Werein one of the most successful bands.
Acid burns the back of my throat and I clear it pointedly. If she’s going to flirt with me, I’m going to hightail it the hell out of here. Maybe if I wanted a quick lay, but these days, nothing’s appealing.
“I’ll take a whiskey neat,” I tell the girl, hoping my order will break her out of this stupor.
She blinks a few times, her long lashes giving them a bambi-like appearance. The pale blue of them, their dominating presence on her face, they trigger something in the back of my head. “Um—” She coughs and fidgets with the dirty rag. “Yeah, su-sure. I can get that for you in”—she checks the clock behind her—“ten minutes.”
I frown. “What?”
“Ten minutes,” she repeats, her voice a little stronger this time around. “We don’t switch over to serving alcohol until five.”
My answering silence makes her squirm, which causes her to elaborate. “We’re sort of…hybrid. Cafe from seven to five, bar from five to twelve.” She gestures behind her to the espresso machine and coffee set up that I clearly missed. But immediately to the right of it are racks of liquor and lines of glasses.
I fix my attention back on her and she shifts, wiping her hands against the black apron tied around her waist. “That’s the dumbest fucking thing I’ve heard,” I deadpan. “That bottle right there is almost within my reach, and it’s surely within yours, but you’re not serving it.”
She narrows her eyes on me but doesn’t seem surprised by my blunt honesty.
Guess I was right. She is a Whisper Me Nothings fan.
Maybe not for long with the way she’s now sizing me up.
“Well,” she says, tone icier than before, and it calls to something in me. “I’ll pass along the feedback to my manager and let him know that his business that he’s been successfully operating for twenty years is the ‘dumbest fucking thing.’ Now, can I get you a coffee?”
“The name is On Tap and you’re telling me you don’t have beer?”
“We have cold brew…on tap,” she says pointedly. “And we do serve beer, just not until we switch over from coffee to alcohol.”
“And that’s at five o’clock,” I say dully.
A curt nod.
“What’s stopping you from just serving me now?”
“Policy.”
“Policy?”
She cocks her hip to the side in a way that makes me think at this point she doesn’t give a shit aboutpolicy, and it’s more on principle now.
Well, now it’s the petty need inside of my own chest that has me planting my feet against the floor and leaning against the counter. “Fine,” I grit out. “I’ll wait ten minutes then.”
She flicks her attention to the clock and back to me once more. “Eight minutes now.” With that, she grabs the rag, tosses it over on her shoulder, and takes off for the other end of the bar. The man sitting down there gets a much brighter smile than I did.
Guess the excitement she had when I first sat down has worn off. Might’ve just cost me and the guys another fan, but I guess when there’s no band anymore anyways, what the fuck does it matter.
I sit there, silently stewing at the interaction for the entireeightminutes until this place switches over. I mean seriously, what kind of hybrid is this? From the outside, it looks like a bar. Who comes here for coffee? And the inside certainly isn’t giving a similar style or vibe to the many other cafes scattered around every block of the city.
It feels like a dive bar.
Much more rail vodka and much less almond milk latte.
Nikolai would like this place. He’d find it charming and would have no issue chugging a hot coffee one minute and chasing it with a shot of vodka the next. I check my phone while I wait, even though I know I’ll find it empty.
Not even a text back from my best friend. Before I left for my workout, I shot him a message to see if he’d want to join, but he must be in the studio. The lack of response gnaws at old wounds, but I try to brush it off.
He’s not ignoring you, not abandoning you. He’s just busy.
He’s wrapping up his first solo album, the first solo endeavor any of us have tried since the band split, and that’s taken up most of his time these days.
