The bar was called something I'd already forgotten.
I'd ended up here the way I ended up in a lot of places, which was by moving in a direction and not stopping until something stopped me. What had stopped me tonight was a bar with low lighting and a door that required showing ID to someone who looked at mine and then looked at me and smiled in a way that meant she recognized me and was going to let me in regardless.
So.
Here.
It was a nice place. All dark wood and candles and a drinks menu that was four pages long and used words I wasn't going to look up. The kind of place you came when you wanted to feel like you were somewhere that mattered.
I was giving it everything I had.
There was a group around me, assembled from the various people who had realized who I was over the course of the evening. Men and women and a couple of people I couldn't immediately categorize. All of them were warm and interested and laughing at the right moments. I was giving them the fullMorrison experience because that was the deal, that was what I did, that was the transaction running smooth and clean and producing exactly the noise I needed.
I was telling the Jenkins story. The one with the wave at the away game, Jenkins counting three Wardens fans as a successful wave. It was a good story. I knew it was a good story because I'd told it before and it worked every time, hit the same beats, got the laugh in the same place.
I heard myself tell it.
That was the thing. I could hear myself from the outside, the timing and the pacing and the moment I leaned in, and it was correct, all of it was correct, and I was somewhere behind it watching it happen.
Someone refilled my glass.
I kept going.
The thing about the transaction was it ran best when you weren't thinking about it. When the noise came in and you gave it back out and nobody examined the machinery. Tonight I could see all the gears. Tonight every laugh had a half-second delay between the landing and the receiving, this small gap where I could see the audience deciding to respond, and the deciding was somehow worse than anything.
I was so fucking tired.
Not the physical kind. The other kind. I was tired because I had been performing for hours at a bar and could not stop, because stopping meant the quiet arriving, and the quiet had Nathan Cross in it.
Nathan Cross and my apartment andfuck itand his hands in my shirt and the wall and the sound he'd made, the sound that had gotten past everything he'd built to keep it from getting past.
Nathan Cross andI understandand a door clicking shut.
I killed my drink.
Someone new had materialized at my elbow, close in the way people got when they'd decided something. Good-looking, easy smile, the kind of person who knew exactly what they were doing and was comfortable with it.
"You look like you could use a better night," he said.
I looked at him.
In the past, before, in the version of myself that had existed before a corridor in a hockey facility and a shirt that smelled like clean soap, this would have been the moment. This was the offer. This was the transaction completing itself, give them the moment and get something back, and I had done this version of it a hundred times and it had always worked fine.
"Yeah," I said. "Maybe."
He slid something across the bar.
Not a drink. The other thing, casual and quiet, just an option, completely my call.
I looked at it.
I thought about Nathan Cross's face when he handed me my laundered shirt.
I thought about the chair. Nathan sitting in the chair all night.
I pushed it back.
"I'm good," I said.
