Chapter 2: The Bartender's Advice
The dress was a slip of nothing, a black seam of shadow against her pale skin. It had cost more than a week’s groceries and felt like wearing a secret. The heels were a declaration of war on cobblestone streets. Levy’s ankles protested with every step toward The Guild Hall’s buzzing neon sign, a pink cursive scar in the night.Inside, the air was a solid thing. Cheap beer, old fryer oil, and the cloying ghost of a thousand perfumes fighting a losing battle.The jukebox played something with a thumping, mechanical heart. Men in worn flannel glanced up from their dart game. Their eyes snagged on her for a second—a flash of blue hair, the unfamiliar silhouette—before sliding away, uninterested in a puzzle they hadn’t been introduced to.
Cana was behind the bar, a temple of poured whiskey and withering looks.She was polishing a glass, her movements economical. She saw Levy, and the glass stopped mid-swipe. Her eyes, sharp as broken bottle edges, traveled from the tousled blue hair, down the dress that left little to academic interpretation, to the shoes that said ‘run’ while the outfit begged ‘chase.’ A slow, approving smirk curled her lips.
“Well, well,” Cana said, voice cutting through the surrounding murmur.“The kitten bought claws. And a whole fucking predator’s ensemble to go with them.”
Levy slid onto a stool, the vinyl sticking unpleasantly to her thighs. The pose felt unnatural, an imitation of a woman she’d seen in movies. “I’m experimenting with negative space,” she said, aiming for dry and landing somewhere near brittle.Cana barked a laugh.“Negative space. I like it.” She didn’t ask. She just set a clean tumbler on the bar and pulled a bottle of mid-shelf bourbon.“The usual?”
“Whiskey. Neat.”
The bottle paused.Cana’s eyebrows, artfully sculpted arcs, climbed higher. “Jet’s gonna shit a brick.”
“Jet thinks I’m on a date,” Levy said, the lie now a familiar, useful stone in her pocket.
Cana poured two fingers, the amber liquid catching the sickly bar light.“Are you?”
Levy took the glass. She didn’t sip. She took a mouthful, letting the fire bloom across her tongue and burn a path down her throat.It was awful.It was magnificent. It felt like drinking a truth serum made of lies.“No.I wrote instead. All night.”
“Romancing the duke?”
“I annihilated him.” Levy’s voice was low, a private confession in the public din. “I deleted thirty thousand words of polite yearning.I started something new. It’s… not nice.”
Cana leaned her forearms on the bar, closing the distance. The scent of her—citrus and spice and something permanently smoky—was an anchor. “Tell me.”
So Levy did.The words spilled out, hissed and fervent.The black book with its red letters. The protagonist who was a sculptor of male ego, using their own tools to carve them hollow. The text to Jet. The exhilarating, terrifying act of writing sentences that felt like picking a lock on a part of herself she’d kept boarded up.Cana listened, her gaze never wavering. When Levy finished, clutching the now-half-empty glass, Cana didn’t offer praise or comfort. She lit a cigarette, the flare of the match a tiny, violent sunrise in the dim corner. She took a drag, letting the smoke curl from her nostrils like a thoughtful dragon.
“Good,” Cana said finally.“You’re thinking with a new organ. One that isn’t between your ears for once.” She tapped ash into a chipped tray. “But you’re still thinking small.Literary vengeance is for people who like their revenge quiet and theoretical. You want to stop being a fantasy in their heads?You need to become a fact. A messy, complicated, undeniable fact.”
Levy’s heart tripped against her ribs. “What does that mean?”
Cana’s grin was all edges.“Zeref’s at his penthouse tonight. He’s finishing up some tedious merger or hostile takeover or whatever it is he does to make obscene money.He’s expecting me later.”
Levy knew Zeref. Everyone sort-of knew Zeref.Cana’s on-again, off-again collision of a boyfriend. He was a presence, not a person. Impeccable suits, hair black as a starless night, eyes that held the temperature of a marble slab. He looked at people like they were equations, and he was deciding whether to solve them or erase them.
“He’s… an experience,” Cana continued, her tone clinical.“He doesn’t do small talk. He doesn’t do ‘little sis.’ He’ll look at you like you’re a puzzle he’s already solved but wants to take apart anyway, just to see how the pieces fit. He’s very… thorough.”
The whiskey churned in Levy’s stomach. “Cana, I can’t— You’re suggesting I…”
“I’m suggesting you walk through a door,” Cana interrupted, her voice dropping.“My door.With my blessing. He won’t gentle you along.He won’t put you on a pedestal. He’ll put you on your back, or against a wall, or over the arm of a couch worth more than your car, and he will treat you like a grown woman who showed up knowing exactly what she was asking for. Which, incidentally, is the fastest way to start being one.”
The proposition hung in the smoky air, a live wire dancing between them.It was absurd.It was grotesque. It was, Levy realized with a jolt, the most honest offer she’d ever received. No courtship.No fragile courtship of her fragility.Just a transaction of sensation, a violent education.
“You’re serious,” Levy whispered.“Deadly.” Cana stubbed out her cigarette. “It’s just a night.It’s just a body. You use his to learn about yours.He gets… a novel distraction.Everybody wins.”
Everybody wins. The dark humor of it, the sheer, brutal practicality, was what undid her.It wasn’t romantic. It was logistical.An internship in her own corporeal reality.Levy finished the whiskey. The burn was a familiar warmth now, a companion. She traced the rim of the glass, her mind not racing but settling, crystalizing around the sharp, clean edges of the offer. She thought of Jet’s proprietary hands. Of Gajeel’s ribbing that never quite crossed a line because she wasn’t on the map.Of the hundred thousand deleted words of safe, predictable passion.
She saw herself in Zeref’s penthouse, all cold glass and sharp angles. Saw those calculating eyes on her, seeing not a child, not a sister, but a variable. A new line of code.“What if I hate it?” Levy asked, her voice surprisingly steady.
Cana’s smile was almost tender.“Then you’ll know. And knowledge, my dear, is power.Even the ugly kind. Especially the ugly kind.” She stood up, pulling her keys from her apron.“My shift’s done.I’m headed there now. You can come with me, or you can go home and write another chapter about a woman who wonders what it might be like.” She paused, looking Levy up and down. “But that dress deserves a better story.”
Levy sat for a long moment, the noise of the bar receding into a dull roar.This was the cliff. The one the book’s protagonist would have jumped from without a second thought.She stood.The heels made her taller, her balance precarious. She felt the eyes of the dart players again, but this time, she met the glance of one. Held it for a beat too long, until he looked away, unnerved.“Okay,” Levy said. The word was small, but it didn’t waver.Cana’s grin was triumphant, feral. “Good girl.” She came around the bar, linking her arm through Levy’s. “Let’s go give that negative space something to do.”