Adrian felt the look land on his skin. Actual heat, actual physical response to being looked at by this man, in this specific spot, and his hand did not shake while he poured but it was a near thing. He set the glass down and his forearm was still extended, the paint stain six inches from the man’s face, and neither of them moved for about two seconds and then Adrian pulled back and went to the other end of the bar and stood there and breathed.
His wrist was warm where the gaze had been. His stomach was doing something he didn’t appreciate. He had a rule about customers. The rule was simple. The rule had three years of very good reasons behind it, three years of being someone’s secret, of parking two streets over, of learning to open car doors without the dome light clicking on. He’d built the rule from thatwreckage and Nina had watched him build it and Nina would tell him he was about to break it.
He picked up the cloth and wiped the bar for the fifth time.
When he went back to check the level, the man was looking at the glass, not at Adrian. The air between them had changed. Adrian couldn’t have explained how, but it was different, the six inches of mahogany between his side and the man’s hands carrying a charge it hadn’t carried ten minutes ago.
“What is that?” the man said.
Adrian stopped. The man was looking at his wrist. Not his face. His wrist. Three words, low and rough, and Adrian understood that this was a man who did not make conversation. Who had not spoken a full sentence in this bar in two months. Who had just asked about the paint on Adrian’s skin.
“Ultramarine,” Adrian said. “Mixed with burnt umber. It’s oil paint.”
The man nodded. Eyes back to the glass. Done. Conversation over. Door closed.
Adrian leaned his hip against his side of the bar. “You’re wondering why I don’t wash it off.”
The man’s eyes came up. Not all the way to Adrian’s face. Close, though.
“It doesn’t come off,” Adrian said. “Ultramarine’s the worst. Gets into the skin and sets up camp. I’ve tried every solvent short of turpentine, and turpentine makes your hands smell like you’re pickling yourself.” He held up his left hand and turned it in the light. “At this point it’s basically a tattoo I didn’t consent to.”
The man looked at his hand. Then at his face. Full eye contact. First time in two months that wasn’t an accident. The eyes were brown, the kind of brown that read as black until the light found them, and up close they weren’t angry. They were paying attention.
Adrian’s breath caught. His stomach dropped. Both of these things were problems he was adding to the list.
“Looks like a bruise,” the man said.
“Huh.” Adrian glanced at his own hand. “It does, actually. The world’s most artistic bar fight. Me versus a jar of pigment. The pigment won.”
The corner of the man’s mouth moved. Not a smile. A fraction of an inch, there and gone. Adrian caught it and filed it in the part of his brain that kept things he’d think about later at two in the morning when he should be sleeping.
“You paint,” the man said. Not a question.
“When I’m not pouring bourbon for guys who look like they lost a war, yeah.”
The man’s eyes narrowed. Adrian held the look. He’d been tending bar for eight years and he knew the difference between a man who wanted to be left alone and a man who’d forgotten there were other options.
“Four to one isn’t a war,” the man said. “It’s a mugging.”
Adrian laughed. It came out real and surprised and louder than the room called for, and the man’s eyes tracked the sound and something in his posture shifted. Not relaxing. Recalibrating. Like he’d expected one response and gotten another and didn’t know what to do with it.
“Same time next week?” Adrian said, picking up the cloth, casual. As though the question wasn’t a question.
The man looked at him for one more second. Then back at the glass.
“Depends on the score,” he said.
* * *
The man did not leave at eleven-thirty.
The couple left. The regular in the corner left. The roomemptied out and Adrian flipped the record and it was just the piano and the low light and the man on the third stool, and Adrian was trying very hard to do his closing prep and not think about the fact that the man had never stayed this late before.
His shoulders had dropped. Adrian noticed it the way he noticed everything about this man, which was involuntarily and in too much detail. The hands on the glass had loosened. The jaw had stopped flexing and what was left was a different face. Younger. The anger gone out of it. Adrian had been watching that jaw clench for two months and he’d never seen it release, and now it had released and he was looking at the man’s actual face for the first time and it was doing something to his chest that was worse than the wrist heat and worse than the stomach drop and worse than all of it because this wasn’t want. This was the thing that came before want, the thing that was harder to walk away from. He was watching a man let his guard down in a room he thought was safe, and the room was Adrian’s, and the man didn’t know Adrian had seen it.
Then the man’s hands let go of the glass.
Not to reach for anything. His fingers just opened and his hands came to rest on the mahogany, palms down. The gesture of a person who had stopped holding himself together. Adrian had watched a lot of people decompress at this bar. But this man’s hands had never been empty. They’d always been on the glass or the jacket or the money, always gripping or organizing or controlling something. And now they were just resting on the bar, open, and Adrian gripped the edge of the counter behind him and stayed where he was because if he didn’t hold on to something he was going to walk around to the other side and put his hands where the man’s hands were and find out what it felt like to be that close to someone who’d just put everything down.
