The Last Call Trap

Rachel had been a firefighter for twenty-two years, and she had walked into burning buildings without blinking. But walking into the Last Call for a job interview made her hands sweat, which was ridiculous, because she had poured drinks in that exact bar for seven years before she joined the department. Also ridiculous because the person interviewing her would be Jane, her ex, the woman she had loved since she was forty and lost six months ago when everything fell apart over a dish rack and a sentence neither of them could take back.

She stood outside under the flickering neon sign in the drizzle and asked herself, for the hundredth time that week, why she had even replied to the text. "We're hiring a manager. You'd be great. No pressure." No pressure! From Jane! Everything Jane said came with a pressure hook hidden inside it, like a fly lure.

"You're stalling," Rachel said out loud, and a guy walking a wet terrier gave her a look. She pulled the door open before she could talk herself out of it.

Inside, the Last Call looked exactly the way it always had. Worn wooden booths, brass rail along the bottom of the bar, the same crooked mirror behind the bottles. The rain made the windows glow orange from the streetlight. It smelled like beer and old wood, and something else, something faintly sweet, like the air after a strike of matches.

There was a man at the end of the bar she had never seen before.

"Good evening," he said, and stood up. Tall, gray suit, silver hair, somewhere in his forties or maybe fifty, hard to say, the kind of face that could be any age in the right light. "You must be Rachel."

"That's me. I'm here about the manager job? Is Jane around?"

"Ms. Delgado is upstairs doing inventory. I'm Mr. Carrington. I own the bar." He shook her hand. His grip was cool and dry, like a doorknob in winter. "Sit, please. Can I get you something? On the house, of course."

"Just coffee, thanks. I'm on call until midnight."

"A firefighter. Of course you are." He poured her a cup from a pot that had, she was almost certain, not been there a second ago. "Now then. The position. You know the room, you know the clientele. But I do things formally here. A trial shift. Tonight. You work the bar, the regulars will tell me what they think, and if it goes well, the job is yours."

"Tonight? I didn't exactly dress for it." She was in jeans and her department hoodie, because it was an interview, not a shift.

"You look perfectly capable. Aprons hang by the tap handles." He smiled, and the smile was fine, totally fine, but something about it made her think of the way a dog watches a door it knows someone is about to walk through. "One small house rule. If a customer asks you to pour something unusual, you pour it. No questions. Can you do that?"

"Sure, weird but fine," Rachel said, because rent was rent and her savings account had developed a sad little cough since the breakup. She tied on the apron and stepped behind the bar, and her hands remembered everything immediately, where the bottles sat, which tap stuck, the trick with the Guinness pour. Seven years of muscle memory does not care about a breakup.

The first hour was easy. A couple of nurses from the hospital came in for their usual, then a guy from the bowling league. Then Howie came in at seven, shook the rain off his jacket, and took his usual stool, and Rachel's stomach did a little drop, because Howie had known her and Jane both since before either of them were a couple, back when the three of them closed down the bar playing darts.

"Rach!" Howie said, sixty-two years old and grinning like it was Christmas. "They actually got you back here! Jane will be thrilled. She pretends she won't be, but she will."

"Hi, Howie. Usual?"

"Actually, no." He leaned in on his elbows, and his eyes did something strange, a kind of warm kindness mixed with a look she could not name. "I'll have a Suffering Bastard. And while you're at it, tell me something true. That's the recipe here now, I hear. One part gin, two parts truth."

"Howie, you hate gin."

"I love gin. I've always loved gin. Ask anyone." He absolutely had always hated gin, and he drank the whole thing without blinking, and then he said, "You know she still keeps your photo in the office. Behind the liquor license, where nobody looks."

"Howie."

"I'm just a retired bartender making conversation with a pretty woman," he said, and ordered another Suffering Bastard, and Rachel made it because of the house rule, and hated how easily she had agreed to a house rule without knowing who made it.

That was when she noticed the clock.

It hung over the door to the back office, an old brass wall clock that had been there since before Jane started running the place. Rachel had stared at it through a thousand slow shifts. It was now running backward. Not stopped, not broken, actually ticking backward, the second hand sweeping counterclockwise with a smooth confident tick, tick, tick, and the minute hand crawling with it, and Rachel watched it long enough to confirm that at 7:42 by her phone, the clock read 7:19 and counting down.

"Mr. Carrington?" she called down the bar.

"Yes?"

"Your clock is broken."

"Is it?" He did not even look up from his ledger.

"The hands are going backward."

