The Regular's Return

Liza woke up on the floor. Not her floor. A floor that smelled like beer and old varnish, with a blanket that smelled like somebody else's perfume. She was forty-three years old, and she had slept on worse surfaces, but usually those came with a story she could remember.

She opened one eye. Then the other, because one eye wasn't helping.

The back office of The Copper Tap. She knew it from the one time the card reader had jammed and she'd watched Marsha fix it. Filing cabinet. Dead plant. A stack of coasters nobody used. And a booth cushion pulled off its bench and dragged to the floor, which explained the blanket, which explained, she supposed, everything else.

Because Marsha was right there. On the floor beside her. Asleep on her back with one arm flung over her eyes, wearing her work shirt and jeans, boots kicked off, in the gray light leaking through the blinds.

Marsha. The bartender. Forty-seven years old, forearms like a stevedore, the kind of woman who remembered your drink and your divorce in the same breath. Liza had watched her pour shots for three years. She had never once watched her take her shirt off.

Something was pinned to Liza's blouse. A note, folded once, held with a paperclip like a manila envelope at a law firm. She unclipped it with fingers that felt borrowed.

*You were buzzed, I didn't take advantage. We'll talk. M*

Liza read it three times. Nothing in it sounded like regret, which felt like a mercy. Her bra was hooked correctly. Her jeans were on. There were, she noted with professional detachment, approximately nine million hickeys on her collarbone, but her jeans were on and buttoned, which the note seemed to be vouching for.

"Well," she said, to the filing cabinet. "Okay."

Her head gave a slow, punishing throb, like a neighbor knocking on a wall. Water. There was a bottle of water on the floor by her hip, unopened, with a sticky note on the cap. *Drink this before coffee.* Even the bartender's handwriting was bossy.

She drank the water. She was halfway through it when the door opened and Marsha came in carrying two mugs, fully dressed now, jeans and a flannel, hair down and slightly wrecked.

"Coffee," Marsha said. "It's terrible. It's from the machine behind the bar that I've been meaning to replace since I started here, so, three years. But it's hot."

"You pinned a note to me," Liza said.

"I did." Marsha handed her a mug and sat down on the pulled-off booth cushion like it was a normal chair, knees up, mug balanced on them. "Felt very ransom. I regretted it immediately and then I kept it anyway."

"It's a strong opener."

"Thanks. I workshopped it."

Liza drank the coffee. It was, as promised, terrible. It was also doing something, and she was grateful for it. The light through the blinds said early. Too early for a bar. Someplace out front a faucet was running.

"So," Liza said. "Last night."

"So."

"I remember the tapas place. The work dinner. I remember everyone leaving and me not leaving."

"That tracks. You came here around ten."

"And then?"

Marsha looked into her mug. She had the particular stillness of someone assembling a sentence.

"And then you had two more of those ginger things you like. And then, after last call, when I was stacking chairs, you came around the bar and told me, and I'm going to quote this as accurately as I can, that you had thought about my hands for approximately two years and it was affecting your writing."

"Oh no!"

"There was more. There was a whole bit about my forearms. It had a rhythm to it. Almost a meter."

"Oh no!"

"You compared my hands to a, hold on." Marsha squinted. "A well-run kitchen. Everything where it should be, nothing wasted."

Liza put her face in her free hand. The hickeys throbbed in solidarity. "I'm a writer. I write things for money. Actual money, from actual editors. And I apparently tipsy-drafted copy about your arms."

"You did. And then you kissed me. Which, I did not initiate. I want that on the..." Marsha stopped herself, shook her head. "You kissed me. I asked if you were sure, and you said yes, and then I asked again, and you said yes again, slower. And I'm not going to pretend I didn't enjoy it, because I did, and that's the problem."

Liza lowered her hand. That was not what she'd expected her to say. She'd expected a laugh, a hand wave, *you were a disaster, no harm done, here's your coat.*

"You should have stopped me sooner," Liza said.

"Yeah. I know."

"I was two ginger things past my line."

