Chapter 3: The Bartender's Verdict
Marc drifted in off the street a little after ten. One minute he'd been standing outside Michael's building with his keys in his fist, and the next he was three blocks gone, pushing at a door he hadn't noticed before.
It was a quiet bar. No music, no crowd. Just amber light pooling on a mahogany counter and a low row of bottles glowing like something kept in a church. Four stools. One man at the end of them. A bartender behind the counter, drying a glass with a rag.
Marc took the stool nearest the middle. He didn't look at the mirror behind the bottles, because he'd already tried that this morning in his own bathroom. The man who'd looked back had made him turn off the light.
"Rough night," the bartender said. It wasn't a question.
He set a glass down before Marc could answer, poured two fingers of something amber, and slid it across the wood. His hands moved easy. His eyes didn't. He was younger than Marc by a few years, dark-haired, with a mouth that knew itself.
"I didn't order this," Marc said.
"You looked like a man who needed it before he knew how to ask."
Marc picked up the glass and drank. The whiskey was better than anything he kept at home. It went warm down his throat, and something in his shoulders let go by a fraction.
"Marc," he said.
"David." The bartender smiled and moved the rag in slow circles. "First time in here?"
"Yeah."
"You picked a good night."
"How's that?"
"It's slow. Keeps the company honest."
The man at the far end of the bar finished his drink, left cash under the glass, and walked out without a word. The door sighed shut behind him. Then it was just the two of them and the hum of the cooler.
David poured himself a short measure and leaned on the counter, forearms bare where he'd rolled his sleeves. He didn't drink it yet. He just held the glass and looked at Marc like he was reading a page he'd already read once.
"You came from a friend's place," David said.
"How do you know that?"
"You've still got the look on you." David tipped his head, studying him. "The one a man gets when he's just done something he can't take back."
Marc set his glass down harder than he meant to. The base clicked against the mahogany. David didn't flinch. He drank his own pour and watched, and the silence between them got heavier by the second.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Sure you don't."
Marc stared at the counter. The grain of the wood ran long and dark, like something kept underwater. He'd been an architect for eighteen years. He knew how a thing was built, how a load moved through a structure, where a wall would crack first.
"You're going to tell me it's none of my business," David said.
"It's none of your business."
"See? I'm good at this."
Marc almost laughed. The sound surprised him, short and rough, like it had been in a drawer somewhere. David caught it and smiled a little wider.
"You know what I do most nights?" David said. "I watch men come in here with their shoulders up around their ears. They drink fast. They pay cash. They don't look at me. Then one of them looks at me."
"And?"
"And I can tell the difference between a man who's scared of me and a man who's scared of himself."
Marc's face went hot. He reached for the glass and found it empty. David refilled it without being asked, and his fingers brushed Marc's when he slid it back. Just a second. Just enough that Marc felt it all the way up his arm.
"You're not the first," David said.
"The first what?"
"Whatever you're calling it tonight."
Marc drank. The whiskey was doing its work now, loosening the knot under his ribs. He thought about Michael's kitchen, the warm dishcloth, the smell of clean sheets and sweat. He thought about the way Michael had said next time like it was already scheduled.
"I've got a life," Marc said. "A real one."
"Most men who sit on that stool do."
"You don't even know me."
David smiled and set his empty glass down. "I know you came here instead of going home. I know you haven't checked your phone once since you sat down. I know you flinched when I touched your hand, and then you didn't move it away. That's a start."
Marc looked at his own hand on the wood. He hadn't moved it. He hadn't even noticed.
"It's dead tonight," David said. He untied his apron and folded it on the counter. "I can lock up early. Pour us something better than what's in that glass. We talk, or we don't."
"And if I don't want to talk?"
"Then we don't talk."
Marc looked at the amber light on the mahogany. He looked at David's forearms and his steady hands and the small scar by his eyebrow that some other night had put there. He thought about one night with Michael, whether it was an awakening or just the first crack in a dam.
He thought about his own apartment, dark and waiting, and the man he'd have to be alone with inside it.
"Huh," Marc said, quiet, mostly to himself.
David waited. He didn't push. He just stood there with his hand resting on the edge of the counter, patient as weather.
Marc picked up the glass and finished it. The burn went down clean. He set it down and pushed it across the wood, an inch, toward David's hand.
