Chapter 1
Chapter One
Reid
“Hey! Hey bartender! Hey!” The words cut through the noise of the bar and grated on my ears. Instead of telling the speaker to fuck off like I wanted to, I had to put a smile on my face and move over to where the woman was snapping her fingers and yelling at me.
“What can I get for you?” I asked for what felt like the thousandth time that night.
The woman gave me a flirty look and leaned in. “Surprise me.”
Great. My favorite. The chances that I’d make something she wouldn’t like and would then complain about were high. Luckily, this was not my first rodeo. Figuratively. I’d never actually been to a rodeo.
“You got it,” I told her with a wink, and she giggled. Most of the time, I didn’t mind that part of my job involved flirting with customers to get better tips. But some nights? Like tonight? All I wanted was to go home and not have to talk or smile at anyone for at least ten hours.
Alas, I still had three hours left in my shift and they were going to be brutal as the night wore on and the alcohol flowed. I had no issues with cutting anyone off, and the bouncers would back me up, but still.
I made the woman one of our signature drinks that was a universal crowd pleaser and she declared it was the best drink she’d ever had, so that was something. Hopefully she’d also tell me that with a generous tip.
As the night wore on, I switched my body to function on autopilot, moving back and forth, mixing drinks and wiping spills and keeping track of the other bartenders. It was Saturday night and even though it was the end of April, there wasn’t much else to do in the city on a Friday night but to slog through the slush and get warm and wasted in a bar. If I didn’t work here, it might be something I’d do. Not every weekend, but if I was with my friends then I would. Although, now that two of my closest friends were happily coupled, they weren’t as much fun to go out with and I’d told them that to their faces.
At least I still had Jo. She was single as hell while she fought her way through grad school, and I was single because I hated most people. That, and my one and only brush with serious romance ended up earning me one spectacularly broken heart. Never again.
“Can I tell you a secret?” a voice slurred in what she thought was a whisper but was actually a tipsy yell.
“Sure,” I told her, smiling. She could barely focus her eyes so if she was trying to order another drink, she was out of luck. I’d be ordering her a car to take her home. I glanced over and caught one of the bouncer’s eyes in case I needed some backup.
“I’m not even, I’m not even a lesbian,” she tried to tell me but ended up telling just about everyone.
“Okay,” I said.
“I wish I was. Men are just the worsttttt, you know? My fiancé cheated on me with his fucking coworker. She’s a whore.”
I nodded because this was also part of my job: coddling people who got emotional when they drank. I wouldn’t say that I was a therapist, but I did a lot of listening to people’s problems.
“I’m so sorry to hear that,” I said. “Are you here by yourself?”
She shook her head and nearly knocked herself over. “My friend Shhhara is with me.”
Well where the hell was she? Come get your friend, Shhhara.
“There you are!” a voice said as a woman came over to my new friend.
“Shhharaaaaa,” the other girl said, throwing her arms around her friend and almost falling into her. “I’m gonna get another drink.”
“No, baby, you’re not. We’re gonna go home, okay?”
“You good?” I asked Sara, who looked to be steady on her feet.
“Why aren’t I gayyyyyy?” the other woman wailed.
Sara gave me a sheepish look.
“She won’t even remember in the morning,” I said.
“I would hope not,” Sara said, dragging her friend away from the bar.
Shaking my head, I moved on to the next person and realized it was Jo.
“What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?” I asked.
She winked at me. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”
I flagged down one of the other bartenders and said I was taking a break. Jo followed me outside, even though it was cold. The interior of the bar could get stifling on busy nights.
“Ahhh,” I said, filling my lungs with city air. The smell of cigarettes and weed combined with pavement and gasoline and all the other city smells that I couldn’t help but love. It helped wash away the smell of the bar which was mostly alcohol and sweat and too many bodies packed in one space together.
“Rough night?” she asked, leaning against the brick wall of the building.
“Just like every other night. What are you doing here?” Ever since she’d started school, she’d been hard to pin down because she was so busy. I missed her just as much as I missed Cade and Hunter. I couldn’t help but feel a little abandoned while my friends were on all these new adventures.
“Had to get out. I was going to lose my mind,” she said, rubbing her eyes. She did look tired, even under the weak light.
Her wavy hair was pulled into a loose bun on top of her head and her skin was pale.
“You need more sunshine, kid,” I said.
She rolled her eyes. “You’re one to talk. You work vampire hours.”
That was true. I slept through a lot of days after my shifts. I worked just enough to get by. Sometimes I got a little bit of money teaching a baby ballet class here and there. For some reason the little kids thought me being surly was funny and none of the parents had complained. I wasn’t mean or anything, but I also wasn’t sunshines and rainbows and a cutesy voice. They got talked to like they were people and my goal was for them to have fun, not to have perfect form. If they wanted to spend the entire class spinning in a circle over and over, I wasn’t going to do much to stop it. You had to pick your battles and I didn’t really want to battle with kids.
