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"Birthday man? Birthday entity. Birthday phenomenon."

"I take it back. Boy was fine!"

She came around the bar and hugged him hard enough to reorganize his vertebrae. "Happy birthday, Hakeem. You are twenty-seven and alive and not murdered."

"Can we please retire that joke?"

"Never. It will be on your tombstone someday. Here lies Hakeem Morales: dead, but not murdered."

He tied his apron and started setting up his station. The bar was filling with the usual assortment of dark denim, theatrical eyeliner, and Angelenos who used the word aesthetic as a moral position. A couple in matching leather jackets pored over the drink menu with the intensity of scholars decoding a manuscript, which Hakeem found endearing.

The door opened again about forty minutes into the shift, and Hakeem looked up to see Antonio standing in the entrance of The Last Cue.

He had never been here before.

Antonio was just inside the door, taking the room in with the quiet, thorough attention he gave everything. Hakeem watched him examine the space with curiosity, which in turn prompted Hakeem to see his work-home of the past four years in a new light. He gazed at the pouring red light, the velvet that lined all the seating and some walls, the hand-shaped sconces, and the taxidermy crow installation that Layla had once described as "moderately cursed." He was wearing a jacket Hakeem hadn't seen before, and he looked, in the moody red-black light of the bar, charmed (and dangerously attractive, Hakeem thought) by the kitschy horror set.

His eyes found Hakeem behind the bar.

Something in Hakeem's chest did something it had no business doing during a shift.

Antonio walked to the bar and sat down. He looked at the menu in its brass crow holder with the faintly amused expression of someone who appreciated theatrical commitment in others.

Then his eyes stopped.

"The White Lighter," he read.

Hakeem's hand stilled on the glass he was polishing.

Antonio looked up at him. "How long has this been on the menu?"

Hakeem could feel the heat climbing his neck. "A while."

"How long is a while?"

"Since—" He cleared his throat. "Basically, since I moved in."

Antonio stared at him. Then genuine, uncontrolled surprise gave way to a laugh that came from somewhere deep and real, bursting out of him.

"You named a drink after my bad jokes!" Antonio said.

"I named a drink after a cultural reference."

"You named a drink after the first weird thing I said to you."

"That is a dramatic oversimplification."

"Hakeem." Antonio's smile lingered, the unreserved version he'd stopped rationing somewhere in the last week. "You were writing me down, too."

The sentence made Hakeem's breath catch. Antonio was right. The White Lighter had been sitting on the menu for weeks—a cocktail named after a joke made by a man Hakeem wanted since the first night, if he was being honest. He had turned Antonio into a drink before Antonio had turned him into a character. They had been documenting each other from opposite sides of the same house, using their respective crafts, and neither of them had seen it.

"Shut up." Hakeem rolled his eyes, but he was smiling.

"I'd like one, please."

"You'd like a White Lighter?"

"I'd like to taste whatever you made out of me."