"Lock the door," he said.
David untied the apron string at his hip, folded it once, and set it on the back counter. He walked to the door with the easy stride of a man who did this every night of his life, and Marc watched the way his jeans sat on him and hated himself for watching. The bolt turned with a heavy clunk. David flipped the sign in the glass to closed, pulled the blind down string, and the bar went darker, just the two lamps still on and the amber glow over the bottles.
"Through here," David said.
He lifted the hinged section of the counter and waited. Marc got off the stool, and his legs felt like a drink he shouldn't have had. He went around the end of the bar, past the cooler with its low hum, and David put one hand flat on the small of his back and steered him through a swinging door. The kitchen beyond was dark and smelled of lemon and cold grease. Past that, a short hall, then a room.
It was an office that had given up on being an office. A leather couch with a blanket folded on the arm. A desk with a laptop and a stack of invoices. A mini fridge, a floor lamp with a yellow shade, a back door with a deadbolt and a frosted window onto the alley. Cardboard boxes against the wall. One square of mirror screwed above a sink in the corner, and Marc made himself not look at it.
David closed the door. He didn't lock it, and that meant something, though Marc wasn't sure what.
"Sit," David said.
Marc sat on the couch. The leather creaked. David took a bottle down from a shelf above the desk, two glasses that were already clean, and poured them both. Then he sat on the other end of the couch and turned into the corner so he could look at Marc straight on.
"You going to tell me what happened tonight, or do I have to guess?"
"You'd guess right."
"Probably." David drank. "The friend. He the first?"
Marc looked at his glass. "Yeah."
"Tonight, or before?"
"Tonight."
David nodded slowly, like a man confirming an address. "And now you can't go home, because your apartment's got all your own shit in it and you'd have to sit there with it by yourself."
"That's about it."
"It's not that bad."
"You don't know that."
"No, I don't," David said. "But I know it's not the worst night of your life. I've seen a few of those. Nobody holds a glass that steady on the worst night of his life."
Marc breathed out through his nose. Something in him wanted to argue and something else wanted to stop arguing, and the second thing was winning, slowly, the way water wins.
David set his glass on the floor and took Marc's out of his hand and set it down next to it. Then he moved. He didn't grab. He came in slow, one knee on the cushion between Marc's legs, and put his palm flat on Marc's chest and felt his heart going, and he smiled at that, close enough that Marc could smell whiskey and soap and the citrus of whatever he'd been cutting behind the bar.
"Tell me to stop and I stop," David said.
"Don't stop."
David kissed him. It was nothing like Michael, who kissed like a friend who'd known you for years and could afford to take his time. David kissed like a stranger, which meant he had nothing to protect. He got a hand in Marc's hair and angled his head where he wanted it and put his tongue in Marc's mouth, and Marc made a sound he didn't recognize and reached for him and got a fistful of his shirt instead.
"That's it," David said against his mouth. "There he is."
He kissed down Marc's jaw, down his throat, and worked Marc's shirt open button by button without looking, quick as a man undoing something he did every day. Marc's chest came bare and David put his mouth on it, tongued a nipple until Marc arched up off the couch, and laughed low when Marc's hand came down hard on his shoulder.
"You're loud," David said.
"I'm not."
"Give it ten minutes."
He slid off the couch to the floor, settled on his knees between Marc's boots, and pulled Marc's belt loose. The buckle knocked against the leather. He got the button, the zipper, and then he hooked his fingers in the waistband of Marc's jeans and his boxers and hauled them down to Marc's knees in one pull.
Marc's cock was already hard and standing up out of dark hair, wet at the tip and jumping when the cool air hit it. David looked at it the way he'd looked at the whiskey pour, with appreciation and no hurry.
"Been a while since somebody looked after this for you," he said.
"He did."
"Oh." David raised an eyebrow. "The friend did. Well. He do it right?"
"I don't have anything to compare it to."
"Then I'll give you something."
He put his mouth on the head and sucked, just the head, tongue flat against the underside, and Marc's whole body pulled taut like a line. David took him deeper by inches, one hand wrapped around the base, working the shaft while his mouth slid down, and Marc watched himself disappear between a stranger's lips in a room that smelled like cold grease and lemons. It was obscene and it was the best thing he'd ever felt and he couldn't stop his hips from pushing up into it.