"Ah. Yes. It does that near closing time. Pay it no mind. Bars keep their own time, you'll find." He wrote something in the ledger. "How are the regulars treating you?"

"Fine. Weird. Howie's drinking gin."

"Howie drinks whatever the evening requires," Mr. Carrington said pleasantly, and Rachel decided she was not going to unpack that sentence tonight, or possibly ever.

At eight the door opened and Ross came in shaking rain off his helmet, because of course he was still in uniform, because of course he had heard from the whole firehouse within an hour that Rachel had an interview at his favorite bar. Forty-eight years old, her firehouse partner of two decades, a man who had once eaten a gas station burrito off a dare during a twelve-hour shift.

"There she is! Interview going okay? Blink twice if the boss is a weirdo." He dropped onto a stool and slapped a twenty on the bar. "Whiskey, neat, and a water, because I'm a professional."

"The boss seems fine," Rachel said, pouring. "The clock's broken."

"Fix it, you're the manager now."

"Not yet I'm not."

"Yet," Ross said, and grinned, and drank, and then his grin did a small stutter, the way Howie's eyes had done, and he added, "You know what you should do, right? You should tell her. Tonight. While you're here. Just say the thing you didn't say in March."

"Ross, I came here for a paycheck, not a therapist."

"Sure, sure." He turned his glass in a slow circle on the bar. "The clock's really going backward?"

"Look for yourself."

Ross looked. He looked for a long while, and then he said, quietly, in a voice Rachel had only ever heard him use at bad scenes, "Huh. You know, I heard a guy in the bowling league say this place does that. Said his brother lost three hours in here once and came out sober as a judge."

"His brother is full of it."

"Probably." Ross drank again. "Pour me another one. And hey, Rach? When the old man asks you the question, think before you answer."

"What question?"

"He'll know which one," Ross said, and the clock behind her ticked backward, and somewhere upstairs a floorboard creaked, and Rachel had the sudden certain feeling that Jane was standing at the top of those stairs, deciding whether to come down.

Jane came down the stairs at 8:20, still holding a clipboard, wearing the same faded flannel she wore every inventory night, and Rachel's heart did the stupid thing it always did.

"Hey," Jane said. "You're still here."

"I'm interviewing. Sort of. Nobody's asked me a single normal interview question."

"Yeah, about that." Jane set the clipboard down on the bar and rubbed her eyes. "Can we talk in the office? Two minutes?"

Mr. Carrington waved them toward the door like a man granting a recess. In the office, next to the framed liquor license, Jane turned around and just said it.

"This isn't a manager job, Rach. Well, it is, but that's not the interview. The interview is whether you can handle the special customers."

"Special customers."

"You've met one. Howie tonight. Howie died in 2021."

Rachel sat down on a stack of beer mats. "Howie is dead."

"Howie is a regular. There's a difference here. The house rule exists for a reason. When something unusual gets asked for, you pour it, no questions, because questions are how you end up with a problem. Mr. Carrington needs a manager who can keep her head when a ghost demands a drink, and frankly, you're the calmest person I've ever met. Twenty-two years running into fires. I thought, who else?"

"Howie hates gin and he drank two Suffering Bastards."

"Right. The bar makes you say the thing you'd never say. That's part of it. So when the next one comes in, don't argue with it. Just pour." Jane hesitated at the door. "And Rach? If he offers you something, think before you answer."

Everyone kept saying that. Rachel went back out front, and at 8:55 by her phone, 7:02 by the clock, the door opened and a woman walked in soaked with rain, except the rain on her coat was falling upward, off her shoulders and back into the ceiling. She sat down at the far end of the bar.

"Whiskey," the woman said. "The good stuff. And don't tell me what it costs, because it costs me nothing anymore, which is the whole tragedy."

Rachel poured her the Blanton's without a word. The woman drank it, wept a little, tipped huge in cash that vanished when Rachel looked away, and left through the door without opening it. Rachel noticed she had not screamed, which she counted as a professional win.

"That," said Mr. Carrington, closing his ledger, "was adequate. Now the final test."

The bar had gone empty. Ross was gone, Howie was gone, the rain outside had gone silent. Mr. Carrington came around the bar for the first time all night, and up close he smelled like cold stone and old paper, and the clock ticked backward like a heartbeat.

"Pour me a cocktail," he said. "The perfect one. The one you would make for someone you loved, if you had one chance, and you knew it was your last. And while you make it, I will make you an offer."

Rachel made the drink. Rye, Bénédictine, a bar spoon of Fernet, two dashes of bitters, lemon peel, stirred until the mixing glass frosted. Her hands never shook, not in fires, not now. She set it in front of him and he looked at it a long time.

