Chapter 11 All Hands On Deck #2
"Check the back for yellow Chartreuse and Aperol," I say.
"If we have both, we can do the Naked and Famous.
The Penicillin is straightforward if the ginger syrup is fresh—don't use the bottle from the rail, there should be a proper syrup somewhere.
The Paper Plane: equal parts bourbon, Aperol, Amaro Nonino, lemon juice.
If we don't have Nonino, Montenegro works. Go."
Priya looks at me for one second with the specific expression of someone recalibrating expectations upward. Then she goes.
Jamie says, "How do you just know all of that?"
"Three years of bar work and the kind of memory that retains cocktail recipes and absolutely nothing useful.
" I pull on the bar apron from the hook by the counter.
"Also Elvin sent me a bar inventory list last week to ask my opinion on stock, which I thought was unnecessary and now understand was preparation for this exact moment. "
I am going to have to say something genuinely complimentary to Elvin at some point and I'm going to resent it.
Jamie laughs—a startled, genuine sound—and I push through the service gap to the bar.
The back section of Clancy's comes into view from the bar side and the private party is—exactly what Danny described, which is to say: a collection of men who are accustomed to better and are not quiet about the gap between their expectations and their current situation.
Expensive clothing worn with the carelessness of people who don't think about what things cost. The easy, loud camaraderie of a group who've been together long enough that their dynamic has its own language.
Several conversations at full volume. A few masks still hanging from jacket pockets or abandoned on the table, which means—
Masquerade attendees.
They were at the Lucky Clover Society event last night.
Which is—interesting. And irrelevant. I'm here to make them drinks, not to investigate their social calendar.
I set up my station with the efficiency of someone who has done this in unfamiliar bars before: survey what's available, arrange by frequency of use, locate the ice situation, check the citrus prep.
The citrus is not great—pre-cut and drying at the edges, which is the kind of thing that takes thirty seconds to fix and which I fix.
The first order comes in before I've finished.
"Penicillin. Three of them."
The man who says it is at the bar end, leaning with the ease of someone who occupies space without negotiating for it.
He's got the physical quality of certain Alphas at rest—substantial, settled, the kind of presence that doesn't announce itself because it doesn't need to.
His scent, even across the bar, is distinctive: bourbon and orange peel, a sugared smoke quality underneath, warm and easy and entirely at odds with the demanding energy of the request.
Blond. Blue eyes. Freckles across a nose that suggests he spends real time outdoors rather than decoratively. He's looking at me with the frank, appraising attention of someone who is deciding whether I'm going to solve his problem or become another one.
"Blended or single malt?" I ask.
His eyebrows go up. "Single. Islay if you have it."
"Check." I turn to the back bar, locate the Laphroaig that Priya confirmed is there, and start pulling ingredients.
Scotch, fresh lemon, honey syrup—I find it in the mini fridge, someone at Clancy's knowing what they're doing after all—and the candied ginger garnish that I'll manage without if it's not present but that it turns out is in the garnish tray, uncut, which I fix in under a minute.
The process settles me the way it always does.
Not because bar work is easy—it isn't, a proper Penicillin requires balance between the peat of the scotch, the acid of the lemon, and the sweetness of the honey, and getting that ratio wrong produces something that's technically the right drink and experientially wrong—but because it's known.
The hands know what to do. The brain follows the sequence.
The world narrows to the glass and the ingredients and the specific outcome I'm building toward, and everything else—the noise, the pheromones, the rain outside, the grey-green eyes I've been not-thinking-about all day—recedes to background.
I set three Penicillins on the bar mat, the scotch floating correctly on top, the candied ginger across the rim, the pale gold of the drink catching the bar lighting in a way that delivers before it's even tasted.
The blond Alpha looks at them.
Then at me.
"Hm."
"That's not a complaint," I observe.
The corner of his mouth moves. "No. It's the opposite." He picks one up, noses it—actually noses it, which is either genuine appreciation or performance, and from the quality of the attention he gives it I'm reading as genuine—and then drinks. A real sip, long enough to taste it properly.
"Where did Danny find you?"
"Hannigan's. Three years ago."
"Small town," he says, almost to himself, the way people say things they're revising their assumptions about. He picks up the other two glasses and starts to carry them back toward the private section. Stops. Turns back. "What's your name?"
"Mila."
He nods. "Finn."
He takes the drinks.
The party shifts after that—not dramatically, but in the way of a room adjusting to a new variable.
The complaints from the back section slow and then stop.
