Chapter 18
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— Austen —
“The good news,” I said, sliding the sales report across the bar to Fewin, “is you sold eleven bottles of Veuve on Saturday.”
“That’s good, right?” Fewin looked pleased with himself. He’s a big man — beard, scarred knuckles, a face that ends conversations — and he builds a cocktail like he’s holding a baby bird.
“It could be,” I said, “if you hadn’t sold all eleven to one table.” I tapped the line. “A bachelor party. Eighteen men in matching shirts who’ll never set foot in here again, because the next time most of them have eighteen friends in one room it’ll be a funeral.”
“More than half of ‘em were single.” Fewin didn’t look at the report. “Ten. Eleven, maybe.”
“You counted?”
“I count the room. Always have.” No brag in it.
“Did they have a good time?”
He nodded.
“So the next one of them gets engaged,” he said, “where’s he bringing the party?”
I didn’t answer.
“Here. Eighteen new shirts, another eleven bottles. That’s not one night.
That’s a standing order I haven’t booked yet.
” He slid the report back at me. “And it wasn’t all one table, either.
Eleven bottles between eighteen men, they’re on the floor by ten.
Groom got generous, started buying for the room — tables on both sides got bottles.
Two of ‘em asked me what it was and wrote it down.”
“Huh.” He’d out-argued me with my own arithmetic, and I didn’t hide it.
“Fair. Keep the whale, then. But it’s still a bonus, not the business — a table like that walks in twice a year.
What pays the bills is forty men who come in every Thursday and drop forty dollars without noticing.
So you comp the regular his second drink, and you let the bachelor party pay through the nose for the privilege of being loud.
Whales are a bonus. Regulars are the key.
” I uncapped my pen. “You’re wasted here, you know that?
A bar like this in a real city, you’d have a following.
Instead you’re pouring champagne for a motorcycle club in a strip club on Route 9. ”
“Best job I’ve ever had,” Fewin said, and went to get the new vermouth he’d been dying to show me since I walked in.
This was the part I hadn’t seen coming: I liked it here.
Not the here of it. The work. The work was clean.
The problem was good, and Fewin — God help me — was a genuinely gifted bartender stuck in the body of a man who settled arguments with a pool cue.
Teaching him was the most fun I’d had on a clock in years.
He argued, then he did it my way, then he came back the next day and told me I’d been right.
“Build me a Manhattan,” I said. “And don’t talk to me while you do it.”
He built it. I watched his hands — good hands, careful — and my thoughts drifted to another man. A man who’d sat at the end of my bar for months memorizing my entire pour spec while I thought he was reading Jane Austen. Then Fewin started under-stirring.
“Four more seconds. You’re scared of bruising it. Don’t be.”
He gave it the four seconds and the Manhattan came out right.
It was barely past noon — chairs still up on the tables, the floor dark, the stage a flat black slab nobody was looking at. That was the point. My rule was daylight only, and the official reason was not the one everyone assumed.
It wasn’t him. Or it wasn’t only him. It was because I had zero interest in standing in a room full of women working the back half of a routine — the pole, the lap dance, the part at the end where it all comes off — while I tried to talk to a brother about pour cost. I’d kept a professional face through a lot of things.
I didn’t fancy testing it against a fully nude finale in the evening.
I still couldn’t get over Indira allowing Dutch to buy a strip club. Indira. Who’d lose a night’s sleep over a badly worded flyer. A strip club. The Venom Riders patch over the door of a strip club. The optics were mind-boggling for a marketing specialist.
Then I thought about the bar — the door charge, the champagne margins, what a real cocktail program could pull in a room where men already walked in planning to spend — and I understood exactly why she’d said yes.
Sadly, the rule did not account for the fact that Handful was here in daylight too.
He came out of the back hallway around one with one of the new cocktail servers half a step behind him — Mara, clearly nervous and talking fast. I braced for the version of this I’d have bet money on a year ago — the Handful I’d met first, who spent the better part of ten minutes talking to me while looking at my tits.
He stopped when she stopped. Turned to face her, both feet, hands at his sides. Didn’t touch her. Said something short that got her shoulders down, and by the time they reached the bar she was nearly laughing — and he’d done the whole thing without once looking at her tits.
“Austen,” he said when he clocked me. Even. Always even now — as if that mouth had never been buried between my thighs, as if his tongue hadn’t licked me out on the regular for months. He said my name like I was a stranger. Not like a woman he used to take apart slow, more nights than not.
