Chapter 16
?
— Austen —
“Astrip club,” I said.
“A venue,” Indira corrected.
“A strip club.”
“A venue that happens to be a strip club.” She was sitting at the end of my bar at three in the afternoon with a sparkling water. “Hear the whole pitch before you say no.”
“I can listen and say no. I’m a professional. I multitask. And the more times you say ‘venue,’ the more it sounds like ‘strip club.’”
It had been sixteen days since I’d stood on the sidewalk outside this bar and ended things with the man I was now fairly sure this entire conversation was going to be about.
Sixteen days since he’d heard me out, agreed to none of it, and told me — calm as you like — that I was his last and we weren’t done.
Then he’d done the thing I least expected: exactly what he’d said he would.
Given me room. Not a call, not a text, not a slow lap of the block on that bike.
Sixteen days of the quiet I’d asked for, handed over without a fight.
Indira had texted me twice in that window — once about nothing, once to say she was around if I wanted company — and hadn’t mentioned him.
I’d loved her a little for it, but I should have known that meant she was saving it up.
“The club bought a place out on Route 9,” she said. “The Dollhouse.”
“I know the Dollhouse. By reputation. Seedy.”
“The reputation was accurate. Sticky floors, cheap beer, a bar built around one idea — get a man drunk as fast as you can and aim him at the stage. That was the business model, and it ran that way for ten years.” She took a sip of her water. “It’s not how Venom’s going to run it.”
I’d been cutting limes for the night ahead. I put the knife down. “Go on.”
“I want it to sell forty-dollar champagne to a table of guys celebrating a bachelor party. I want cocktails. Premium spirits behind glass. Bottle service to the floor.” She finally looked at me straight.
“The dancing pays the lights. The bar’s where the room could actually make money, and right now it’s leaving every cent of it on the table, because nobody running that place has ever set foot in a bar that sold anything other than beer. ”
She’d had my interest the second I put that knife down, and we both knew it.
I could see the whole thing in about four seconds.
A short, tight menu. Train the floor to sell up instead of just fetching.
The economics of a champagne pour at that volume.
It was a genuinely good problem — the kind I could do in my sleep, and had been doing for three years on somebody else’s bottom line while I saved to open a bar of my own.
“It’s a good idea,” I said. “The upscaling — genuinely. And very much not a biker’s instinct.” I gave her a look. “All that drinking you did in your twenties finally paying off, I suppose.”
Indira didn’t take it. She looked up at the rafters, then down at the bar between us, weighing something.
“Indira.”
“It wasn’t my idea.” She met my eyes. “It was Handful’s. He’s running the place.”
It came out of me before I could stop it — a laugh, the first I’d managed in sixteen days.
“Of course he is. Of course Handful’s running a strip club.
” I had to put a hand on the bar. “He’s perfect for it.
The man’s logged more hours in rooms like that than half the women who work in them — whole weeks of his life, gone, a dollar at a time into somebody’s thong.
King of the lap dance. I’d put money on him having a favorite in every one of those sad little private rooms in the back—”
Indira was already shaking her head.
“You’d be surprised.” She let me run down. “He didn’t pitch the bar, Austen. Not first. First he pitched shutting the place down — closing it, gutting it, spending a small fortune to make it somewhere a woman could work a shift without a hand on her.”
Somewhere in there I’d stopped laughing.
“He asked the club to put the dancers on base pay the whole week we’re closed, so nobody loses a paycheck over a refit they never asked for.
The bar came last. He said it was where the real money had been hiding the whole time, and that he knew it would work because he’d spent a few months watching somebody do it right.
” She let that sit, not cruelly, just plainly.
Five months he’d sat at the end of this bar with a paperback, and I’d thought he was learning to be a person. Apparently he’d also been taking notes on my cocktails and pour costs. I picked up a rag and wiped a part of the bar that didn’t need it.
“So that’s the job,” Indira went on, brisk again, letting me off the hook.
“Build the bar. Concept, menu, layout, train the staff, stand it up. A consult, not a life sentence — daytime, your hours, your call on every glass. The place is gutted to the studs right now for a refit, so you’d be building it clean instead of inheriting somebody’s mess. ” She named a number.
I stopped wiping the bar.
It was a serious number. Enough to take a real bite out of the down payment I needed, the kind of money that turns a five-year plan into a three-year one — and Indira knew it, because she’d done her homework on me the way she does on everything.
“The owners here are fine with it,” she added, before I could reach for that objection. “I already floated it to them. Daytime consult, doesn’t touch your shifts, and they’d like to keep you happy. I may have implied you were weighing up your options.”
“You strong-armed my bosses?”
“I informed your bosses.” She smiled. “Think about what it is, Austen, not where it is. You’re not going to work at a strip club.
You’re the front-of-house lead on a full venue repositioning.
Taking a tired adult room with beer in the carpet and turning it into a place that makes money on craft and service.
That’s not a stain on a resume. That’s the line that gets you the loan.
I took a failing concept and rebuilt its entire revenue model.
Put that on the wall of your own bar someday. ”
“You’re very good at this.”
“Marketing is my career.” She lifted her water. “It’s good money, it’s the best experience you’ll get anywhere, it accelerates the exact thing you’re working toward, and it’s interesting, which you and I both know is the part you can’t actually say no to.”
I looked at her. She looked back, serene, holding all her cards face-down on my bar.
“There’s exactly one downside,” I said.
“Mm.”
“And his name is Handful.”
“Mm,” Indira said again. “Yes. There is that.”
It was nothing — a small sound of agreement. Except it came too easy, and a shade too light. Indira didn’t think Handful was the downside. She was up to something. I didn’t call her out. You didn’t show a woman like Indira that you’d seen her hand.
