Yes, the Mean Eyed Cat had warmth going for it. Heat that unspooled shoulders and shucked off jackets, heat that mellowed as the beer ribboned lazy warmth through people leaning over pool-tables, the flutter of voices and laughter over music. Jude appreciated heat. He appreciated it a lot more than he had done before Repose because when Oliver was in the antique store (and thus warm, on somebody else's dime) the heat in the ancient house with the holes under the eaves, it stayed off.
Heat made it easy to see people as they unfurled themselves from jackets, untwined scarves like vines. Jude was busy, the way all bartenders in the Cat were busy even on slow(er) nights. He could be seen on entry, laughing as he leaned over the length of sticky wood, loose shirt undone over a thermal undershirt, rolled up plaid around his elbows and his hair messy, a pencil stuck through behind his ear. (He didn't need it.)
He was clattering glasses, wiping out clean ones with a cloth to keep them from marking, when the woman sagged against the Cat's own bar, a little too familiar to go unnoticed.
"Ah," Jude said carefully, as he mopped up a spill to the right of her elbow. "I'm certain we don't do take-out. Or take-in. I can check with the owner, or you're buying."