6
EVAN
Evan had typed and deleted the same response four times. The text from Finn sat on his screen: a name, an address, a question mark. Evan had been staring at it for twenty minutes.
His office was quiet at this hour, the facility mostly empty, the hallway outside dim on the after-hours setting. He had stayed late under the pretense of finishing travel logistics for the first road trip. The spreadsheet was open on his laptop. He had looked at it approximately once in the last forty minutes.
He picked up his pen. Set it down. Picked it up again. The cap clicked against his thumbnail, a small plastic sound swallowed by the empty room.
The job. His father’s program. The optics of a thirty-eight-year-old operations director and a twenty-one-year-old captain, and what that would look like if anyone decided to look. Seventeen years.
He had run through the list so many times that the items had stopped being reasons. They had become a script. Lines he had memorized and was expected to deliver on cue, and somewhere in the repetition, they had lost their weight.
He opened the text again.
A gay strip club in Ferndale. Thursday night. Come with me.
He typed: I don’t think this is a good idea.
Read it back. Deleted it.
He typed: I’ve been thinking about what you said, and I think we should
Deleted that too.
He stared at the blank text field. The cursor blinked. The fluorescent above his desk buzzed at a frequency he only noticed when the building was this empty.
Then he typed: Yes.
He hit send before the part of him that had been running this program for fifteen years could stop him.
He got his coat.
He almost turned around twice on the drive north. Once at the highway on-ramp, once at the exit for Ferndale, and both times his hands stayed on the wheel, his foot stayed on the gas, and the car kept moving. He found the address on a side street off Woodward, parked a block away, and sat in his car with the engine off for long enough that his breath started fogging the windshield.
The building was unmarked except for a small neon sign, pink, the name in cursive. The bass was audible from the sidewalk.
Finn was leaning against the wall outside, hands in his jacket pockets, and he looked up when Evan approached. He was wearing a navy button-down with the sleeves rolled to his forearms and jeans that fit him in a way Evan’s brain processedas a personal attack. His hair was pushed back off his forehead, damp at the temples, and his mouth was already curving.
He looked Evan up and down. The coat, the collar, the posture.
“You look like you’re here to audit the place.”
“I might be.”
Finn pushed off the wall and held the door open. “After you.”
The bass hit Evan’s chest before his eyes adjusted. The interior was dim and dense, bodies moving in the low glow, the air thick with cologne and sweat and something sweeter underneath. A long bar ran along one wall, the mirror behind it reflecting the room back in strips of color, blue and pink and gold shifting in cycles. The stage was elevated at the far end, a dancer working the pole with fluid control that made it look effortless, his body catching every angle. Other dancers moved through the room in various states of undress, carrying drinks, stopping at tables, leaning in close to talk over the music.
Evan’s first instinct was to count the exits. He caught himself doing it and stopped.
Finn was already at the bar, already talking to the bartender, already tipping with the ease of a regular. He caught Evan looking and raised his eyebrows.
“Drink?”
“Whiskey.”
“Two,” Finn said to the bartender without turning around.
