Page 63 of Handful

“More than half of ‘em were single.” Fewin didn’t look at the report. “Ten. Eleven, maybe.”

“You counted?”

“I count the room. Always have.” No brag in it.

“Did they have a good time?”

He nodded.

“So the next one of them gets engaged,” he said, “where’s he bringing the party?”

I didn’t answer.

“Here. Eighteen new shirts, another eleven bottles. That’s not one night. That’s a standing order I haven’t booked yet.” He slid the report back at me. “And it wasn’t all one table, either. Eleven bottles between eighteen men, they’re on the floor by ten. Groom got generous, started buying for the room — tables on both sides got bottles. Two of ‘em asked me what it was and wrote it down.”

“Huh.” He’d out-argued me with my own arithmetic, and I didn’t hide it. “Fair. Keep the whale, then. But it’s still a bonus, not the business — a table like that walks in twice a year. What pays the bills is forty men who come in every Thursday and drop forty dollars without noticing. So you comp the regular his second drink, and you let the bachelor party pay through the nose for the privilege of being loud. Whales are a bonus. Regulars are the key.” I uncapped my pen. “You’re wasted here, you know that? A bar like this in a real city, you’d have a following. Instead you’re pouring champagne for a motorcycle club in a strip club on Route 9.”

“Best job I’ve ever had,” Fewin said, and went to get the new vermouth he’d been dying to show me since I walked in.

This was the part I hadn’t seen coming: I liked it here.

Not the here of it. The work. The work was clean. The problem was good, and Fewin — God help me — was a genuinely gifted bartender stuck in the body of a man who settled arguments with a pool cue. Teaching him was the most fun I’d had on a clock in years. He argued, then he did it my way, then he came back the next day and told me I’d been right.

“Build me a Manhattan,” I said. “And don’t talk to me while you do it.”

He built it. I watched his hands — good hands, careful — and my thoughts drifted to another man. A man who’d sat at the end of my bar for months memorizing my entire pour spec while I thought he was reading Jane Austen. Then Fewin started under-stirring.

“Four more seconds. You’re scared of bruising it. Don’t be.”

He gave it the four seconds and the Manhattan came out right.

It was barely past noon — chairs still up on the tables, the floor dark, the stage a flat black slab nobody was looking at. That was the point. My rule was daylight only, and the official reason was not the one everyone assumed.

It wasn’t him. Or it wasn’t only him. It was because I had zero interest in standing in a room full of women working the back half of a routine — the pole, the lap dance, the part at the end where it all comes off — while I tried to talk to a brother about pour cost. I’d kept a professional face through a lot of things. I didn’t fancy testing it against a fully nude finale in the evening.

I still couldn’t get over Indira allowing Dutch to buy a strip club. Indira. Who’d lose a night’s sleep over a badly worded flyer. A strip club. The Venom Riders patch over the door of a strip club. The optics were mind-boggling for a marketing specialist.

Then I thought about the bar — the door charge, the champagne margins, what a real cocktail program could pull in a room where men already walked in planning to spend — and I understood exactly why she’d said yes.

Sadly, the rule did not account for the fact that Handful was here in daylight too.

He came out of the back hallway around one with one of the new cocktail servers half a step behind him — Mara, clearly nervous and talking fast. I braced for the version of this I’d have bet money on a year ago — the Handful I’d met first, who spent the better part of ten minutes talking to me while looking at my tits.

He stopped when she stopped. Turned to face her, both feet, hands at his sides. Didn’t touch her. Said something short that got her shoulders down, and by the time they reached the bar she was nearly laughing — and he’d done the whole thing without once looking at her tits.

“Austen,” he said when he clocked me. Even. Always even now — as if that mouth had never been buried between my thighs, as if his tongue hadn’t licked me out on the regular for months. He said my name like I was a stranger. Not like a woman he used to take apart slow, more nights than not.

“Handful.”

“Mara’s up for a spot on the floor. Wanted you to look her over.” He turned to her. “Anything she tells you about this bar — that’s law. She says it, it’s the same as me saying it, only smarter. So listen up.” Then, to me, even. “She’s yours.” And he went off to do something else.

That was the new thing. I expected Handful to stay — lean on the bar, watch us work, make it a show, provide a running commentary on the two of us. Instead he handed me a competent woman, told her my word beat his, and left.

You and me. We’re not done. You’d never know it watching him now — a wide berth, a clean handoff, not one thing left out for me to push against. He’d meant the part about giving me space, apparently, every bit as much as he’d meant the rest.

I ran Mara through it the way I train all of my staff — a table of four, two beers and a water, walk me through your next sixty seconds. The first time, she led with the price. By the third she opened with the ice and the glassware, and let the number land last. She listened the way Fewin listened — argued first, then did it my way.

“You’ll be running this floor in a year,” I told her. “Don’t let them keep you on trays.”