Orders start coming in with actual specificity rather than the vague entitlement of men who'd decided the bar wasn't worth engaging with seriously.
Priya catches my eye from across the floor and raises her eyebrows: this is better, the look says, and I give her the small nod that confirms yes, we can work with this.
For the next hour I work.
The Naked and Famous, when Priya confirms the Chartreuse and Aperol are both present: equal pours, fresh lime, mezcal that brings the smoke while the Chartreuse provides the herbal complexity and the Aperol grounds it into something drinkable rather than medicinal.
Four of those. A round of proper Irish Coffee for a corner table that doesn't need any more alcohol but deserves at least to have it in a good vessel—dark roast, brown sugar, a float of lightly whipped cream that I do with a fork and thirty seconds rather than the canned variety.
The Paper Plane variation, for the man who'd described it as what the good bars do: Blanton's bourbon, Aperol, Amaro Montenegro instead of Nonino because that's what they have, and the lemon juice freshly squeezed while he watched, because freshly squeezed in front of a difficult customer is half the battle. Equal parts, shaken hard, up.
He took the first sip. Said nothing. Took a second. Set it down and looked at it.
"Better than the city bar," he said.
"Different from the city bar," I said. "Montenegro has a different base than Nonino. Both are correct."
He considered this. "You know your amaro."
"I know my drinks."
He took the glass back to his table.
Priya appears at my elbow during a brief natural lull, the kind bars generate between rounds when everyone is mid-drink and the orders pause for a collective minute. "You're terrifying," she says, not unkindly.
"I'm a bartender."
"You're a bartender who told a table of drunk rich Alphas that both versions of a cocktail are correct without breaking eye contact. That's a different category."
"They're not getting fired from their jobs if they make an Omega feel small. I'm not getting intimidated because they ordered the right thing."
She stares at me for a moment. "Danny literally talks about you like you're a saint."
"Danny has never called me a saint in his life."
"He called you the best hire he'd made in a decade. Last week. To a table of customers who weren't even talking about you."
I'm going to have to buy Danny a very good bottle of something at some point and I'm going to have to find a way to not make it weird.
"I'm not glamorous," I tell her. "I'm just consistent. There's a difference."
"Sure."
"Now let's keep moving or we're here until seven and I have opinions about seven AM."
Jamie reappears from the floor section with an order on his notepad.
Priya goes to handle the end of the bar.
The game on the screen reaches something that the room reacts to with collective volume, and I'm already moving—glass in hand, ice cracked, the sequence running smooth and automatic while the noise of the evening washes through and around me.
My scent is present and working: the honey and vanilla a constant underneath the bar's ambient overlay of spirits and crowd, the lime zest threading in when someone orders something that requires the full concentration of a complicated build.
My own signature, doing what it does. Entirely mine, entirely unbothered by the room's collective Alpha energy, which the perfume's effect has apparently left something of itself in even now.
Finn comes back to the bar once more, toward the end of the second hour. Different drink this time—he asks for the recipe on the Clover Sling, specifically, which tells me someone mentioned it, which tells me the word has gotten around the masquerade crowd faster than I'd tracked.
Cole's recipe. In my clutch. In an apartment drawer now.
I can make this from memory.
I build it: Irish whiskey base, the green Chartreuse measured carefully because it overpowers when it dominates, the fresh lime juice bright and cutting, the sparkling water float over the back of a spoon to keep the layers.
It comes out the gold-green of the original, the same quality of light in the glass.
Finn takes it, looks at it.
"You were at the event last night," he says. Not a question.
I keep my expression entirely level. "The Clover Sling is Cole's recipe. He shared it."
Finn looks at the drink. Then at me. The bourbon-and-citrus scent of him carries a note of something sharper now—not aggression, more like a recalibration, the scent version of a man updating a theory.
He doesn't push it. He takes the glass and goes.
He knows.
Or he suspects. Which amounts to the same thing with a man who reads rooms the way that one clearly does.
Fine. He can suspect. He doesn't have enough information to do anything with it, and I'm behind a bar in a ponytail in a green shirt and I look nothing like last night's version of this situation, so.
I turn to the next order.
The rain is still coming down outside. The game on the screen is reaching its final period.
The bar is loud and warm and smells like an entire holiday's worth of spirits and celebration, and I am in it and of it in the way I've always been in bars—at home in a way I'm at home nowhere else, the work absorbing the things I can't think about directly and giving me the clean, forward momentum of purpose.
Let's try to survive this shift.