Page 13

Hakeem reached for a shaker. “I adore that you believe I can have this conversation while I’m drowning in liquor.”

“You can.” Tabbi scanned the room. “You’re one of the only people here who can.”

Then she added, “Also, if you die before closing, clock out first. I’m not allowing overtime this month.”

“Oh, Tabbi, you are so incredibly maternal.”

“It’s fiscally responsible.”

She turned, shouted toward the dining room, “If that fog machine leaks on my floor again, I’m taking the repair cost directly out of someone’s paycheck,” and vanished through the curtain toward the stage corridor.

Layla watched her go. “There she is. Our dark queen of questionable payroll.”

“She thinks my fingers are promising,” Hakeem said, already reaching for the vodka.

“She thinks your shoulders are a liability.”

That was also true.

They pushed through the rush in the way people who had done it too many times develop intimacy around suffering. Hakeem built rounds of Final Grrrls while a pair of actors in vampire costumes bared fangs at each other beside the ice well and discussed whether grief should “read erotic” tonight. A bus tub crashed somewhere near the back. The sound tech came by holding half a remote in one hand and said, to nobody in particular, “The building is rejecting electricity again.”

There were moments, in the middle of this kind of shift, when Hakeem could feel exactly how small his life had become without it feeling small to anyone else.

Not small in value. Small in infrastructure and scale. His ambition remained massive, humiliatingly alive, still flaring every time Tabbi gave him a note that treated him like somebody worth shaping. But the actual container of his days was this: building themed cocktails for tips; catching scraps of stage time where he could; learning to turn his face toward the light in a horror bar where the taxidermy crows watched with their ever judgmental, beady eyes, and the actors were paid barely enough to afford their required eyeliner.

He really did love the artistry of it. But love didn’t make it bigger, and love wasn’t always enough.

By the time the rush finally gave up and slunk back into the Los Angeles night, The Last Cue looked like it had survived something devastating, but remained hopeful and mostly whole.

The candles had burned low. Half the actors were out of costume, or near enough, though Nadia was still drifting around in her widow's veil like she expected someone to applaud her mourning, specifically. The bar top was sticky with citrus and sugar. Somewhere near the host stand, someone counted silverware with the dead-eyed focus of a person one inconvenience away from spiritual collapse.

Hakeem wiped down his station, restacked coupes, and then, because he was tired and wired and unable to leave anything alone, reached for the tequila.

Layla looked up from where she was rolling bar mats. “Absolutely not.”

He didn’t glance at her. “You don’t even know what I’m doing.”

“I know that face. That face means you’re about to create labor for other people.”

“I’m innovating.”

“You’re freelancing with liquor inventory.”

He grabbed a rocks glass, reconsidered, and switched it for a coupe. The coupe felt campier. More doomed. “Tabbi said we need one more signature cocktail that feels, quote, ‘specific but still orderable by women in mesh tops celebrating a divorce.’”

“Those women are the backbone of our infrastructure.”

“And I honor them,” Hakeem said with a two-finger salute. “Which is why I’m giving them art.”

He poured tequila into the shaker, added lime, then reached for the smoked rosemary syrup they used in one of the seasonal drinks. The smell lifted sharp and woody when he uncapped it. He liked that immediately. It smelled like a forest fire, and he internally winced at the thought. Angelenos shouldn’t joke about that.

Layla came over despite herself, drying her hands on a bar towel. “What is it?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“That is not how menus work.”

“It is how genius works.”