The guy at the end of the bar had been nursing the same whiskey for forty minutes.

I noticed because noticing is what you do on slow Tuesday nights when the only entertainment is a muted baseball game and a couple in the corner having the quietest breakup I've ever witnessed. She was crying into her wine. He was checking his phone. Romance was alive and well.

The whiskey guy wasn't checking his phone. He wasn't watching the game. He was sitting with the kind of stillness that made the air around him feel heavier, like gravity worked differently in his personal radius.

Tall. Dark hair pushed back. Jaw that looked like it had been designed to make someone stupid. He was wearing a black henley with the sleeves pushed to his forearms, and I'm not saying forearms are a reason to make bad decisions, but I'm also not saying they're not.

He looked up when I refilled his glass. Grey eyes. The kind of grey that isn't really grey. It's what happens when blue and green give up arguing and compromise on something that makes your brain short-circuit.

"Thanks," he said.

"You've been staring at that glass like it owes you money."

The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. "Maybe it does."

"Let me know if you want to start a tab."

"I don't plan on staying long."

"That's what they all say."

He did stay. Through my last two hours of shift, through the couple's breakup (she left, he ordered nachos), through the regulars trickling out until the bar was nearly empty. He ordered a second whiskey and drank it the same way, slow, like time was something he had too much of.

When I started wiping down the bar at midnight, he finally spoke more than four words.

"What time do you get off?"

I squeezed the rag out in the sink. "That depends on whether you're asking as a customer or as something else."

"Something else."

I looked at him. Really looked. Up close, he was worse. Not handsome the way actors are handsome, all symmetry and grooming. Handsome the way a problem is handsome. The kind of face that makes you think: I'm going to regret this, and I'm going to do it anyway.

"Twelve-thirty," I said.

He was waiting outside when I locked up. Leaning against the brick wall with his hands in his pockets. The street was empty, orange under the sodium lights, the kind of quiet that makes a city feel like it's holding its breath.

"I don't usually do this," I said.

"Me either."

"That's statistically unlikely."

He laughed. Short, real, surprised. Like he hadn't expected to laugh tonight and I'd caught him off guard.

We walked three blocks to his hotel. He didn't touch me. Didn't try. Just walked beside me with that same careful stillness, and somehow the space between our arms felt louder than everything else on the street.

The elevator was small. He hit the button for the fourteenth floor and stood on the opposite side, hands in his pockets.

"You don't even know my name," I said.

"You don't know mine either." His eyes dropped to my mouth, then back up. "Seems fair."

The room was dark except for the city coming through the windows. He closed the door behind us and I kissed him because waiting any longer would have been a waste of everyone's time.

He kissed back like he'd been thinking about it since the first whiskey.

His hands slid up my sides, thumbs tracing my ribs through my shirt. I pulled at his henley and he helped, dragging it over his head in one motion. His chest was warm and solid, a scar running along his left side that I traced with my fingers without thinking.