He caught me watching.
"You've been behind a bar," he said.
Not a question.
"Three years," I told him. "Plus two more before that in various forms. What's your gin?"
He showed me the bottle.The right answer.We had a conversation.
Forty-five minutes, which was longer than I intended, but Cole had a palate for teaching, and I had a hunger for learning that has nothing to do with the occasion and everything to do with the bar I'm going to open one day, when the financial situation resolves itself by one means or another.
He walked me through his signature cocktail for the evening—a Lucky Clover Sling, his own construction, built on Irish whiskey with green chartreuse for the holiday reference, a measure of fresh lime juice that balanced the herbal weight, and a float of sparkling water over the top that kept the whole thing light.
The color in the glass was the particular gold-green of late afternoon light through leaves, and it smelled like a garden that had just found a bottle of good spirits.
"Try it," he said.
I tried it.
The Irish whiskey was present but not dominant—it was the foundation rather than the point, which is the correct philosophy—and the chartreuse lifted everything into something botanical and complex that shifted as it warmed in the glass. The lime kept it honest. The carbonation at the end was the exit, clean and bright, and it left the kind of finish that made you consider having another while simultaneously respecting the current one.
"This is good," I said, with the conviction of someone who means it rather than says it.
He made me another and gave me the proportions written on a Lucky Clover Society napkin, which I folded and put in myclutch next to the coin, because that recipe is going in the Lucky Clover Lounge's opening menu if it kills me.
He also gave me a second drink on the house when I showed him a more efficient way to do his citrus prep—a small adjustment, nothing dramatic, just the way Danny taught me to work a peeler so you get the full oil expression from the zest without any pith—and the second drink was a Clover Club, his version, with a raspberry syrup he'd made himself that morning from frozen fruit and a small amount of rose water that shouldn't have worked and did.
It may have been flirting.
I logged it in the neutral category and moved on.
Two drinks on an empty-ish stomach after a seven-course dinner that was portioned for elegance rather than satiation.
I'm not drunk.
I'm—adjusted.
Recalibrated.
The version of myself that existed before the pack is closer to the surface now…less submerged, less managed.
She's blinking in the light.
And she finds the room interesting.
I stroll.
This is not a word I use for myself often—I am a person who moves with purpose, efficiently, between the locations my schedule requires. Strolling is a luxury for people who aren't calculating whether they can afford the time. But tonight has loosened something in the calculation, and I find myself moving through the reception rooms at a pace that belongs to someone who is simply present rather than transiting, glass in hand, listening to the room.
The conversations I pass through range widely.
Gossip, mostly—the specific social currency of an occasion where everyone knows some of the same people and isperforming familiarity as a credential. An Omega near the window is discussing someone's pack situation with the practiced clinical detachment of a person who knows she's gossiping and has made peace with it. Two Alphas are comparing professional contexts in the overlapping, credential-matching way that certain Alphas have when they're establishing hierarchy through a resume rather than scent.
I keep moving.
And then, from a cluster of people to my left, I hear something that stops my feet without my permission.
"—did you hear about this pack? Three Alphas, apparently. Ditched their Omega and walked away clean. Left her with?—"