David pulled off with a wet sound, coughed a little, and went back down. He wasn't gentle. He got a rhythm, sloppy and fast, spit running down his knuckles onto Marc's balls, his free hand pressed flat on Marc's belly to keep him pinned. Marc fisted a handful of that leather cushion and said, "Fuck. Fuck, slow down," and David didn't slow down at all.
"You want to come in my mouth?" David asked, pulling off just long enough to say it. There was saliva on his chin.
"Yeah."
"Then say it."
"Come in your mouth."
David grinned and swallowed him down to the root.
Marc lasted maybe a minute. Less. The pressure came up out of him fast and dirty, and he said David's name, and David stayed on him, tongue working, throat tight, and Marc came with his heels skidding on the floor and his hand in David's hair. David took it all and swallowed, and when he finally slid off, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and sat back on his heels, breathing hard through his nose.
"Better than the whiskey?" David asked.
"Yeah," Marc said. He could barely get the word out. His jeans were around his knees and his shirt was hanging open and he felt like a man who'd been taken apart on somebody else's floor.
There was a sound, small, from the other side of the wall. A phone buzzing on the bar. Once, twice, then stopping. Marc's phone. Michael's name on the screen, he knew, because nobody else called him after ten.
David heard it too. He didn't look at the wall. He looked at Marc, still kneeling, still hard himself inside his jeans, and he stayed where he was and let Marc decide what the next minute was going to be.
"You going to answer that?" David said.
Marc looked at the door. Then at David. Then at the door again.
Marc didn't move. The buzz stopped, and the room was quiet again except for the cooler humming through the wall and David breathing through his nose.
"Your friend," David said.
"Yeah."
"What's his name?"
"Michael."
David stood up, slow, knees cracking. He tucked himself back into his jeans without buttoning them and picked his glass up off the floor. He drank what was left and set it on the desk.
"You going to call him back?" David said.
"No."
"Good answer." David crossed to the desk, picked up Marc's glass too, and poured two fresh fingers in each. "You going to sit there with your cock out all night, or you want to pull your pants up?"
Marc looked down at himself. His jeans were still bunched around his knees, his shirt open, his softening cock lying in the crease of his hip. He hadn't noticed any of it. He pulled his boxers and jeans up, zipped them, didn't bother with the belt, and left the shirt open.
David handed him his glass and sat down on the corner of the desk instead of the couch. From there he was above Marc, looking down the length of him, and Marc felt the size of the room get smaller.
"Where's your phone?" David said.
Marc pointed at the door. "Coat pocket. By the bar."
"You're not going to get up and go answer it."
"No."
David nodded. He sipped his whiskey and watched Marc drink his. The second one hit different than the first. It didn't loosen anything, it just made the room warmer and Marc more willing to be in it.
"Here's my night," David said. "I close up, I count the drawer, I have one drink, I walk home. That's it. That's the whole thing." He turned the glass in his fingers. "I don't take men into this room."
"You took me."
"Yeah."
"Why?"
"Because you came in here with your whole life on your face and you didn't even know it." David drank. "That's rarer than you'd think."
Marc leaned his head back against the couch cushion. The leather was cold on the back of his neck. He thought about saying something about his life, the house, the work, the woman he'd dated for two years before he'd ended it for reasons he'd never given her. None of it got as far as his mouth.
David set his glass down and stood. He stepped between Marc's boots and pushed Marc's knees apart with one hand on each, and Marc let him, and the leather creaked under both of them when David knelt with one knee up on the cushion.
"Another round," David said.
"You mean the drink."
"I mean whatever you're going to let me have."
Marc's mouth was dry. The whiskey was supposed to fix that and wasn't. "You don't get to say it like that and make me choose."
"I'm not making you choose anything. I'm asking." David put a thumb on Marc's jaw and turned his face up. "Another round, yes or no."
Marc looked at the door with the frosted window and the alley light behind it, and at the phone somewhere out there in his coat, and at the man kneeling over him who had no stake in any of it. That was the part that made it easy. David didn't know Michael. David didn't know the office, the truck, the house in the hills, the mother who called every Sunday. David was nobody, which meant Marc could be nobody too.
