“Well, he’s huge,” Uncle Martin says, inadvertently causing Julien to imagine possibly huge, hidden parts of Mr. Harlow not appropriate for TikTok.
Julien gulps. “How so?”
“He’s got amassivefollowing.” Uncle Martin must know what he’s saying, right? There’s no way these are accidental Freudian slips. “And of course, he’s not hard to look at.”
Hard. Goddammit.“What does his attractiveness have to do with the restaurant?”
“That’s why I hired him.”
Julien scrunches up his brow, missing the implied meaning. “To...be hot?”
“Yes,” Uncle Martin says. “And also to bartend, come up with a creative cocktail menu that will drum up business.”
Julien’s brain is scrambled eggs. “What about my wine pairings?”
Uncle Martin scowls. “We’ll still have those, but for people who prefer hard alcohol, now we’ll have more options.”
Options.That dirty word shows its grimy face again. He’s not sure why it’s dirty. Often, he questions his own brain, still, even at twenty-six, uncertain of its various functions and foibles.
It’s not that he dislikes hard alcohol. He just has a complicated relationship with it thanks to his parents. And wine is far superior in every way.
“Over the last several months, it’s been slow. This might be the boost we need,” Uncle Martin says, growing sullen. “I’m getting up there in age, Julien. I want this place to still be in business when it’s time to pass off the keys, okay?”
Julien doesn’t even notice that he nods until he’s already finished doing it. He doesn’t have the heart (or the guts?) to tell his uncle that owning Martin’s Place is not his dream. It’s never been his dream.
But it will only hurt Uncle Martin’s feelings. And he owes so much to Uncle Martin for taking him in and raising him like his own son.
All Julien says is, “Okay” and then he gets back to work.
Two
GREG
Greg Harlow lugs the last of his brown boxes up the steep flight of steps and sets them down with a huff. He’s sweaty, his gray shirt stained both front and back. After he unpacks, he needs to take his first shower at his new place, otherwise he’ll be stinking up his new room on day one—and it’s already smelly enough thanks to the previous tenant, a pizza delivery guy who didn’t bother to clean before he skipped town and left behind a few old, ripped work polos to rot in the closet.
Every room, even the bathroom, has the ghost of garlic floating on the air.
He finds lavender air freshener in a disorganized box and tries his best to spray the scent away.
Greg didn’t expect to be moving into a tiny room in a house with a roommate at twenty-seven. When he was a teenager, imagining a life beyond Ohio, he often thought he’d be living in a luxurious city in one of those high-rise buildings with a doorman and a business suite and a gym. What he wouldn’t give for a free gym right now.
And he had that. For a while. The financial security and the luxury, all thanks to ninety-second shirtless cocktail-making videos he started posting for fun on TikTok and ended up turning a profit on. But fifteen minutes of fame came and went, and while he still has a solid following, the endorsements and the invites and the checks have dried up relatively quickly.
Burning bright and fast was never in Greg Harlow’s imaginings of his future.
Yet, here he is, twenty-seven and two months, moving into his cousin’s guest room in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and taking a job at a (presumably) failing bar and restaurant.
He is lucky to have a cousin, Rufus, a couple years younger than him who is willing to rent him the spare room in his grandmother’s old home on the cheap. He was also fortunate to get a message from Martin Shaw about the open bartender position. Frankly, there are times when he buzzes with excitement over the idea of having his own cocktail menu at an established restaurant. None of his friends could say the same.
Not that he has many friends. Not anymore. New York City runs on the rich. The prettier you are and the fatter your wallet, the more social you get to be. The rub is that the more social you get to be, the more money you have to spend. And the more money you have to spend, the more money you have to make. Which wouldn’t have been a problem if the algorithm didn’t hate him suddenly, and his engagement wasn’t going down to the point that he was handing over potentially meaningless pieces of plastic for bottle service while crossing his fingers and toes that his card doesn’t get declined.
The memories of his old life and his carelessness whip up an anxiety twister inside him, picking up traces of guilt and loneliness along the way, until they’re spiraling together so fast that he starts sweating even more. He sits down from sudden dizziness.
He swipes his forehead with a paper towel from a roll near the closet, focuses on the breath in his lungs and the feel of his feet on the ground, and inspects the room. To combat the anxiety, he makes a mental list of what he sees. One window, small and facing the neighboring house. Just enough floor space for a full-size bed and a dresser. A corner where he can hang up his backdrop, roll over his roving kitchen cart, and set up his expensive studio lights.
At least there’s that. He still gets to make videos, share his creations, and engage with the fans who have stuck around, liking and commenting.
It could be worse.
