It is immediately and completely Elvin.
Elvin Park has worked at Hannigan's for a decade, which is remarkable in the way of someone who arrived at a job at sixteen because their father knew the owner and simply never departed. He's twenty-six and deeply, comprehensively nerdy in the specific way of a man who reads instruction manuals for recreation and has opinions about cocktail chemistry that are technically correct and socially excessive. He means well. He means enormously, endlessly, unambiguously well.
He also cannot stop talking about me.
This started the evening I’d covered the main rush during a town-wide event six weeks ago, when the wait time was sitting at two hours and I’d worked the bar alone for forty-five minutes and brought it down to a manageable queue through sheer organized speed. The kind of shift where your hands know what to do before your brain sends the instruction, where the choreography of a well-run bar takes over and everything narrows to the strip of countertop in front of you and the orders coming in. I’d been in a state of pure function and I’d loved every second of it.
Elvin had apparently not recovered.
The man either has a crush or he simply did not want to suffer this shift alone.
Both are plausible. Both are irritating in this weather.
"They offered to pay for open bar if I could get you there," Danny says. "Pending a demonstration of your skills, which—" he sounds momentarily offended on my behalf, "—is a thing they said, not me."
"A demonstration."
"Rich jocks."
I pinch the bridge of my nose. Outside, the rain has committed fully to its worst-case interpretation of St. Patrick's Day weather—the kind of downpour that doesn't care about anyone's plans or clothing or general goodwill toward the holiday. The windscreen is opaque with it. My jacket collar is still damp from the walk from the apartment to the car.
"Fine."
"Truly?"
"You said triple. I'm already here. What time do you need me?"
"Fifteen minutes ago," Danny says, which is when I realize Clancy's is three minutes from where I'm currently parked, because of course it is, because Danny called me when I wasalready most of the way there, which means he absolutely knew where I was going after Hannigan's and routed this accordingly.
"You owe me," I say.
"Genuinely. In full. Come by Hannigan's when things quiet and the drinks are on me."
"And Elvin owes me."
Danny chuckles. "I'll pass that along."
I hang up.
Clancy's back entrance is down a short alley that I've used once before during a multi-bar crawl event that Hannigan's participated in last September. The door is propped open with a milk crate, which means someone has been going in and out frequently enough to stop locking it, which is either efficiency or a security lapse and tonight I don't have the bandwidth to determine which.
I hear the bar before I reach it.
The sound that comes through the propped door is the specific acoustic of a space at full occupancy with a game on: layered male voices at various volumes, the sharp punctuation of something happening on screen that generates a collective reaction, glasses against bar surfaces, the ambient thump of a sound system being asked to compete with all of the above and mostly winning. The scent arrives alongside the sound, channeled through the door—beer, the primary note, the malt-and-grain density of a tap that's been running all night, with whiskey and something citrusy cutting through from the back. Male Alpha pheromones in volume, overlapping and compounding, the kind of collective scent that a room full of excited, drinking Alphas on a holiday produces: assertive, warm, competitive, with that particular edge of festivity that turns the usual dominance signals into something slightly less threatening and considerably louder.
My own scent response is minimal. The perfume is long gone, but whatever recalibration the evening has done to my baseline is holding—the honey and vanilla present but settled, the lime zest quiet, my body correctly reading this as a work situation and calibrating accordingly.
I go in through the back.
The staff room is small and has the particular smell of a space that's been used all day by people in various states of stress—coffee that's been reheated twice, the ambient sweat of a busy shift, someone's food from hours ago. Uniforms are hanging on the rack: dark green tops, Clancy's logo, various sizes. I find one that looks right, locate the black leggings I keep in my bag as a standard shift backup, and change in under three minutes.
The green is St. Patrick's day specific, which I can appreciate. Previously they'd done jeans, which are comfortable exactly nowhere after hour five of active bar work. Leggings are a decision made by someone who has actually worked a shift, and I file that under points in Clancy's favor before heading to the mirror above the sink.
The hair is—still blonde.
The green is gone, at least.
Elowen's one-shower promise delivered. What remains is the champagne blonde that she spent two hours on yesterday, which in a high ponytail with a few strands loose at the temples looks considerably less masquerade-adjacent and considerably more like a bartender who happened to have an interesting week.