"Yes," Marc said.
David kissed him, and it was slower this time, the way a man kisses when he's already had what he wanted and can afford to be generous. He got Marc's open shirt down off his shoulders and Marc pulled his arms out of it. David's mouth went down his throat and over his chest, teeth dragging, and Marc's hands went into David's hair and stayed there.
David sat back on his heels and pulled his own shirt off over his head. He was leaner than Michael, wiry, with a dark line of hair down his belly and an old bruise on his ribs that had gone yellow. He unbuttoned his jeans and pushed them down and his cock came out thick and dark, curving up against his stomach. He didn't touch it. He just let Marc look.
"You want to do something for me first?" David said.
Marc slid forward off the cushion onto his knees on the floor. The floor was cold tile under him. He put a hand on David's hip and took him in his mouth, and David hissed through his teeth and got a hand on the back of Marc's head, not pushing, just holding.
"Slower," David said. "You're rushing it."
Marc slowed. He worked the head with his tongue and took him a few inches at a time, one hand on the shaft, and David talked to him the whole way through it, low, easy, none of it meant to wound.
"There. That's it. Watch the teeth. Use your hand on the bottom, yeah, like that."
Marc's jaw ached before long. His knees ached too, and he was hard again, pressing against the inside of his zipper. He pulled off and wiped his mouth and David pulled him up by the arm and walked him backward to the desk.
"Turn around," David said.
Marc turned. David pushed him down over the desk with a hand flat between his shoulder blades, and Marc's cheek came down on a stack of invoices. He heard a drawer open behind him. The click of a cap. Then David's fingers, slick and cold, sliding down the crack of his ass.
"You've done this once," David said.
"Last night."
"Last night." David laughed, quiet. "And you're back for it the next one. That's not a man having a crisis. That's a man finding out something." His finger pressed in, slow, and Marc's whole back went rigid. "Breathe."
Marc breathed. David worked him open with two fingers, curling them, and Marc's cock was leaking into his jeans and every push made his hips jerk against the edge of the desk. It didn't hurt the way it had with Michael. It was already loose, already used, and it took him less time than he wanted to admit.
"Okay," Marc said.
David pulled his fingers out. Then there was the sound of a condom wrapper and a pause, and David's hand came back to his hip.
"Same as last night," David said. "You want it, say so."
"Do it."
David pushed in. Marc's breath left him in one long note. David was thicker than Michael and slower, going in by inches with a hand braced on the desk next to Marc's head, and by the time he was all the way in Marc's hands were shaking against the invoices.
"Fuck," Marc said.
"Too much?"
"No. Keep going."
David fucked him over the desk, steady and deep, one hand on Marc's hip and the other braced. The desk legs scraped the tile an inch at a time. Marc braced himself on his forearms and pushed back into it, and every stroke went through him and came out of his mouth as sound he couldn't do anything about.
"Say my name," David said.
"David."
"Again."
"David."
David leaned over him and got a hand under Marc's jaw and turned his face back and kissed him while he fucked him, and Marc moaned into it, mouth open, sloppy with it. The lube had gone warm and the slap of their skin was loud in the small room. Marc got a hand down and pulled his cock out of his jeans and worked it fast in time with David's hips.
"Slow," David said against his ear. "You come when I come."
"I can't."
"You can."
Marc held on. He bit his own wrist. David fucked him harder, losing the rhythm, breathing hard through his nose, and when he came he went rigid over Marc's back and said something Marc didn't catch. Marc came a second later all over his own hand and the side of the desk, hips jerking, teeth still in his wrist.
David stayed inside him until he softened, then pulled out slow with a hand on Marc's back. Marc heard the condom come off and land in the trash. He stayed bent over the desk with his cheek on the paper, not sure his legs worked.
On the desk, six inches from his face, his phone lit up where it wasn't supposed to be. Face down, buzzing, the white edge of it glowing around the seam against the wood. David had gone out and gotten it while Marc was on his knees on the floor and never said a word.
It buzzed a third time and stopped. Marc didn't turn it over. David's hand came down on the back of his neck, warm and steady, and stayed there.
The liquor store called. He'd left the number there for Michael.
David's hand stayed on the back of Marc's neck, warm and steady, not holding him down. Just there.