“It’s not so bad,” I said, and she gave me a look.
“You literally complain about this job all the time,” she said. It was true, but it was rude of her to point it out.
“Yeah, well,” I said and then couldn’t think of anything else. Talking so much at my job seemed to use up all my words, and then I had nothing left over.
“Don’t,” I told her when I saw her open her mouth to start telling me that I should get a different job. I couldn’t count how many times I’d had that conversation with my friends. I wasn’t quitting my job at Sapph. Yes, it sucked, but it sucked a hell of a lot less than living under my mother’s thumb like I used to.
Plus, working as a bartender really pissed her off and that was a little extra twist of satisfaction.
“I’m fine,” I said.
Jo raised her hands. “Okay. I didn’t come to harass you.”
I snorted. “Yeah you did.”
She grinned. “Maybe a little bit. You know it’s out of love.” It was. I teased my friends right back. With affection.
“Any good stories?” Jo asked. My friends always wanted to know my best Sapph stories.
“Almost had to call a car for a drunk girl who just had to tell me that she wasn’t a lesbian and her fiancé had cheated on her. Fortunately, her friend seemed sober enough and took her home. I wonder if she’s even going to remember coming here.” Probably not. “How’s school?” I asked.
She blew out a breath and closed her eyes. “Sometimes I wish I could go back in time and tell the me who decided that grad school was a good idea that she should do something else. Anything else.”
“Awww,” I said, reaching out and squeezing her shoulder. I wasn’t much into touching, but I knew she was having a rough time.
“It’ll be fine. It will all be worth it in the end, but right now it doesn’t feel like it, you know?”
How many times had I told myself the same thing when I’d been bandaging my bleeding toes after a particularly rough dance class? It hadn’t worked out for me, but there was a big difference between what I’d been doing and what Jo was doing now.
She was living life on her own terms and that was fucking beautiful.
“Can I help?” I asked.
She gave me an exhausted smile. “Make me that drink I like and let me sit at the bar and not think about the paper I need to write or all the research I need to do. I just want to be in a room of people and just…be. And see pretty girls dancing.” She let out a little sigh.
I inhaled a deep breath and got a whiff of someone else’s cigarette. I’d smoked for a brief period a few years ago in another attempt to piss off my mom before I switched to vapes. I’d given both up without much fuss, but every now and then a craving hit me like a truck.
Fuck. I needed to get back to work to get my mind off it.
Jo and I went back inside, and I made her the drink she wanted and went back to doing my damn job.
I got home after three, as usual. Having odd hours meant that I experienced the world in those strange in-between times that not many other people did.
My apartment was close enough to the bar that I was able to walk home. Sure, sometimes it was a little sketchy, but I felt safe most of the time.
The first thing I did upon locking my door and dropping my stuff was to strip naked, leaving my clothes in a pile on the floor and stumbling into the shower.
It didn’t matter that the water wasn’t warm yet. I just loved the feeling of washing off the night and letting it go down the drain. All the forced smiles and small talk and waiting on people took their toll on me.
Even though I was exhausted, I still wasn’t ready to sleep yet, so after I showered so long I ran out of hot water, I got out and went to my kitchen.
Food options were slim, since I needed to go grocery shopping, but I had some leftover fried rice and egg rolls that were probably okay that I ate cold while standing up in the kitchen. It didn’t make sense that I’d been standing all night and was still standing, but I was too hungry to care.
I’d thrown on an oversize T-shirt and underwear and once my stomach wasn’t screaming, I shuffled to my bedroom to try and wind down so I could sleep. It was always a fight. I’d never been one of those people who could crash in a few minutes and stay knocked out the whole night.
Working bar hours had made it even worse so now it was a battle every time. I’d tried all the tricks like turning off devices and meditation and counting and all that crap, but nothing had worked so now I’d just read until I finally passed out. My work schedule made doing things during the day difficult, but I was only working four shifts a week now. I’d done five or more and burned out so bad that I’d almost had to quit. Slowing down was the only option, and as much as I hated it, I refused to run my body into the ground again. Not after so many years of dancing.
Winding down after a shift when I was finally in bed was actually one of my favorite parts of the week.
My first step was to log onto my favorite fanfic site and check to see if some of my favorite fics had updated. One of them hadn’t had any updates in three years and I was starting to wonder if it would ever be finished. I was so close to sending a message to the author and begging.
I made sure to ignore my own stats; too tired to deal with all that right now. I confined my fanfic writing to certain hours that I could really devote to it.
I read fanfic for a while and then switched to the library app because I had an ebook that was going to expire soon, and I wanted to finish it before it was due.
