The room came back.
The club. The bar. The broken glass on the floor. The wolf Dom looking mortified, already backing away, his hands up in the universal gesture of I'm sorry, I didn't mean to.
Amani exhaled. "I'm fine."
"You don't have to be," Bethany said.
"I know. But I am." He made himself let go of the bar. His hands were shaking. He shoved them into the hoodie's pocket where no one could see them. "Just startled me. I'll clean it up."
"I'll clean it up. You sit."
He wanted to argue. The old Amani would have argued, would have said something sharp and bratty about being perfectly capable of cleaning up his own messes, kitten. But the old Amani had never flinched at a touch from a regular and the old Amani had never shattered a glass because someone brushed his arm and the old Amani was four blocks and five days away from where they were standing now.
"Okay," he said.
He sat on the stool behind the bar, the one Lady Leo kept there for slow nights, the one he'd never used because sitting down meant not being in motion and not being in motion meant not being useful and not being useful meant not being himself. He sat on it and watched Bethany sweep up the glass and wipe down the floor and he pressed his shaking hands flat against his thighs under the bar where nobody could see. He breathed.
Sero came in at ten.
He didn't come to the bar right away. He went to his usual stool, third from the left, the one that had an unobstructed view of the main floor and the private room hallway and the bar, the reason Sero liked it, and he sat down and he waited.
Amani saw him. He'd been dreading this and needing it in equal measure. Sero was the one person in the building who would understand, and that understanding was exactly what made it terrifying. It was one thing to be seen by people who didn't know. It was another thing entirely to be seen by someone who did.
He poured Sero's Shirely Temple over ice with a wedge of lime without being asked. Same as always. He walked it over and set it down and Sero looked at him, really looked, the way he'd looked at Amani the night after the cum-harvesting when Amani had sat with him at this bar and told him the truth about what Trevor had done, and Sero's dark eyes moved over the hoodie and the jeans and the careful way Amani was holding himself and then he picked up his drink and took a sip.
"You changed the limes," Sero said.
Amani blinked. "What?"
"The lime in this. It's different from the ones Bethany was using."
"Bethany uses the wrong compartment. She puts them with the lemons and they—" He stopped. Sero was smiling at him. Not a big smile. Not a sympathetic smile. Just the quiet, knowing smile of someone who had sat on this stool a hundred times and who was telling Amani, without saying it, that some things were still the same and some things were still worth noticing and the limes were in the right compartment again.
Amani's throat went tight. "Yeah. I moved them back."
"Good." Sero took another sip. "Bethany means well, but she doesn't understand citrus hierarchy."
A sound came out of Amani that was almost a laugh. Almost. It got about halfway there before something caught it and it turned into a breath instead, and Sero heard the difference and didn't remark on it. They sat there in the noise of the club while the half-laugh hung between them like something fragile that neither of them wanted to touch.
Sero didn't mention the hoodie. Didn't ask if he was okay. He just sat on his stool and drank his Shirley Temple and when his glass was empty he set it down and said, "Same again," and Amani made it and brought it over and Sero said, "Trevor says hi. He wanted to come tonight but he's got a practical with Miriam."
"Tell him I said hi back."
"I will." A pause. Then. "You know where to find me."
That was all. No pressure, no probing, no you should talk to someone or have you thought about therapy or it gets better. Just, you know where to find me. The same thing Amani had said to Sero, in this bar, months earlier, when Sero was the one sitting on a stool with something broken behind his eyes. The words had come around in a circle, the way they always did in this place, and they landed on Amani now the way they'd landed on Sero then, not as a solution but as a door that would stay open whether you walked through it or not.
"I know," Amani said.
Sero nodded and went back to watching the room.
Amani went back to making drinks.
The night went on.
Lady Leo appeared at eleven.
She was doing her rounds, the circuit she made every night, moving through the club with the unhurried precision of a lioness surveying her territory. She stopped at the bar and looked at Amani. He could see her cataloging: the hoodie, the sneakers, the hands wrapped around a glass he was polishingtoo intently to be casual, the stool behind him that he'd actually used.