"That's yours," David said. The desk, the phone, a nod at all of it. "It's been going since you got on your knees. I went out and got it while you weren't looking."
Marc lifted his head off the invoices. The paper had left a crease on his cheek. His legs were still shaking, and he got one boot flat on the tile and pulled himself up straight with a hand on the desk edge.
"You could have left it," he said.
"I could've done a lot of things."
David picked up his jeans and stepped into them, no rush. He buttoned them and left the shirt off, and Marc caught himself watching the line of hair down his belly and looked away like it was a draft he could close.
"Check it," David said.
Marc turned the phone over. Three missed calls from Michael. One voicemail. He didn't play it. He set the phone back down and pushed it away from him, an inch, the same distance he'd pushed his glass.
"Not playing it?"
"No."
"Wise." David poured the last of the whiskey into both glasses and handed Marc his. He sat back on the desk this time, hip against the invoices, looking down. "How long's this been going on? The two of you."
"Two days. It was last night."
"Last night and tonight's the second time." David drank. "That's quick for somebody who says he's got a life."
Marc drank too. It went down hot and settled the shake in his hands. He thought about answering and couldn't find a version that wasn't a lie.
"You want to tell me what you're going to do tomorrow?" David said.
"Work."
"That's not what I asked."
Marc looked at the frosted door, the alley light behind it, the way it made the room feel like the inside of a bottle. "I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow."
"That's the first honest thing you've said all night."
David turned and opened the drawer under the desk. Marc tensed, expecting the condoms again, but David came up with a small brass key on a wire ring. He set it on the wood between them and let Marc look at it.
"Back door," David said. "Alley side. Works any night I'm here, and I'm here six nights out of seven."
Marc stared at the key. It was the color of the lampshade, dull and used at the teeth.
"That's not a drink."
"No, it's not."
"You're giving me a key."
"I'm offering you one. You can leave it on the desk and walk out the front. It won't hurt my feelings. I don't know you well enough for that yet."
Marc laughed, short and rough, and it surprised him again. He put his glass down and rubbed his face with both hands. When he took them away, David was still watching him with that patient look, like weather.
"Why?" Marc said. "You don't know me."
"I know the version of you that comes in here at ten with your shoulders up. That's the only version I get, and I like him fine." David turned the key over with one finger. "What I don't want is you showing up next week pretending last night didn't happen. That gets old. If you're going to come back, come back on purpose."
"And if I don't come back?"
"Then the key sits in the drawer and I pour somebody else a whiskey."
Marc picked up the key and closed his fist around it. The brass was cool, then not.
"What do you get out of it?" he said.
"Company that isn't paying me." David slid off the desk and took the two glasses to the little sink. Water ran. He rinsed them and set them upside down on a rag without turning around. "I pour drinks for strangers nine hours a night. You'd be amazed what that does to a man's week."
Marc got his shirt off the floor and put it on. He did the buttons wrong the first time and had to start over. His belt was still unbuckled, and he fixed that too, and when he looked up David was leaning in the doorway with his arms crossed.
"You want me to walk you out the back?" David said.
"Yeah."
David got the lamp and they went down the short hall through the dark kitchen, past the cooler and the stacked crates, and out the back door into the alley. It was cold and smelled like rain that hadn't fallen yet. A single sodium light buzzed on a pole. Marc's breath showed.
Michael's car wasn't here. Of course it wasn't. Michael was thirty blocks away in a warm kitchen with his phone in his hand, and Marc was standing in an alley behind a bar with a stranger's key in his fist.
"You good to drive?" David said.
"Yeah."
"Text somebody. Anybody. Doesn't have to be him."
"I'll text somebody."
David nodded and pulled the door half shut, keeping the light behind him. The last thing Marc saw was the shape of him in the doorway, shirtless in the cold, and then the door clicked and the alley went back to one buzzing lamp and the wet smell of the street.
Marc stood there a minute. His phone was in his other hand, screen dark, no notifications since the last one. He thought about the voicemail and didn't play it. He thought about the key and put it in the pocket of his jeans, next to the wallet, where he'd feel it every time he reached for money.
The car was two blocks up. He walked to it. He sat behind the wheel without starting it and looked at his own hands on the wheel for a while, and they looked like his hands.
Then he started the engine, and he drove home.