“One song. Please.”
She’s doing the face. The face she probably uses on Captain Donnelly, the one that’s all sincerity and zero guile and makes it nearly impossible to say no without feeling like you just kicked a golden retriever.
“One song,” I say. “If it’s Taylor Swift I’m burning the place down.”
“It’s not Taylor Swift.” She pulls out her phone. “How do I connect?”
“You don’t connect. You tell me the song and I decide if it’s worthy of the speakers.”
“Against Me! ‘Don’t Lose Touch.’”
I stop wiping the bar.
She requested my song. The one I told her was mine. The one I’ve never played at Anthem because it’s too close to something I keep for myself, and she walked into my bar on a Saturday night with her four best friends and asked me to play it like it was nothing, like she didn’t just reach into my chest and find the thing I didn’t offer her.
“That’s a deep cut,” I say. My voice is even. I’m good at even.
“You said it was yours. I want to hear it in here.” She gestures at the room. “I want to hear what it sounds like in this place.”
I could say no. I should say no. This is my bar and my playlist and that song is private, and playing it because a twenty-two-year-old with a smile that could power a small city asked me to would be giving up something I didn’t plan to give.
I play it.
Laura Jane Grace’s voice fills the room, cutting through the noise from Zoe’s table and the pool game and the clinking glasses. The opening chords are clean and restless and familiar in a way that feels like pressing on a bruise, and I stand behind the bar and listen to a song I’ve listened to a thousand times in private hearing it for the first time in this room.
It sounds good. It sounds like Anthem. It sounds like it should have been here all along.
Zoe doesn’t say anything. She just sits on her stool with her Moscow mule and listens, and when the chorus hits she closes her eyes for a second, and I watch her listen the way I’ve been watching her since she walked in on a Tuesday and asked to be destroyed and I gave her ginger ale instead.
The song ends. The playlist moves on. Rancid. Different energy, louder, and the room adjusts.
“Thank you,” Zoe says.
“Don’t thank me. It’s just a song.”
“It’s not just a song.” She looks at me. “You played it because I asked.”
“I play lots of songs because people ask.”
“But not that one.” She finishes her mule. “Thanks, Teague. For letting me hear it.”
She slides off the stool and goes back to her friends. Keely pulls her into a hug and whispers something in her ear and Zoe laughs and they all pile together in the booth, loud and young and taking up more space than five people should be able to take up.
I wash the mug. Wipe the bar. Laura Jane Grace is still in the speakers even though Rancid is playing, and I’m feeling something I’m not going to name.
They leave at midnight. All of them, together, a mass exit of bags and phones and hugs and one of them yelling “bye Teague!” from the door like we’re friends. Zoe is last. She stops at the bar and puts a twenty down and looks at me.
“Same time next week?”
“You know the hours.”
“I know your hours.” She picks up her jacket. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Zoe.”
The door closes. The bar goes quiet. I stand there for a moment, in the neon light, and then I pick up the twenty and put it in the tip jar and start closing.
I don’t play “Don’t Lose Touch” again. Once was enough. Once was already too much. But I don’t take it off the playlist queue either.
