Chapter Four
Archer
Days of texting and I still haven't figured out what I'm doing wrong, because by all accounts I should’ve stopped by now, but there's something about this woman that has me hooked. My own personal Spreadsheets. It’s the nickname I put in my phone for her.
Wednesday
Spreadsheets: Day two of unemployment. Applied for eleven jobs and reorganized my sock drawer by color AND season. This is either progress or a cry for help.
Me: Sounds like progress.
Spreadsheets: It's a cry for help. But thank you for the vote of confidence.
Whatever I was doing before her name lit up the screen doesn’t matter the second it does; some part of me decides it can wait. Whatever she has to say is more important.
Friday
Me: How's the apartment search?
Spreadsheets: Nonexistent. I have a spreadsheet for it though. Column for rent, column for commute, column for whether the listing photos look staged or like a crime scene.
Me: What's the ratio so far?
Spreadsheets: Sixty percent crime scene.
A laugh gets out of me before I can stop it, short and rusty, the kind that surprises me every time it happens. Just an empty cabin and a phone I keep checking like it owes me something.
Sunday
Spreadsheets: In other exciting news, I turn thirty on Thursday. Thirty years old, no job, no apartment, and a color-coded system for tracking my downfall. Living the dream.
Me: Happy early birthday, Maya.
Spreadsheets: Don't. I'm not ready to be sincere about turning thirty. Ask me again on Thursday. Maybe I'll have found some perspective by then.
I don't ask again. I file it away instead, the way I file most things she says, in a place I don't examine too closely, and go back to work on the guest bedroom door that keeps sticking.
Thursday, I'm sitting at the bar an hour before my shift, going through the motions of a shift that hasn't started yet.
Ainsley's behind the counter doing inventory, counting bottles out loud to herself, and I've got a soda water sweating a ring into the wood in front of me because old habits from the job keep me sober even off the clock.
The door opens before Ainsley's ready for it, throwing a slice of afternoon light across the floor, and a woman walks in as if she's got somewhere to be and this is only one of many stops.
Something in my chest does an inconvenient thing before I've even gotten a good look at her face.
Dark hair pulled back, a blazer that says she dressed for a boardroom that doesn't exist anymore, a bag over one shoulder heavy enough to be carrying files instead of makeup.
Not my type, if I still got a type after this many years without testing the theory.
Doesn't stop the reaction. Because her curves are exactly my type, and all that softness has me taking notice.
"Hi, is the manager around?" Her voice carries across the bar, brisk, a little too polished, a voice built for pitching things to people who don't want to be pitched to.
Something about it snags. I sit up a little straighter without deciding to.
"That's me." Ainsley wipes her hands on a bar towel and comes around the counter. "Ainsley. What can I do for you?"
"Maya Reyes." A hand goes out, a firm handshake, the kind you practice. "I’m starting a marketing consulting business, mostly local, and I’m doing a walk-through of businesses in the area to see who might benefit from a fresh look at their digital presence.
I'd love ten minutes of your time, if you have it. "
Maya.
I go still in a way that has nothing to do with training and everything to do with every phone call and text I've had in the last two weeks, one voice building into a woman standing fifteen feet away from me with a laptop bag and a birthday she didn't want acknowledged yet.
She hasn't looked at me once. I'm just a guy at the bar to her, background furniture, the thing you register and move past on your way to a pitch.
"Ten minutes, sure." Ainsley gestures at a stool, though something in her expression says she's humoring more than hiring.
"Fair warning, our owner runs a handful of properties out of Vegas and keeps his own marketing team for all of them, so I doubt there's real work here for you.
But I've got ten minutes and a soft spot for a good pitch. "
"I'll take the ten minutes." Maya sets her bag down and pulls out a folder, and inside the folder is a spreadsheet, laminated, tabbed, color-coded within an inch of its life, and something in me that's been quiet since a voicemail two weeks ago sits up and pays very close attention.
