Author's note: Very little naughty stuff in the first chapter.
*****
I mentally willed the TA to move faster as he distributed exams to the auditorium. Almost two hundred other people surrounded me in the freshman history class, the soft rustling of their presence damped by the sheer size of the auditorium and the soft white-noise hum of air conditioning. All I could think about as people in the front row fumbled with stacks of exam copies, slowly passing them backward, is that
I
should have sat at the front, because I would have already been able to get started.
I'm prepared for the test, mostly because I was up until two this morning reviewing my notes and rereading half a semester's worth of the textbook. I'm exhausted, and somehow still nervous that I've forgotten some enormous segment of antebellum American history that I should have reviewed. Add that to the fact that we have two hours for the test, but I'm due at my bar shift in about forty minutes, and you have a pretty good baseline of where my daily anxiety finds its level.
The owner of the bar told me he needed me for the noon shift today, and I tried to explain about my exam schedule (my classes are normally much earlier), but as usual I knuckled under. I've always been terrified of authority figures. I went through a grocery store express checkout line with too many items once (I didn't know!) and I almost cried when the clerk made a comment about it.
Finally the stack of papers made back it to me. I snatched it out of the hand of the girl sitting in front of me, ripped one off the top, and shoved the rest of the stack backwards, almost letting go of it before the boy behind me had a chance to grab it. I scrawled my name across the line at the top and set to work with a will. Most of the exam was multiple choice, and I tore through those questions in under fifteen minutes. The last ten were essay questions, though, and I had to take enough time to make my answers legible. By the time I finished the last one, a glance at the wall clock told me I had five minutes until my shift started.
If I hadn't been in such a state, I would have been calm enough to realize there was no way I'd be able to cover the half-mile between my campus and the bar in that amount of time, not safely. As it was, I shot up out of my desk, edged past the people on my row with barely an 'excuse me', and literally ran down the steps to the professor's table, where I dropped the paper in front of him. I glanced up and found myself pinned by his glare.
"Miss...," he said, glancing at the name at the top of my exam. "...Thompson. Do you have somewhere else to be?"
His voice echoed loudly in the silent chamber, and I know the entire class was staring at us. I could feel my ears burning before I started to speak. "Y... Yes sir, my job, sir."
"I hope you take this class seriously, Ms. Thompson. This is not high school."
"No, professor, I mean, yes sir, I do, I just..."
"Go." He turned back to his book, done with me.
I knew my entire face was as red as my hair as I turned and quickly walked up the stairs. I didn't look at anyone, because I
knew
they were all staring at me. I made it through the doors of the auditorium and waited to hear them click shut behind me before I began sprinting full tilt, my backpack thumping against my spine as I exploded out of the building and across the quad. My mind kept skittering away from the events of the last couple of minutes, as though they were just too much to bear. I was fighting tears, which probably explains why I was half blind when I tried to run across the street that acted as the border of the campus. Brakes squealed, and a someone grabbed my arm and yanked me backward onto the curb, and onto my ass. The driver of the delivery truck who barely missed me had a few choice things to yell out his window (I don't speak... Latvian?, but I'm pretty sure they weren't compliments) as he drove away.
I made a strange little cough-hiccup as my brain tried to choose between panic and shock. It finally settled on both. I looked up at the guy who'd dragged me backwards out of the road... a cop. Of course it was a cop, how could it not be?
"In a hurry, ma'am?"
"I'm so, so sorry, officer, I'm late for work..."
"You were almost late in general. What if that truck had swerved onto the sidewalk to miss you? How many people do you think could have been hurt, or died?"
"...I don't... I don't know... I'm so sorry..."
"Sorry doesn't bring someones child back to life, ma'am. Or their brother, or mother. Stand up, please."
I did, shakily, and the next ten minutes were the most embarrassing of my life. The policeman made me take a field sobriety test, right there on the sidewalk. By the end of it a small crowd had formed at the front of a coffee shop across the street and were watching as me made me perform. I began to develop a curious impulse to throw myself back in the path of oncoming traffic. He was less than sympathetic, but eventually walked me to the crossing at the corner of campus and sent me on my way without a ticket.
I was pretty shell-shocked by this point, and by the time I finally slouched through the door of the bar I was a full half-hour late for my shift. The owner was furious, in his quiet-in-front-of-the-customers way, and jerked his head back toward the kitchen. He joined me there a few moments later, led me back to his office, and spent the next ten minutes explaining the concept of responsibility to me at about a hundred decibels. I sniffled, looked at the carpet, and said 'yes, sir' and 'no, sir'. Finally, calmer but still disgusted, he ordered me back out front, behind the bar.
The place was mostly empty, because almost all of the university kids were either taking exams or getting ready to head home for Christmas break. We don't offer much in the way of food, nothing that requires a paid cook, so the lunchtime crowd of office executives generally passes us by. Besides me and the owner in the back, there was a lady working on a laptop at a table by the window, and one older guy sitting at the bar, nursing a beer and occasionally munching on a peanut while he read the financial pages.
I took a moment to repair my makeup and squeeze a couple of drops into my red, puffy eyes. I checked that the customers had everything they needed, and then fished a worn clipboard out from behind the counter. It was Tuesday, which was usually pretty slow even in the evening, and so it was the day of the week the bar did inventory. I say 'the bar', but for the last month or so it's been me exclusively, because the owner liked how OCD I tend to be about things like liquor levels in individual bottles.
It was exactly the kind of mindless, attention-absorbing task I need at the moment, so I didn't have to think about the events of the morning. I tied back my hair and spent the next fifteen minutes crouching behind the bar, going through the cabinets and making notes about everything there, from napkins and straws to bitters and giant jars of olives. I popped up every now and then to make sure no one was waiting for a beer or something, which is the first time I saw him.
I stood up and there was a man seated at the counter, directly across from me. At the table by the window, and at the bar stool a bit further down, the previous customers had both dropped a few bills and left the bar. The owner was still in the back, if he was still in the building at all. The man at the bar was... absorbing. Tallish, or at least taller than me, but not by much. In terms of age, he could have been anywhere between thirty and fifty. Dark brown hair, with just a touch of grey at the temples, and perhaps just starting to thin. To this day, despite all of the time I spent with him, I have never been able to call his face to mind. All I could ever remember were those eyes, that pale watery blue, the irises a little too large, and the pupils a bit too small, as though he used less light than the rest of us. Given everything else, that would be the least surprising thing about him.
"I would like an old-fashioned," he said. I never forgot that voice, silk across gravel. "I'd like you to make it with this. You may charge me for your most expensive bourbon."
He put a flask on the wood surface of the bar, leather and silver, etched with a hunting scene.
"We, um, we aren't supposed to do that..."
"Do what?"
"Use outside alcohol."
"It's probably best if you check with your manager, then, isn't it?"
"I... yes. I'll be right back."
Inevitably, the owner wasn't in the back. I even checked in the alley behind the bar, and his car wasn't there. Glumly, I returned to the bar.
"I take it your manager said no," said the man.
"Uh, no, no, it's just that I'm the only one here and... I'm sorry, but..."