"You were buzzed, not gone. I've poured drinks long enough to know exactly where that line is, and you were on the near side of it, but only just, and I should have sent you home in a cab and asked you again sober. Instead I let it run because you were very persuasive and I'd been looking at you for about two years myself." Marsha said it plainly, no flinch. "So. I'm sorry. That is all of it. Somewhere around one in the morning I put the brakes on, made you drink water, waited, and put you on the booth cushion. Nothing else happened after that. I slept on the floor like a gentleman."

Liza looked down at her collarbone. "And before the brakes?"

"Kissing. A lot of it, judging by your collarbone. Everything stayed on." Marsha's mouth twitched. "Nothing past kissing was going to happen with you that tired and that buzzed, however persuasive you were. That's a rule, not a favor."

"Okay." Liza nodded slowly, working through it like a receipt that didn't add up. "Okay. So I'm not, like, a crime victim. But I was sloppy, and you were sloppy back, and now we're drinking terrible coffee on your office floor at whatever o'clock this is."

"Six forty."

"Six forty in the morning. And you have a shift."

"At eleven."

"So why are we up?"

"Because you have questions. I could hear you having them from the bar. You were doing that thing where you sit very still and vibrate."

Liza did have questions. She had a stack of them, in fact, and the top one was the one she'd been circling since she woke up: why did it feel less like a mistake and more like a door she'd kicked open on purpose?

"I slept with my bartender," she said, testing it aloud. "That's a sentence."

"You're a writer. You've written worse sentences."

"I haven't, actually. My ex would disagree. The workshop guy." She waved a hand. "Fling, eight years ago, he critiqued my dialogue. Ruined me for commas for a year."

"Charming."

"He was not. You're more charming, which is a problem, because you're also evasive, and I've noticed that, and I notice things for a living."

Marsha's face did something then. Not a flinch. More like a door closing partway. She drank her coffee and looked at the dead plant.

"You're doing it now," Liza said. "The not-answering thing."

"I'm not evasive."

"You have claw marks on your basement door and a no-questions house rule and I've watched three regulars get quietly bought off with free peanuts for asking about them. You're a little evasive, Marsha."

"That's fair." Marsha set her mug down. Her hands did the thing Liza had apparently written a sonnet about, settling flat on her knees, deliberate. "There's a reason. It's not a fun reason. It's the reason my last relationship ended, actually, a woman named Tessa, I was thirty-nine, she was great, and I hid the reason from her until she found it and left. So I don't hide it anymore, but I also don't hand it out for free on a Tuesday morning."

"It's Wednesday."

"It's Wednesday. Even worse." Marsha smiled, briefly, and it didn't reach all the way up. "You want the answers. I get it. But they come slow, or they come never. Those are the options. I've been burned handing them out fast."

Liza considered that. Her head throbbed. Her collarbone throbbed. Her professional detachment, which she'd been holding up like a shield all morning, was getting heavy.

"Fine," she said. "Slow. I can do slow. I'm here most days anyway."

"You're here most every day."

"That's between me and my liver."

Marsha laughed. It was a good laugh, low, and Liza felt it land somewhere she'd have to deal with later, with a clear head, in daylight, possibly with a therapist.

"Drink your coffee," Marsha said, standing. "I've got chairs to stack and a floor to mop and a bar you'll be sitting at again tomorrow, apparently."

"You know my order."

"Everyone knows your order. You order the same thing like it's a legal obligation." Marsha paused at the door, hand on the frame. "Liza. One thing. Whatever you think you figured out last night, about me, about this. You didn't figure it out. You just got closer to the question."

Then she was gone, and Liza was alone with the terrible coffee, the dead plant, and the note, which she read a fourth time and folded into her pocket like research.

* * *

She came back Thursday. She told herself it was for the ginger things.

The bar was half empty, rain on the windows, some old song on the jukebox. Marsha set the drink down without being asked and didn't linger, which was its own kind of message.

Liza drank. Watched her work. Noticed, for the first time in three years of noticing, that Marsha never took her flannel off, even sweating over a keg change in August.

"Question," Liza said, when she came by again.

"Slow, we said."

"It's a small one. What's in the basement?"

Marsha dried a glass. Set it down. Looked at her for exactly one beat too long.

"That," she said, "is the opposite of a small one."