When it came to my reading tastes, they were kind of all over the place. Most of what I read was romance, from the sweet to the depraved and everything in between. If a book was captivating, I didn’t really care about much else. As long as it kept my attention, I was in.
When I’d first gotten into fanfic, I hadn’t really wanted much romance at all. I guess I’d thought that it was silly or boring or cringey, but then I read a few and one in particular that was so good I could barely think about anything else. That had been a hard time. I’d been a junior in high school and my entire life had been school, dance, repeat. I’d been too strung out from dance to really have friends, but there was a group of people I had lunch and sometimes spent time with, and one of the girls (who I had a raging crush on, in hindsight) had told me about a great story she read and then it was all over after that. It just so happened the story was set in the world of a show that I’d become obsessed with. I lost so much sleep from reading that my teachers started worrying about me and my mom and I had never fought so much before.
Looking back, I’d been so desperate for something that brought me joy in those days. School didn’t, most of the time. Dance hadn’t for a long time. I was so grateful that I’d found fanfic at a time in my life when things could have gone very differently. I wouldn’t say that it saved my life, but it definitely was a bright spot during a dark time and still brought me so much joy, both reading and writing it.
I didn’t finish my library book before I passed out and the next time I woke, sun streamed through my window and my tablet was under me and digging into my back.
“Fuck,” I said as I rubbed my eyes and tried to wake up. Caffeine needed to happen immediately. I had another shift tonight and then a few days off, which I always looked forward to. Cade and Eloise were having a party at their house, and I’d agreed to go. The food and drinks alone were worth showing up for. I guess the company wasn’t so bad either. Cade’s girlfriend Eloise had grown on me. She was incredibly impressive, and I would die before I admitted it, but I was kind of in awe of her. Not that I wanted to be a famous romance writer, but anyone who could consistently hit bestseller lists year after year was someone to admire. I’d read her books and while they weren’t my favorites, they sure as hell kept me turning the pages. In my opinion, they would have been better if they’d been sapphic, but Eloise had heard us tell her that enough times already.
I stared at the ceiling and gave myself a pep talk to get up. If I got up, then I could order breakfast because I didn’t really have much in the kitchen that would make a decent breakfast. I could eat it on the couch with the curtains open and the sunshine pouring in and hopefully giving me some vitamin D so I didn’t actually turn into a vampire. I loved reading about vampires, but becoming one wasn’t on my agenda.
I scrolled my phone for something new to order for breakfast, but ended up just getting the same sandwich, hash browns, and bubble tea that I always did.
My brain took a while to come online and I puttered around trying to clean and get ready for my day. In between sucking down the bubble tea and inhaling my sandwich, I finally did some laundry and picked up so I wasn’t living in a disgusting pit.
Housekeeping was usually low on my priority list and my apartment had gotten bad lately.
Once things were kind of in order, I only had a little bit of sunlight left, so I went outside to walk around my neighborhood while listening to an audiobook. Even though the weather was cold, and the sidewalks were slushy, the sun was warm on my skin.
Since my book was so good, I kept walking all the way down to the waterfront. The wind coming off the water was sharp and cut through my spring coat. I wrapped my arms around myself and breathed deeply. I did love living by the ocean. Even on the gloomiest days of spring it was beautiful.
By the time I got back home, the sun had sunk below the horizon and it was time to get ready for work. Another night, another shift.
I awoke on Sunday to noise. A lot of noise. Banging and thumping and sounds that I couldn’t ignore.
“What the fuck ,” I croaked as I glared at the wall behind my bed. The sounds were coming from the apartment next to mine. Things had been pretty quiet over there for a while, but it sounded like someone was moving in. Great. Fantastic. Just what I needed in my life.
When it came to my neighbors, my philosophy was that their lives were none of my business. Anything other than a polite nod was too much contact. I didn’t want to be friends; I didn’t want to knock on their door for a cup of sugar. We could live in the same space, but we didn’t have to be besties.
Hopefully my new neighbor wasn’t one of those overly friendly types. My building was pretty small but quiet for the most part. It wasn’t the cheapest place around, but it wasn’t as nice as Hunter’s place. To be fair, she had one of the nicest apartments in the whole city, but that’s what happened when you had a trust fund to supplement your income. Not that I resented her for it. She worked hard at a bunch of things when she could have just sat on her ass and done nothing. I never would have thought that I’d be close with someone like that, but she’d changed my perceptions of rich people. Plus, her parents were assholes. We had that in common.
“For fuck’s sake,” I said as the banging and noise continued. Moving was usually loud, but this felt like an attack. I’d hoped to have some quiet time to read until I had to go over to Cade and Eloise’s house.
Guess that wasn’t happening.