Page 6 of Break for Me

“Yes.” Truth.

“The police?”

“No.” Lie.

“Boyfriend? Husband?” He asked. “Sometimes they’re more dangerous than police.”

“No and no.” Truth.

“But still someone dangerous?” He asked.

“Yes.” Truth.

He sighed another time, but he leaned forward and picked up the papers to put them right back into the drawer.

“Please, Marcus,” I added after another couple seconds of unpleasant silence.

“Was that even your real name?” He asked. “Dakota?”

“Yes.” So many lies.

“If you’re really hiding from someone, you might want to consider not handing out your real name,” he said with a smirk.

“That’s probably good advice. I don’t know what I’m doing. Just trying to figure it out as I go,” I said.

“Listen,” he said, leaning forward on the desk. “I don’t like this. I don’t like anything about it. But everybody has a past, you know. At least one thing behind them that they aren’t proud of. If you really know what you’re doing behind a bar, we’ll try this out for the next week. If you’re a shitty bartender or a shitty person and I tell you that I want you gone, you just leave. I won’t tell anyone you were here as long as you leave when I want you out. Got it?”

I smiled. But then I had to close my eyes because actual tears pooled in them for the first time in a very long time.

“Thank you, Marcus. You can’t possibly know what this means to me.”

“Come on, let’s see if you can bartend,” he said, standing to go back to the door. “Do you still want me to call you Dakota? Or are we coming up with a code name?”

“Dakota is fine,” I said and smiled again. Having to keep track of too many different names for one city was dangerous. Learned that lesson in Illinois.

five

TRISTA

I was lucky enough that I’d stopped in for that half-assed job interview at the beginning of the week, so it gave me the benefit of having a few slow days to get used to the flow of working in a bar again before Marcus assured me that things would get hectic over the weekend. He’d hired me to be an actual bartender from Monday through Wednesday and then essentially to be a server from Thursday to Saturday so the more experienced bartenders would handle the drink making on the busy nights. The experienced bartenders, Sandy and Anna, weren’t anywhere around through those first days while I was getting acclimated. Their names were the only pieces of information I’d been offered about them. With the way that Marcus stared at my chest every time I was in his presence, I imagined both of these other bartenders would also be rather voluptuous. I tried not to think too hard about it that the owner of this bar had only hired a crew of females. He stared too much, but he hadn’t been inappropriate. He didn’t give me the ick vibes that most older men did when they were around me.

I felt like an absolute asshole by the time that Thursday evening rolled around though. I had to swallow a spoonful of my own medicine. It went down about the way that I imagined battery acid tasting. Sandy was in fact the single largest man I’d ever seen in my life. Leave it to me, the queen of thieving genderless names, to have assumed Sandy would be a female. He was a real-life giant with red hair that was so long, he kept it pulled back in a ponytail. He looked like the most frightening biker imaginable, and I didn’t even know if he owned a motorcycle. He just looked like he belonged on one. When he caught me staring at the mountain in shock during my first look at him, Marcus informed me that Sandy doubled as the bouncer for the bar. I found it all the more uncomfortable to get to learn that Sandy and Anna didn’t even speak to one another. The other bartender was no bigger than a toothpick, with sleek black hair and a very rounded face that was covered in entirely too much makeup. She was the kind of woman who was more than willing to use the assets that she’d been given to help her earn her place. It was easy to spot other women with that mindset when you existed as one yourself. She was pretty enough, but she absolutely looked at me like I was the competition. Very unwelcome competition, at that. She only furthered that suspicion when Sandy introduced himself to me and she stood just behind him, glaring at me the entire time. Marcus laughed about the whole encounter after the fact when he told me I was going to feel an outrageous amount of hostility for a while because Sandy got drunk one night and Anna convinced him to go home with her. I guess he told her the next morning that it was a mistake. She apparently didn’t take that too well and they hadn’t spoken directly to one another since.

It felt nice to be back in a group of people; albeit a wildly dysfunctional group. I’d probably fit in with their chaos better than I ever would with a completely stable and grounded set of humans anyway. Sandy didn’t know it yet, but he was about to become my new best friend. He looked like he could handle himself and anyone else within his gravitational pull if it became necessary. That was exactly the kind of friend I could use if I was going to stick around Seattle for a minute. Achieving that was easier than I ever would have anticipated. Despite his massive stature and rather frightening appearance, he talked to everyone who came into the bar like they were a long-lost relative. He was quick-witted and sarcastic. He never smiled, but he was funny and people loved it. I made sure to avoid Anna as much as I could. I simply wasn’t interested in competing with her and I didn’t want her to see me that way either. I didn’t need to ruffle feathers while Marcus was already wary of having me around. Luckily, I raked in tips like it was my sole purpose in life over the first couple of busy days. While it was helpful that Marcus and Sandy noticed and they were suddenly very much in favor of keeping me around, Anna was less than amused.

Saturday night brought the strangest combination of people that I’d ever seen gathered within the same bar for one evening. Every kind of person who existed in Seattle seemed to be accounted for tonight; from girls who looked like they really weren’t old enough to be in a bar and wore next to nothing in the way of clothing to old guys who couldn’t have had more than a couple years of life left in them wearing full three piece suits. It was busy on a consistent basis though, and I only had to interact with Anna every so often when she’d make a drink for someone who was across the room. Otherwise, I took all the drink orders to Sandy and dealt only with him and left Anna in charge of the people who physically went to the bar themselves. I rarely messed up drink orders and I was a champion at playing the flirty waitress. All-in-all, I felt like I was having a pretty phenomenal first weekend with this bar crew. Until I took two drinks from Anna and turned around to slam the whole front of my body and both glasses directly into the abdomen of a man who stood a solid foot taller than me.

“Son of a bitch,” Anna hissed from behind the bar. “Marcus! Need a cleanup!”

Twat. I just knew she was an absolute twat, and that solidified it.

“I’m so sorry. Are you okay? I didn’t hurt you, did I?” I asked, looking at both now-empty glasses to make sure I hadn’t actually broken either of them against this man. My whole body froze when he took both the glasses from my hands and reached around me like I wasn’t even there to place them back on the bar behind me.

“No harm done. Are you okay?” He asked, taking both my wrists in his hands to turn them over to look at my palms.

“I — I don’t think either of them broke,” I stuttered out like an imbecile. “I’m fine.”

Marcus appeared at the edge of my vision with two handfuls of paper towels and gave me an excuse to free myself from the searing touch of this stranger.

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