"Here is the offer," he said. "Stay. Bind yourself to this bar and time stops mattering. And I will give you back the afternoon you lost. Fifteen years, gone in one afternoon over a dish rack, and you may have that afternoon again and again, forever, with the woman upstairs, if she will have you. She keeps your photo behind the license, you know."

"That's not an offer, that's a trick. That's taxidermy."

"Is it? You have loved her since you were forty. Tell me you don't want it."

"I do want it," Rachel said, and her voice cracked on it. "That's why I'm not taking it from you."

Mr. Carrington smiled, and it was the first real smile all night. "That is the correct answer. The trial is complete, and you have passed. Which means," and here his voice dropped, "I am permitted to make you a different offer. An honest one. An evening. No bindings, no bargains, nothing settled tonight or ever. Just desire, freely given and freely taken, and nothing in this house will push you toward it. The job is settled either way, the stool is yours either way, and Jane has nothing to do with it. Say no and I will pour you a coffee and we will both forget I asked. Do you want that?"

Rachel looked at him. Tall, silver, ageless, trouble. Six months of an empty bed and a dish rack she couldn't look at.

"Yes," she said. "Yes, I want that."

"Then ask me for what you want."

"I want you to kiss me."

He came around the bar and kissed her, slow and deliberate, one hand cradling her jaw like she was something being poured carefully. She kissed him back, hard, and made a noise into his mouth that she was going to blame on the clock.

"Wait," she said, and he stopped instantly, both hands up, and she liked that more than the kiss. "Condom. I don't know you. No offense."

"None taken. I'm very old-fashioned about such things." He produced one from his suit coat, a man who had been alive long enough to learn manners. "And I'll tell you plainly, I'm clean, tested recently by standards you'd find amusing, but the barrier stays until you say otherwise."

"Good. Keep it." She pulled her hoodie off over her head. "Okay. Yes. Continue."

He laid her back on the bar itself, which was somehow exactly the right temperature, and went down the front of her jeans with unhurried hands. She was already wet and he noted it out loud, which made her wetter. "May I taste you?"

"God, yes, do it."

He got her jeans off, dropped to his knees on the brass rail footrest like a gentleman, and put his mouth on her pussy, and Rachel, who had run hoses into burning buildings, grabbed the bar rail and made sounds she'd never made on duty. His tongue found her clit and worked it in slow circles, then faster, two fingers sliding into her and curling forward, and she came on his face in about ninety seconds, loud, hips bucking, one sneaker kicking over a bar stool.

"Oh my god," she said. "Okay. Wow. Get up here."

He stood, and she unbuckled him, and his cock was long and hard and already leaking. She rolled the condom down him with her own hands, because she was a professional. "Now fuck me. Right here. Slow at first."

He lifted her onto the bar, lined up, and pushed in, and the stretch of it dragged a long groan out of her. He fucked her slow and deep, both her legs over his forearms, the backward clock ticking and the neon sign buzzing through the rain-black windows. Then faster, when she said faster, harder when she said harder, and he kept asking, "like this?" and she kept saying "yes, yes, don't stop," and the whole bar seemed to lean in and listen.

She came again around him, clenching, and he followed with a low sound against her neck, spilling into the condom, both of them breathing like they'd climbed stairs.

"Well," Rachel said finally, from the flat of her back on the bar top, jeans around one ankle, "that was not in the job description."

"The benefits," said Mr. Carrington, disposing of the condom neatly, "were never part of the position. I hope that was clear."

Upstairs, a floorboard creaked. The office door was open. Jane was standing at the top of the stairs, clipboard forgotten, looking down at the two of them, and the clock over the office door ticked backward, and backward, and backward.

Rachel sat up slowly, pulling her hoodie over her bare chest, and looked at Jane looking at her, and neither of them moved.

"Rachel," Jane said, and her voice came out small, which was not a thing Rachel had ever heard from Jane. Then she looked past Rachel at the front door. "Howie? Ross? Are you two just going to stand there in the doorway?"

Howie and Ross shuffled in through the front door, both looking anywhere but the bar. Ross was holding his water like a shield.

"We knocked," Howie offered. "Sort of. Ross knocked on the doorframe."

"The whole thing," Jane said, coming down the stairs slowly, clipboard still clutched like a life vest. "The interview, the ghost test, the clock, even Howie dying, well, not that part, that part was just Howie. But the job posting? That was me. I put it up three weeks ago. I wanted to see if you'd come."