Thursday turned into Friday. Friday turned into "accidentally walking past the bar at two in the afternoon when it was closed." Liza stood outside in the drizzle, hands in her coat pockets, and asked herself what exactly she was doing. Surveillance, she decided. Fieldwork. A writer gathering material.

The material was a woman she couldn't stop thinking about.

She went in Saturday afternoon. Marsha saw her come through the door and didn't pretend otherwise.

"You know," Marsha said, pulling a ginger ale without asking, "most people spread their visits out. Ration the charm."

"I'm not charming. I'm persistent. Different animal."

"Uh huh." Marsha set the drink down. "You look like you slept."

"I slept. I also remembered things." Liza said it quietly, because the bar had three people in it and one of them was the guy who always cried at the jukebox. "Fragments. From that night."

Marsha's hands went still on the bar. Just for a second. "What kind of fragments?"

"Taste, mostly. Something metallic. Right before everything went fuzzy around the edges." Liza watched her face. "And your eyes. They changed color. I remember that clearly, which is funny, because I don't remember clearly anything else."

"Rainlight," Marsha said. "Old fluorescents do weird things."

"They went gold, Marsha. Not weird. Gold."

The jukebox changed songs. The crying guy cried.

"And one more thing," Liza said. Her voice dropped. "When I kissed you. At the bar, after last call. Your arm. There was a moment, half a second, where your skin wasn't skin. It was scales. I remember thinking, huh, that's the gin, and then I remember thinking, no, gin doesn't do that."

Marsha picked up the glass she'd just dried and dried it again.

"You're doing the thing," Liza said. "The drying-the-already-dry-glass thing."

"It's a good glass."

"Marsha."

"I heard you." She set the glass down. "I heard you the first night too, by the way. You talk when you've had a few. You narrate. It's adorable and I'm never telling anyone I said that."

"Is that a deflection?"

"It's a stalling tactic. Different thing." Marsha came around the bar, wiped the spot next to Liza even though it was clean, and sat. That was new. Three years, and Liza had never once seen her sit on the customer side. "Okay. Fragments. I'll meet you partway."

"Partway is a start."

"Metallic taste. Gold eyes. Scales." Marsha counted them off on her fingers, which were, Liza noted for the sonnet, steady as a surgeon's. "Those are all real. You didn't hallucinate any of them."

The bar went very quiet for Liza. The kind of quiet where your own heartbeat gets loud.

"Say the next part," Liza said. "The part where you tell me what those things mean."

"No. Not yet. But I'll say this much." Marsha turned on the stool to face her. "The monster thing. That's what I call it. The reason I don't take my flannel off. The reason the basement door has claw marks, which, for the record, are mine, from my first year here, and I've just never bothered to sand them out because it's easier to let people wonder."

"You're not helping yourself."

"I'm not trying to help myself. I'm trying to help you leave with your afternoon intact." A breath. "Here's what I'll give you today, because you earned it and because you'll just keep coming back until I do, and we both know it."

Liza waited. Her ginger ale went untouched.

"You're right that I wanted you. For about two years, same as your count. I watched you come in here most nights and order the same drink and write in that notebook with the broken spine, and I wanted you the way you want something you've decided you can't have." Marsha's voice was even, careful, like she'd rehearsed it in the shower. Probably had. "And I never did anything about it. On purpose. Because of the monster thing."

"Because you thought I'd run."

"Because I knew the odds. Tessa ran. The woman before Tessa ran faster. I've got a hundred percent failure rate on this particular experiment, and every time it fails it costs me a home and a job and a whole life I have to rebuild in a new city, which, fun fact, is why I ended up here. Third city in twelve years. The Copper Tap was supposed to be quiet."

"And I ruined quiet."

"You ruined nothing. You got buzzed and persistent and you kissed me across my own bar, and I let it happen, and that's on me, not you." Marsha's jaw tightened. "I should have put you in a cab. I've put people in cabs before. I'm good at it. Instead I stood there and let you kiss me and then I let it keep happening, because apparently I'm weak for women who compare my hands to a well-run kitchen."

"That was a compliment."

"It was deranged. It was also the nicest thing anyone's said to me in a decade, which tells you about my decade."

Liza laughed, then sobered, because there was a real question underneath all of it and she wanted it