Page 58 of Handful

“A venue that happens to be a strip club.” She was sitting at the end of my bar at three in the afternoon with a sparkling water. “Hear the whole pitch before you say no.”

“I can listen and say no. I’m a professional. I multitask. And the more times you say ‘venue,’ the more it sounds like ‘strip club.’”

It had been sixteen days since I’d stood on the sidewalk outside this bar and ended things with the man I was now fairly sure this entire conversation was going to be about. Sixteen days since he’d heard me out, agreed to none of it, and told me — calm as you like — that I was his last and we weren’t done. Then he’d done the thing I least expected: exactly what he’d said he would. Given me room. Not a call, not a text, not a slow lap of the block on that bike. Sixteen days of the quiet I’d asked for, handed over without a fight. Indira had texted me twice in that window — once about nothing, once to say she was around if I wanted company — and hadn’t mentioned him. I’d loved her a little for it, but I should have known that meant she was saving it up.

“The club bought a place out on Route 9,” she said. “The Dollhouse.”

“I know the Dollhouse. By reputation. Seedy.”

“The reputation was accurate. Sticky floors, cheap beer, a bar built around one idea — get a man drunk as fast as you can and aim him at the stage. That was the business model, and it ran that way for ten years.” She took a sip of her water. “It’s not how Venom’s going to run it.”

I’d been cutting limes for the night ahead. I put the knife down. “Go on.”

“I want it to sell forty-dollar champagne to a table of guys celebrating a bachelor party. I want cocktails. Premium spirits behind glass. Bottle service to the floor.” She finally looked at me straight. “The dancing pays the lights. The bar’s where the room could actually make money, and right now it’s leaving every cent of it on the table, because nobody running that place has ever set foot in a bar that sold anything other than beer.”

She’d had my interest the second I put that knife down, and we both knew it. I could see the whole thing in about four seconds. A short, tight menu. Train the floor to sell up instead of just fetching. The economics of a champagne pour at that volume. It was a genuinely good problem — the kind I could do in my sleep, and had been doing for three years on somebody else’s bottom line while I saved to open a bar of my own.

“It’s a good idea,” I said. “The upscaling — genuinely. And very much not a biker’s instinct.” I gave her a look. “All that drinking you did in your twenties finally paying off, I suppose.”

Indira didn’t take it. She looked up at the rafters, then down at the bar between us, weighing something.

“Indira.”

“It wasn’t my idea.” She met my eyes. “It was Handful’s. He’s running the place.”

It came out of me before I could stop it — a laugh, the first I’d managed in sixteen days. “Of course he is. Of course Handful’s running a strip club.” I had to put a hand on the bar. “He’s perfect for it. The man’s logged more hours in rooms like that than half the women who work in them — whole weeks of his life, gone, a dollar at a time into somebody’s thong. King of the lap dance. I’d put money on him having a favorite in every one of those sad little private rooms in the back—”

Indira was already shaking her head.

“You’d be surprised.” She let me run down. “He didn’t pitch the bar, Austen. Not first. First he pitched shutting the place down — closing it, gutting it, spending a small fortune to make it somewhere a woman could work a shift without a hand on her.”

Somewhere in there I’d stopped laughing.

“He asked the club to put the dancers on base pay the whole week we’re closed, so nobody loses a paycheck over a refit they never asked for. The bar came last. He said it was where the real money had been hiding the whole time, and that he knew it would work because he’d spent a few months watching somebody do it right.” She let that sit, not cruelly, just plainly.

Five months he’d sat at the end of this bar with a paperback, and I’d thought he was learning to be a person. Apparently he’d also been taking notes on my cocktails and pour costs. I picked up a rag and wiped a part of the bar that didn’t need it.

“So that’s the job,” Indira went on, brisk again, letting me off the hook. “Build the bar. Concept, menu, layout, train the staff, stand it up. A consult, not a life sentence — daytime, your hours, your call on every glass. The place is gutted to the studs right now for a refit, so you’d be building it clean instead of inheriting somebody’s mess.” She named a number.

I stopped wiping the bar.

It was a serious number. Enough to take a real bite out of the down payment I needed, the kind of money that turns a five-year plan into a three-year one — and Indira knew it, because she’d done her homework on me the way she does on everything.

“The owners here are fine with it,” she added, before I could reach for that objection. “I already floated it to them. Daytime consult, doesn’t touch your shifts, and they’d like to keep you happy. I may have implied you were weighing up your options.”

“You strong-armed my bosses?”

“I informed your bosses.” She smiled. “Think about what it is, Austen, not where it is. You’re not going to work at a strip club. You’re the front-of-house lead on a full venue repositioning. Taking a tired adult room with beer in the carpet and turning it into a place that makes money on craft and service. That’s not a stain on a resume. That’s the line that gets you the loan. I took a failing concept and rebuilt its entire revenue model. Put that on the wall of your own bar someday.”

“You’re very good at this.”

“Marketing is my career.” She lifted her water. “It’s good money, it’s the best experience you’ll get anywhere, it accelerates the exact thing you’re working toward, and it’s interesting, which you and I both know is the part you can’t actually say no to.”

I looked at her. She looked back, serene, holding all her cards face-down on my bar.

“There’s exactly one downside,” I said.

“Mm.”