“Handful.”
“Mara’s up for a spot on the floor. Wanted you to look her over.” He turned to her. “Anything she tells you about this bar — that’s law. She says it, it’s the same as me saying it, only smarter. So listen up.” Then, to me, even. “She’s yours.” And he went off to do something else.
That was the new thing. I expected Handful to stay — lean on the bar, watch us work, make it a show, provide a running commentary on the two of us. Instead he handed me a competent woman, told her my word beat his, and left.
You and me. We’re not done. You’d never know it watching him now — a wide berth, a clean handoff, not one thing left out for me to push against. He’d meant the part about giving me space, apparently, every bit as much as he’d meant the rest.
I ran Mara through it the way I train all of my staff — a table of four, two beers and a water, walk me through your next sixty seconds.
The first time, she led with the price. By the third she opened with the ice and the glassware, and let the number land last. She listened the way Fewin listened — argued first, then did it my way.
“You’ll be running this floor in a year,” I told her. “Don’t let them keep you on trays.”
She went to find her apron, pleased with herself, and that was when Lex sat down two stools from me with a coffee.
“You’re the ex,” she said.
“I’m the consultant.”
“You’re the ex who’s the consultant.” She didn’t make it a thing.
“Relax. I’m not here to cause trouble. I just like to know who’s in my building.
” She nodded at the bar. “Six years I’ve danced this floor, and Saturday a table I was working bought a forty-dollar bottle for the first time ever. So, whatever you did, it’s working.”
“It’s a door charge and a kick-ass bar.” I shrugged. “I did the bar. Handful did the rest — the door, the men keeping their hands where they belong. That part’s his, not mine.”
Lex looked at me over the coffee a second.
“I’ve been here through four managers, honey,” she said.
“Four. Every one of them gave the same speech. Things’ll be different.
I take care of my girls.” She set the cup down.
“He gave it too. Near enough word for word.” A pause.
“Difference is, he’s the only one who went and did a single thing he said he would.
And then more. A gate fee and base pay. A man on the floor whose job is keeping us safe. Cameras where we said we wanted them.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that, which she clocked. “And you’ve got a tell,” she added.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Just now. When he handed you the new girl and walked off.” She tipped her head at me, not unkind.
“Your face went soft. Half a second, before you caught it. You might be the ex, honey, but you’re not over him.
” She stood and picked up her coffee. “And for what it’s worth — he looks at you the exact same way, every time you’re not looking. ”
She left.
Handful caught me at the door at ten to four, on my way out before the lights and the lie of the place came down for the night.
“Hey.” Clipboard, again. The man lived behind a clipboard now. “You got a second?”
“For?”
“This.” He turned the board around. Two and a half weeks of numbers.
The bar take, the average spend, the champagne line climbing like it had somewhere to be.
“This is all you, Austen Wicker. Pure and simple. Revenue’s up forty percent and every point of it is the bar.
You walked in, called it, and built it.” No grin.
No sell. He just looked at the number, then at me.
“You said it’d work. It worked. I wanted you to see it on paper because that’s yours. You did that.”
No move. Just a compliment.
“It’s a good bar,” I said with a shrug. “Don’t let Fewin bruise the gin.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
I gathered my coat. At the door I did the thing I’d promised myself I wouldn’t and looked back.
He’d already bent over a keg order, head down, even as ever. But for the half-second before he felt me watching, his face was doing the exact thing Lex had caught on mine. Soft. Unguarded. Then he glanced up and it was gone, packed away clean, and he gave me the nod a man gives a colleague.
“Night, Austen.”
I made it to my car and sat there a few minutes with the keys in my lap. Not because I couldn’t drive. I sat there because I wanted to be sure that when I pulled out, I’d point the car at my own bar and not right back into this lot. And right now I wasn’t sure which way it would go.
So I waited, and put it away the way he had, piece by piece, until my hands were steady and my face was my own again. I’m good at that. It’s not that I couldn’t have him. It’s that I’d decided not to, and a decision only counts if you keep making it.
And then, because I’d earned it, I let myself have the one thought I’d held off all afternoon — that if things had gone some other way, if I were the kind of woman who’d stayed, I’d be at his place tonight after close.
Or he’d be at mine. His mouth at my throat, working down, slow and patient and infuriating the way it used to be, until I forgot every good reason I’d had for leaving.
Then I started the car and drove to work.