“This was supposed to be a dining room, but I mean, who actually uses a formal dining room? Sorry, I’m probably asking the wrong person,” he added wryly.
Sam tried to hide her trepidation. Where was the closest bathroom? “I’ve never slept in a dining room before,” she said warily.
“Here, I’ll help you set up the air mattress,” Liam offered, which was when Sam noticed a giant plastic thing in the corner.
She watched in mute fascination as Liam unfurled it, then pressed a button. The mattress began filling with an angry whirring sound. Liam looked up to meet Sam’s gaze, his hair falling into his face, and grinned.
“You’ve never set up an air mattress before, have you?”
“Of course I have. I’m just distracted by how unbearably loud yours is,” Sam fibbed. Before Hawaii, the only mattresses she’d ever slept on were real ones, handmade in Sweden out of cotton and thick-spun wool and layers of very expensive horsehair.
Liam reached for a set of sheets and began tugging one corner over the edge of the air mattress. Sam tried her best to help, ignoring how intimate it felt for Liam to be setting up the place where she would sleep. He obviously didn’t think it was weird, and for all Sam knew, maybe it wasn’t. Hadn’t he said that they had guests constantly coming in and out of this house?
A clamor of voices made them both look up. Liam rocked back on his heels, grimacing slightly. “That’s the main drawback of this space—you hear everything in the living room.”
“Are those the rest of your housemates?” Sam stood, raking fingers through her cropped hair. “Can you introduce me?”
“I don’t know if this is a great time. We’re all about to go out,” Liam began, but Sam cut him off.
“A night out sounds like exactly what the doctor ordered.”
* * *
As it turned out, the group was headed to Enclave, the very same bar where Sam had snuck out to see Liam’s band on her graduation night. When they headed through the side entrance, Sam saw that it was just as she remembered: dimly lit and smelling faintly of beer. A pre-concert anticipation buzzed in the air.
I should bring Marshall here, she thought, which only made her sadder, because she might never get the chance to.
She turned to Jessica—Liam had introduced them earlier, at which point Jessica had apologized for all the clothes, and urged Sam to borrow whatever she wanted. “Should we stake out spots near the stage?”
Jessica shot her a concerned glance. “Liam didn’t tell you? We all work here.”
“At Enclave?”
“Amber is the sound tech, Leah and I are bartenders, Talal works security, and you already know that Ben and Liam are in the band.” Jessica reached up to pull her glossy dark hair into a ponytail. “It was how we all met, actually.”
“That makes sense.” Sam’s eyes darted around the venue, which was filling up by the minute. Instinctively she pulled her fedora lower over her brow. “Well, I’ll just find a spot, and—”
“Jessica!” An impatient-looking woman strode toward them. “I need you to work your section plus Deborah’s tonight; she just quit. God, this is not the night I wanted to be understaffed. It’s a sold-out show.” She closed her eyes and pressed her fingers to her temples, groaning.
“A sold-out show? Good for Liam,” Sam exclaimed, before she could think better of it.
The woman glanced over, then looked at Sam for a beat too long, her eyes studying Sam’s face. “Sorry, have we met? You look so familiar…”
“I’m a friend of Liam’s,” Sam said quickly.
“Well, new girl, how well can you open beer bottles?”
Sam blinked, and the woman threw out a hand to indicate the venue. “This is going to be a rough night for us without enough bartenders. Are you looking for work? As of now, we’re hiring.”
The old familiar sense of adventure crackled through Sam. Work as a bartender for the night? There were a million reasons it was a terrible idea.
“I’d love to,” she declared.
She’d been out to bars plenty of times in her life. Surely she could handle being on the other side of things for once.
After that, the night passed in a blur of beer bottles and shouted demands, of credit-card receipts and customers whining when she got their drink orders wrong. Sam felt like she was running from one crisis to the next, she and the other bartenders elbowing past each other as they navigated the length of the bar. Her feet hurt in her strappy heels and she sliced her hand chopping limes and the cut stung when she accidentally got vodka on it.
It was exhilarating.
Whenever she could catch her breath, Sam stole a proud glance at the stage. Liam’s band really was good. Their music seemed to echo the pulse of her heartbeat, its emotion raw and vulnerable yet somehow strong, too.
Eventually, the room dissolved in hoarse shouts and applause, and the houselights went up.
Sam blinked, wishing she could look at her phone to check the time; wasn’t this bar open until two a.m.? Had it really gotten that late? She focused on handing over the last few receipts, waiting as security slowly shuffled everyone out of Enclave, the stage lights dimming and then going off.
“New girl, you did okay tonight.” The manager peeled some bills from a stack and handed them to her.
Sam fought back a smile. The cash felt almost hot in her hand, as if it radiated its own energy. This was the very first money she’d ever earned on her own—or at least the first American money. And it felt somehow more momentous than everything Brad had paid her back in Hawaii, because she was doing it here, on her home turf.
“Who wants a drink?” Liam came to stand behind her and Jessica, throwing an arm around each of their shoulders. “I’d say we’ve earned one.”
“Isn’t the bar closed?” Sam asked.
Liam laughed appreciatively. “It’s closed to the general public, but we work here. We’re just grabbing our closing drink.” He took a few beer bottles from behind the bar and began handing them out. The rest of the bartenders and security staff started gathering around: a much smaller group than had been in this room half an hour ago, yet the space vibrated with noise as everyone struggled to be heard over one another.
“I’m telling you, the way people responded to ‘Not This Time’! I told you that song was a winner—”
“Did you see Jenna in the audience? She and Nat are back together—”
“No! Again?”
“We need to stock more bar mops behind the bar, it’s getting way too stressful halfway through shift—”