“Daytime only,” I said. “I build the bar, I train the staff, and I am never — not once — in that building when it’s open and the lights are down. I do my work and I’m gone before the first customer.”
“Done.”
“And I’ll look at it before I say yes. I’m not signing on to a disaster I haven’t seen.”
“Of course.” Indira slid off the stool and gathered her bag, every inch of her screaming success. “I happen to be driving out there now.”
Derek had appeared at the end of the bar somewhere around bottle service and had been pretending to count the reservation book ever since.
“You’re going to consult,” he said, “for a strip club?”
“For a venue repositioning.”
“Oh my God, she got you saying it.” He put the book down. “Austen. With respect. The man. Might I remind you that men like that have three modes: charm, apology, charm again.”
“I’m aware of ‘the man’, Derek.”
Jamie leaned out from behind the bar, delighted, a towel over his shoulder. “Is it his strip club?”
“It’s Venom’s strip club. He runs it.”
“It is his strip club.” Jamie was grinning like it was Christmas. “You’re going to go work at your ex-boyfriend’s strip club.”
“I’m going to go look at a bar. In daylight. With a chaperone. For an amount of money that would make you both weep.” I untied my apron. “And when I come back, neither of you is going to say one more word about it, because you’ll be busy covering the floor.”
“He’s going to be there,” Derek said, gentler now, because Derek had stood between me and the door the night when Handful came in to grovel, and Derek didn’t actually find any of this funny.
“He might be.” I hung the apron on its hook. “I’m a grown woman with a calculator and a grudge. I’ll cope.”
?
The Dollhouse in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon, half torn apart, was the least sexy building I had ever stood inside.
They’d gutted it. Where the carpet had been there was bare swept concrete.
The stages were gone — not stripped down, gone, just clean rectangles where they’d stood.
Somebody had already started putting it back: a new wall framed up in clean pale lumber, fresh conduit run along the open joists, a pallet of drywall parked right smack in the middle of everything.
And the bar.
Oh, the bar.
“Indira,” I said, walking the length of it slowly, the way you walk past something in a museum.
“Somebody sold real drinks here once. Look — there’s a back bar, there’s a whole row for top-shelf bottles.
But they put the pour station here and the ice all the way down there, so you’d have to turn your entire body for every single drink.
You can’t run a service bar like this. Not a fast one, not a good one.
It won’t work.” I reached the end of it and looked back the way I’d come.
“So they gave up, quit making anything that took more than one hand, and sold beer. Honestly, I can see why beer was the only thing that worked.” I crouched to look under the counter and regretted it instantly.
“What is that? No, I don’t want to know. We’re taking the whole thing out.”
“Are we?” Indira sounded smug and I knew why. She’d been fishing for that word since she sat down at my bar.
And I’d done it. I’d said we. There was no taking it back and we both knew it.
“It’s a good problem,” I admitted. “A great one, honestly. The best blank slate I’ve seen in years — and it kills me that it’s attached to—”
“To?”
The back door opened.
He came in with his sleeves shoved up, a clipboard in one hand, sawdust on his boots, talking over his shoulder to somebody about a delivery — easy, unhurried.
He looked up. Saw Indira. Started to nod. Then he saw me.
His face gave me everything, too fast for him to catch it.
The blank half-second where I didn’t register.
Then the half where I did — and what crossed it wasn’t guilt, or charm, or any of his usual moves.
It was surprise, flat and real. He hadn’t known I’d be here.
Nobody had told him. His eyes cut to Indira and stuck, and I saw him work it out a second behind me — she’d done this on purpose.
Walked us both into the same gutted room and called it a job.
“Austen,” he said. Even. Just my name.
“Handful.” He flinched, the way he had on the sidewalk — smaller this time, but I caught it. He’d been hoping a couple of weeks might’ve earned him Tyler back. It hadn’t.
“Indira’s brought me in to fix your bar,” I said, getting in ahead of the silence before it could turn into anything.
“Daytime. As a consultant. I won’t be here in the evenings and I won’t be in your way, and the bar will, when I’m done, make you an obscene amount of money, because right now it is the single worst-designed piece of hospitality I have encountered in my professional life. ”
He grinned. “Yeah. I figured it was bad. I don’t know bars.”
“You know one bar,” I said. It hit exactly where I sent it — the months, the stool, the paperback, the notes he’d apparently been taking the whole time.
For a second, it sat between us but neither of us was willing to say a word about it in front of Indira, who’d drifted ten tactical feet off to study a perfectly uninteresting stretch of stripped wall.
“I’ll send you the layout,” he said finally. “Whatever you need. You run the bar, it’s yours. I won’t —” He stopped. Started over, plainer. “Thank you for doing it.”
“I’m doing it for the money. And the resume. Indira’s very persuasive.”
“She is.”
“It has nothing to do with you.”
“I know,” he said.
And he meant it. A man who’d told me to my face we weren’t finished, and who then stood in a gutted room and made sure I knew this job had nothing to do with that.
No charm, no second run at me, not one of the moves I’d spent all those careful days bracing for.
Whatever “we’re not done” meant to him, it didn’t come with pushing. He’d thanked me and let me go.
“Right,” I said, picking my bag up off a sawhorse. “Send me the dimensions and the budget. I’ll have you an outline by Friday.”
“I knew you would,” Indira said, serene as the actual First Lady of the USA, and walked me out.
I didn’t call her on it. But in the car, pulling out of that sad lot in the afternoon sun, I caught her smile in the side window. Handful and I had definitely been played.