"I aim to please," he says. "And I shoot my shot. These are values I'm proud of."
I am smiling.
A full one—not the service version, not the managed-warmth version that I maintain behind a bar to keep the room's energy workable. The actual smile, the one that gets out before I've authorized it, that belongs to the version of me that Elowen has been trying to coax back to the surface for months.
I take his phone.
More laughter. Elvin's expression completes its transition into something between betrayal and admiration. I type quickly—my number, my actual number, not the wrong version that I've given precisely twice in the last two years to people I didn't want to hear from—and hand it back.
He's from the city. He'll be gone by the weekend. He'll sober up and not text, which is fine, and I'll have a funny story for Elowen, which is also fine.
Both of those things are fine.
Finn stands. Checks the number. Looks at me.
"He pockets the phone. "Where are you going?"
"Other bar." From the back, my coworker's voice again—Boss needs you, Mila, the other location, the call that's been waiting since the distraction intervened. "My shift's moving."
"Tell me where and I'll?—"
"Goodnight, Finn."
The groan that goes through the crowd is collective and theatrical and I wave at all of it without turning around, already moving toward the back corridor. Several voices—three,maybe four, the men who'd been most entertained—express genuine disappointment at the departure, which is flattering and completely irrelevant because I have a shift to work and a car that needs to make it across town.
"Best entertainment of the night!" someone calls. "Better than the game!"
"By a significant margin!" another one adds.
The back corridor of Clancy's is quiet relative to the bar floor—the sound muffled by the door, the scent considerably less dense. I lean against the wall for one second. Just one.
The bourbon-citrus-smoke is gone.
Not gradually—the way scent clears when you leave a room, immediately absent rather than fading, so that its removal is its own kind of statement. My own honey-vanilla comes back forward in its absence, and the lime zest settles, and my nervous system recalibrates from the heightened state it's been in since the arm came around my waist.
Damn.
That's a first.
I've worked bars for five years. I've handled drunk Alphas, difficult regulars, three separate occasions where someone had to be escorted out, and the entire creative-threat catalog of men who don't handle rejection with any grace. Not once has a stranger's scent made me bold in a way that felt less like performance and more like permission.
Bars. They will always have something.
I push off the wall.
The staff room is unchanged—the uniform rack, the used coffee cups, the ambient smell of a room that's hosted a long shift. I grab my jacket and my bag, check the car key is in the side pocket, do the standard close-out of my section of the mental inventory: Priya has the floor, Jamie's covering the back tables,the bar stock is topped to where I left it before the confrontation interrupted the rhythm.
All fine.
I wrap my jacket around me against the cold that's going to hit the moment I open the back door, and I think, briefly, about a man on his knees on a bar floor with his phone lit and his grin intact and not a single ounce of embarrassment about any of it.
He'll forget by morning.
People from the city always do.
The back door opens onto the alley, and the March air is cold and wet and smells like rain on old stone, and I head for my car with my keys already in hand.
The engine cooperates on the first try, which I choose to read as an omen.
