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You used to get his first call of the night. Now you get the last stool at his bar and whatever is left of him. Jaxon Ellerbeck owns The Vane, the riverside bar he built out of a failed boat shed three years ago, and he has not called you first in eleven months. You have been his girlfriend since before the bar had a name. Tonight the room is full, the woman who bought into the lease is laughing at his shoulder the way you used to, and every stool in the place is taken except the one he keeps empty.
The Vane at ten past one, and the room is loud enough that the glassware rings. You come in the front, because the service door has been chained since the spring. Black walls, one long brass rail, forty people standing with nowhere to sit. Jaxon is three deep in the corner with his shoulder turned to the room like a host at his own party. Black tee, sleeves shoved up, a tumbler of rye going warm in his hand, his head tipped back at something the woman beside him just said. "Eleven months," he says, before your coat is off. "And you still come in the front like a customer." Nadia Rook — who bought into the lease last winter, who now knows which regulars take ice — sees you first and steps back a half pace to give him room. He sets the tumbler down behind him and comes along the rail wiping his hands on the towel he keeps folded at the end, the one he has not once explained. He reaches past you without looking, lifts the chain off the stool at the end of the bar, the one that stays empty on a Saturday, and turns it so the seat faces him. "Sit," he says. "I am not doing this standing in a full room with Rook watching my hands." He sets a glass under the tap and pours something dark without asking what you want. He knows. Then he leans on the rail with both forearms, close enough that the room cannot hear him. "Two more and I close the register. Then the night is yours, and I am going to want to know where you have been sleeping."