“Then worry about it now, but do it while making drinks, because we’re short-staffed and table six has been waiting for their mojitos for ten minutes.”
I looked at him.
Then at the bar—mybar, the place that had become the center of my universe in the two years since a chaotic interview in which I’d talked too much andmade the best drink of my life and somehow gotten hired on the spot.
“Fine,” I said. “But I’m keeping Princess Consuela behind the bar.”
“Absolutely not.”
“She’ll be in her carrier! Besides, she’s already here. Where else is she going to go?”
Finn opened his mouth, closed it, looked at the carrier, looked at me, then pinched the bridge of his nose in a gesture I’d seen approximately nine hundred times. I considered it a personal compliment, because it meant I’d gotten under his skin in the way that only family can.
“Behind the bar,” he said. “She stays in the carrier, and if she makes a single sound—”
“She’ll be quiet. She’ll be an angel. You won’t even know she’s there.”
Princess Consuela chose that exact moment to unleash a yowl so loud that a customer at table three flinched and spilled his beer.
Finn glared at me but said nothing.
I worked my shift, making mojitos and old fashioneds and the spicy margarita that had become ourbestseller. I did the bottle tricks that made people film me for their Instagram stories and flirted with regulars and welcomed first-timers.
I was Benji with a capital B, a neon-sign, never-stops-moving Benji, and for six hours, I almost forgot that I was homeless and living out of a garment bag and a cat carrier.
Almost.
But every time there was a lull, even a thirty-second gap between orders or a bathroom break or a moment of quiet at the end of the bar, it hit me again.
The soaked closet, the warped TV stand, the six to eight weeks minimum.
Underneath all of it, quiet as a splinter, was the fear that I was a twenty-five-year-old bartender with a hairless cat and no savings and a life that could be upended by a pipe in a wall, that everything I’d built—my job, my TikTok following, my life—was balanced on something as fragile as drywall and busted copper tubing.
But I didn’t say any of that.
I made drinks, I did the show, and I smiled until my face hurt.
At 2 a.m., after close, I loaded Princess Consuela back into the car and drove to Mia’s apartment, where she’d made up the couch and left a bowl ofwater out for the cat without being asked, because Mia was Mia and she’d probably known I’d end up there before I did.
“One night,” she said, handing me a blanket. “Because I love you; but my building has a no-pet policy, and my landlord has the moral flexibility of a Puritan.”
“Thank you,” I said without conviction.
I lay on Mia’s couch with Princess Consuela on my chest. She was finally quiet, finally still, her wrinkly body warm against mine, as I stared at the ceiling.
Somewhere across town, in an apartment building that was trying to ruin my life, a bulldog was snoring, and a man in an oatmeal bathrobe was reading a newspaper.
Neither of them had any idea what was coming.
Neither did I, honestly.
But Tuesdays, man.
Never trust a Tuesday.
Chapter 2
Peter