"This is a breakdown of what I noticed just walking in," Maya says, sliding the sheet across the bar top like she's dealing cards in a game only she knows the rules to.
"Your signage is too small, your online reviews aren't being responded to, and your social media hasn't posted in eleven weeks, which in algorithm terms is basically a business that's already closed. "
Ainsley leans over the sheet, eyebrows climbing. "You got all this from the parking lot?"
"I got most of it from the parking lot," Maya taps a column with genuine pride. "The rest from your website, which, no offense, looks like it was built for a business in 2011 that's since changed hands twice."
I make a noise, somewhere between a cough and something else, and Maya's gaze flicks to me for the first time. Not recognition. Just the automatic check you give a stranger who's made a sound near you.
"Sorry," I say. "Just admiring the color-coding."
Her eyes narrow, something working behind them that doesn't land anywhere, and she turns back to Ainsley without another glance my way. I should feel relieved. I feel something closer to disappointment, which is its own kind of problem.
"So what do you think," Maya's saying, already three steps into a pitch about engagement metrics and posting schedules, and I watch her hands move while she talks, quick and precise, cutting the air into the same tidy sections as her spreadsheet.
Ainsley's nodding along, genuinely interested, which isn't nothing, because Ainsley doesn't fake interest for anybody.
"Honestly," Ainsley says when Maya pauses for breath, "some of that's good stuff, and I'll pass it along to Simon's people, see if any of it sticks. But I can't promise you paid work here, not with a marketing team already on retainer."
"That's fair. I can work with a lot of budgets." Maya's already flipping to another tab in her folder, ready for the objection, rehearsed for exactly this moment.
"What I actually need," Ainsley says, tapping her pen against the bar, "is a bartender. We're short three shifts a week, and I've been covering them myself, which isn't sustainable. You said you're starting your business?"
Maya blinks. Whatever's next on her tab isn't built for this pivot. "I mean. Technically. But I'm a marketer, not a bartender."
"Can you make a drink?"
"I can follow a recipe card."
"That's more than half the people I've interviewed this month.
" Ainsley studies her for a second, the way she studies most people who walk through that door, quick and thorough.
"Steady paycheck while you build your client list. We can talk about the marketing stuff too, separately, once you've got a foot in the door here. What do you say?"
I sit still, watching this happen in real time, watching Maya's entire plan bend sideways into something she didn't walk in here for.
"I say yes." The words come out before she's finished thinking them through; I can tell by the small flicker of surprise on her own face right after. "I say yes, absolutely. Thank you."
My gut does something ugly and possessive that has no business existing yet, given that twenty minutes ago I didn't know this woman had a face to go with the voice.
She's about to be standing behind that bar at least three nights a week, close enough to talk to, close enough that I'll have to do my job with her in the room, and my job requires a level of focus I'm not sure I've got in me anymore.
"Perfect, you can start Saturday." Ainsley claps once, decision made, already moving on to logistics, training shifts and schedules, and I realize I've got about ten seconds left before this stops being a private problem.
"Archer." Ainsley waves me over without looking up from her notepad. "Come meet our new bartender. Maya, this is Archer; he handles the door and keeps the place from turning into a mess most nights."
Maya turns. Whatever's on her face when she does, a professional smile already halfway assembled, drops the second her eyes land on mine and actually sees me, really sees me, the way she hasn't bothered to yet.
I watch it happen. Watch the exact moment the voice on the phone lines up with the man on the barstool, watch her go through the whole call in about a second and a half, my landlord, my spreadsheet, my voicemail, my texts.
Color drains and then floods back twice as fast, pink climbing up her neck and into her cheeks until she looks like she's standing too close to the fireplace.
"You," she says, which isn't a sentence, isn't anything, just the one word her whole nervous system had left in it.
I let the silence sit there for as long as I want to, because some pleasures are worth being petty about.
"Congratulations, Spreadsheets." I lift my soda water half an inch, something close to a toast. "Happy birthday."