Re: Late-night intermission, at the bar: Sonya C & Open
For all its women-in-church-on-Sundays goodness, Repose had rolled over and exposed a taste for the titillating. Carnivals and old-world glamor, a bar at the end of town dedicated to slow sex-appeal served over ice, and now this: a temple to vintage delight and expensive drinks. Jack rolled into the new roadhouse, a testament to a clean-lived ...well, not a week, but at least a handful of days in the scrubbed-clean slope of chin and the aroma of newsprint and dust and coffee in his wake rather than sour liquor.
He wasn't looking for food; god no. He was looking for how the cards laid down in the game of barkeeps competing to keep the town entertained and partly? He was checking out the bar-prices and half-heartedly writing a skeletal review for the paper that could be shipped on to a willing journalist, to wrap evocative flesh around parched prose. He slid onto a stool, unwrapped a scarf, three consecutive loops around his throat, and draped it over his knee. Ready to order, he leaned into the absent space between his seat and the next to attract the attention of the bartender, and learned his neighbor was shivering as if the snow and wind was inside instead of out.
"It's not worth making yourself sick to get here opening-night. It's just a bar," he said, good humor tangled under clipped consonants. "Given how quick the rabble were to tell the owner that the unique selling point isn't exactly unique, there'll be another one in a week or two."