrace the way people in this community pulled each other into half-embraces, because touch was the language here and casual affection was as common as handshakes in the outside world.
"Hey! There he is! Missed you while you were on vacation.
" The voice was in his ear. Close. Happy.
Kendrick, one of the Thursday regulars, a bear, older, jovial, a Dom who treated the entire bar staff like his nephews and nieces.
He'd known Amani since Amani was seventeen.
He was harmless. He was kind. His arm was around Amani's waist. His face was close.
His voice was warm. He squeezed and said, "How's my favorite little cub? "
The tray hit the floor.
It happened the way car accidents happen, a sequence of events that takes two seconds and lasts forever.
The arm on his waist. The breath in his ear.
Little cub. The sound of the words in Kendrick's mouth were not the same as the sound of the words in Grainger's mouth.
It didn't matter because Amani's body didn't process language in that moment.
It processed sensation. The sensation was: arm, waist, voice, close, cub, trapped.
He was on the couch. The couch in the ranch house with Grainger's arm around him.
Grainger's breath on his neck. Grainger's hand on his stomach.
The clock was ticking. The sage candle burned.
Outside the window the desert was dark and endless.
He couldn't move. His body had remembered compliance the way bodies remember everything.
Compliance meant still. Compliance meant quiet.
Compliance meant let the arm stay because fighting the arm was how you ended up in the cage.
Glass shattered on the floor. The sound reached him from very far away.
Filtered through water. Someone was saying his name, Amani, Amani.
The arm was gone. Kendrick had let go. He was stepping back with his hands up and his face a mask of confusion and concern.
Amani stood in the middle of the floor of Kinky Kritters with broken glass around his feet.
His arms locked at his sides. His eyes wide open, seeing nothing in this room.
People were looking. The noise of the club had dipped, not to silence but to the lower register that meant something had happened and people were trying to figure out what. A room full of eyes. Watching him. Cataloging him. Deciding what he was, and what he was for.
He couldn't breathe. He was going to be sick or shift or fall down.
His lion was pressing against his skin, the shift response triggered by threat.
If he shifted in the middle of the club floor he would hurt someone.
He would hurt Kendrick, who hadn't done anything wrong, who had called him the same name he'd been calling him for three years because Kendrick didn't know.
Nobody knew. They thought he'd been on vacation.
Vacation. He'd been on vacation. In a cage in the desert. On vacation.
He walked. His feet moved and the glass crunched under his sneakers and he was through the service corridor and past the supply closet and into the small room at the end of the hall that was used for storage and nothing else and he pulled the door shut and the latch clicked and he was alone.
He sat on the floor. Back against the wall. Knees up. Arms around his knees. Face down. He shook. The shaking was violent, soundless and it went on for a long time.
The door opened ten minutes later.
Amani didn't look up. If it was Bethany, she would want to help. If it was Lady Leo, she would want to fix it. If it was Nero, he didn't know what Nero would do and that was its own kind of fear.
Someone sat down on the floor beside him. Not close. Not touching. Just there. Against the same wall. About a foot of space between them.
Amani looked up. It was Sero.
The bat was sitting with his legs stretched out in front of him, his back against the wall, his hands resting loosely on his thighs.
He wasn't looking at Amani. He was looking at the far wall of the storage room, the stacked boxes of cocktail napkins, the spare glasses, the broken karaoke machine that Lady Leo kept saying she'd get repaired and never did.
His face was calm. Not performatively calm.
Not the careful neutrality of someone trying not to make it worse.
The calm of someone who knew this room. Who had sat on floors before.
He didn't say ‘are you okay’. He didn't say ‘what happened’. He didn't say ‘do you want to talk about it’.
What he said was: "The first time I went back to Trevor's apartment after we got back together, he touched the back of my neck and I threw up."
Amani's breathing hitched.
"It wasn't his fault," Sero continued. "He used to touch the back of my neck all the time.
It was our thing. And then after I found out what he'd been doing with the machine, after the marks, the truth, and all of it.
We got back together, and I thought I was fine.
When he touched the back of my neck and my body just—" He made a small gesture with one hand. "Decided. Without asking me."
Amani said nothing. His face was still pressed against his knees but his breathing was slowing and the violent shaking had subsided to a finer tremor.
"Trevor cried," Sero said. "He sat on the bathroom floor while I was sick and he cried because he understood that he'd done something to my body that I couldn't undo by deciding to forgive him. The forgiveness was real. The throwing up was also real. Both things at the same time."
Amani's fingers tightened on his own arms.
"I sat on a lot of floors that first month," Sero said.
"This floor, actually. Right about where you are.
Bethany found me the first time and she wanted to talk about it and I love Bethany but she didn't—she hadn't—" He paused.
"She hadn't been on the floor. So, she didn't know what the floor needed. "