Rachel pulled her jeans on properly, one leg at a time, dignity being a process. "You put up a fake job to see if I was over you?"

"I put up a real job to see if you'd take it. And then Carrington got involved, and by then it had a clock running backward and a dead regular in it, and I couldn't exactly take it down." She gestured helplessly at the bar. "This was supposed to be a Thursday."

"It is Thursday."

"Well I know that, Rachel, I do the books here."

Mr. Carrington straightened his cuffs, entirely unbothered by any of it. "If I may. The trial is concluded, the position stands open, and the choice is yours. Accept, and you become the keeper of this house. Its hours, its rules, its people. Forever is a long word, but you have seen what it buys."

Rachel looked at him. Then at Jane, whose face was doing several things at once. Then at the backward clock, ticking patiently toward a yesterday that never came.

"The job," she said slowly, "means I'd be bound to the bar. Part of the magic. The way you are."

"Exactly so. You would never age past this night. You would pour until pouring is done, which is to say, never."

"And never leave?"

"The door opens for visitors. Not for you."

Ross set his water down. "Rach, buddy, take the job, free whiskey for life."

"Shut up, Ross."

"Fair."

Rachel laughed, and it came out shaky, and then it came out real. She thought about twenty-two years on the job, about pulling people out of things, about how the best part of every shift was always the walk home afterward. She thought about the dish rack.

"No," she said. "No, thank you. I'd rather be a regular than a boss. I'd rather have somewhere I can walk out of."

Mr. Carrington bowed, actually bowed, suit and silver hair and all. "Then you may have the only thing better than the job. A stool, a tab, and a standing invitation. And Rachel? For what it is worth, you are the first person in sixty years to turn me down twice in one evening."

"Twice?"

"The forever, and then the job. Most people manage only one."

"Next time I'm charging you for the Fernet," Rachel said, and Howie howled.

And then the whole bar went up. Howie was slapping the brass rail, Ross was wheezing into his uniform collar, and the ghost woman from earlier, who had apparently been nursing her whiskey in the corner booth this entire time, raised her glass in a toast. Even the neon sign flickered like it was laughing.

"You went through a whole supernatural ordeal," Ross managed, wiping his eyes, "for a job you didn't even want. The clock, the rain going the wrong way, the dead guy, all of it, and you were going to say no the whole time."

"To be fair," Rachel said, "the middle part had its perks."

Jane came around the bar then, past the taps she'd wiped ten thousand times, and stopped an arm's length away. "Six months," she said. "I've been miserable for six months over a dish rack and one stupid sentence I said at the end of a long day. And I couldn't just call, because what if you were fine? So I built a trap out of a job listing and let an immortal bar owner spring it on you. That's insane. I know that's insane."

"It's the most you thing I've ever heard," Rachel said. "You once organized an intervention for my laundry habits."

"Did it work?"

"No."

They were both laughing now, and then they weren't laughing, and Jane's hand found Rachel's hand on the bar top, and that was enough for the moment. Fifteen years, gone and back again in one strange Thursday, and Rachel felt something in her chest unclench that had been tight since March.

"Come have a beer," Jane said. "Off duty yet?"

"Midnight. But I'm technically done, nothing's burning." She settled onto her old stool, third from the door, the one with the wobble she used to fix with a folded coaster. Jane poured her a ginger beer from the good tap, the one Rachel used to sneak her after close, and set it down on a fresh coaster like an apology.

Howie raised his Suffering Bastard. "To Rachel. Who looked death in the eye, twice, and told it to keep the job."

"To Rachel," the whole bar said, ghost included, and Rachel drank her ginger beer.

The rain had softened outside. The clock overhead still ran backward, but nobody watched it anymore, the way nobody watches a clock in a place where they're already where they want to be. Ross launched into the bowling league story again, longer this time, with voices. Jane leaned her hip against the bar beside Rachel's stool, close enough that their shoulders touched, and didn't move away.

"So," Jane said quietly, under Ross's impression of his captain. "Thursday. You, me, no job listings, no immortal intermediaries. Just dinner."

"Just dinner," Rachel agreed, and touched her glass to Jane's. "And maybe a new dish rack. One we pick out together."

"God, you romantic."

"I've been told."

Mr. Carrington, from the far end of the bar, lifted his glass to her once, almost imperceptibly, and then he was simply not there, the way the best regulars always are at last call. The neon sign buzzed on against the wet street, the door swung easy on its hinges, and Rachel sat in the warm noise of it all, third stool from the door, home in the only way that didn't cost her anything at all.