Work Text:
Logan swore lavishly.
Bartending was not what the movies made it out to be.
He didn’t have the paycheck nor the emotional stability to nod and “mmmh” congenially while some poor bastard poured their hearts out on his newly swiped counter.
He didn’t give advices that one would consider morally decent, he didn’t condone feelings that found themselves on either side of “mild annoyance” and “bone-cracking anger” in his (frankly constricted) sympathy spectrum, and he sure as hell didn’t carry around embroidered handkerchiefs to wipe tragically snotty, heartbroken noses.
Apparently, someone hadn’t gotten the memo.
Logan swore again in the vague direction of the rug he was rubbing violently on some chipped mug.
All that sighing on his left was starting to get on his nerves.
Not to mention the seriously creeping half-glass-of-scotch-staring that was being performed behind the alcohol shelves on the other side of the counter.
Those two dudes didn’t even see each other, and they were driving him nuts.
The rug in his hands screeched painfully against the glass.
“This is our anniversary,” sighed the irritatingly posh men on his left. He then proceeded to chug mournfully at the last swig of alcohol in his glass.
He swayed dangerously on his stool.
“Ah,” said Logan.
“Well, it would be,” the man corrected himself, completely unsolicited. “If we didn’t break up.”
Logan glided on the counter and refilled the man’s glass as if his sideburns depended on it, almost dropping the whole bottle of whiskey in his haste.
The man flashed him a broad smile. “Thank you, my friend.”
He wasn’t Logan’s friend. Logan didn’t have British friends. Logan didn’t have friends period. He occasionally made a mental list of people he wouldn’t beat up willingly. Or for less than twenty bucks. It was a short list.
“Ugh,” said Logan.
Then the frown returned: the man had probably realized he had come to the bar to sulk, not to smile at strangers who were encouraging his unhealthy coping mechanisms. “It would have been our fifteen-month anniversary.”
He stopped and stared pensively at the sticky trail one drop of alcohol had left on his glass. “Did you know that fifteen months is the average gestation length of giraffes?”
Logan fled to the other side of the counter and found solace in the hiding-place provided by the bottles of alcohol.
Brief.
He found a brief solace.
The other Romeo was still staring at his glass of scotch with the desperate face of someone who had just seen the waiter dropping his long-awaited creme-brulee.
God have mercy.
“Do you want anything else?” Logan asked, because he needed to justify his impetuous arrival on stage, or maybe for his compulsive need to punish himself.
The man lifted his gaze and settled it on Logan. He opened his mouth, frowned, and finally said: “How do you move on from someone who used to smile at you like… Like you are at the train station, and you have been away for God knows how long, and you are trudging through the crowd with your luggage slamming on your ankle, everyone is running, everyone is shrieking. And then you see him, and he turns. And he smiles and doesn’t say anything, anything at all, and it’s not your mother tongue, it’s not the buildings you know so well, or the streets, or the flavor of coffee at your favorite bar that you missed. It’s him. And now you are back home and everything is steady again. How do you move on from someone who smiles at you like that?“
Logan was kind of jetlagged. “Shit,” he said profoundly.
“Yeah,” said the man.
Logan poured himself a drink because he was starting to feel feelings and he didn’t like it, then drew a battered cigar out of his pocket and lit it. The smoke soared gracefully in front of the “DON’T SMOKE” sign plastered on the wall.
The man arched his eyebrows, but returned without further comment to his brooding.
The screeching and wailing that always signaled the arrival of a large group of barely-legal jackasses forced Logan to go back to the part of the counter occupied by the previous helpless bastard. He served drinks that were half ice and half Gatorade, content to be finally doing what he was paid for.
“I don’t even know why we broke up, you know?” sighed the aspirant retired Oxford professor on his left when the mooing crowd had left. “I guess we were too different. Or maybe we were too similar, but wanted different things. You know?”
“Ugh,” said Logan, and puffed wildly on his cigar in a good impression of a locomotive.
“It all seems so insubstantial, now,” the man dragged on. “I can work on my thesis all night long without feeling guilty for not being home, but I still put all of my clothes only on the lower shelves of the wardrobe so that he can use the others without bending.”
“Shit,” said Logan.
“Yeah,” said the man. “I miss him especially when it’s Sunday evening and it’s raining, and my feet are cold under the covers.”
Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was the smoke, but Logan felt something tugging at his chest as if a worm had crawled its way into his heart.
He dragged another puff of smoke to suffocate the worm.
The man became thoughtful and appeared to have come to a resolution. “Would you be a good chap and refill this,” he shook gently the glass in his hand, “so that I can get drunk and call him?”
To Logan it seemed a reasonable request as any, so he shrugged and poured the man another drink.
And refilling he did.
He went to the other side of the Shakespearean stage another couple of times, because if that tragedy was in two acts then he might as well start following the plot.
Creepy-lover had almost finished his tired whiskey, and spoke to Logan again while he pretended to gather some ice for a margarita. “I obviously miss him, but most of all I miss being that person he saw when he looked at me. I don’t even fit in my skin anymore.”
Half an hour later Logan was starting to miss a boyfriend he never had.
And then everything really went bananas.
The act that triggered the fuse was blurry and wet.
Well, it was for Logan, who was chugging pure vodka right from the bottle and saw Posh-Professor pawing the screen of his cellphone through the glass.
After a few moments, a cellphone rang.
On the other side of the counter.
Logan spat out the whole content of his mouth like a spray fountain.
He heard a crash, a curse in German, something hollow banging against the counter, another, consonanter curse.
He saw Posh-Professor’s jaw open and swing like the seat of an abruptly stopped funicular. “Erik?” He asked, in a soft voice.
There was a pause, then a tentative: “…Charles?”
***
Six months later, Logan saw a creamy envelope land on his counter.
He frowned. “What’s that?”
The waitress shrugged. “A man came by earlier and left it for you. Said it was important.”
She went away, and Logan poked at the envelope in distrust and building annoyance. He poured another beer and finally decided to open it.
It was a wedding invitation.
He handed over the beer to the customer, and saw him gaping.
“What do you want, Summers?” Logan grunted.
“Are you smiling?”
“No.”
“You are, you are actually smiling. I didn’t know your face-muscles did that.”
“It’s a grimace of pain.”