Sticky Floors

The last keg thudded into place against the back wall of the cellar pushing midnight, and Angelica Schneider let herself slide down the cool cinderblock until her ass hit the floor. She didn't plan it. Her legs just quit, the way they'd been threatening to since hour nine of the festival, and the floor was right there, so she took it.

Cristian Miller looked up from the tap handles he was breaking down, one eyebrow already climbing. "You good?"

"I'm vertical by technicality," she said. "Don't trust the technicality."

He laughed, that low dry sound he made when he thought something was funnier than he was willing to admit. Ira Harrington, on the other side of the cellar wrestling a hose coil that had clearly won their fight, snorted so hard he dropped the whole thing on his own foot.

"Shit," Ira said, hopping. "Shit shit shit."

"Graceful," Cristian said.

"I'm running on four hours of sleep and a body made entirely of IPA," Ira shot back. "I'm not responsible for my motor functions."

Angelica tipped her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. The cellar smelled like wet concrete, grain, the sweet-sour ghost of two days' worth of spilled beer, and underneath all of it, the yeast-warm smell of the three of them. Sweat. Effort. The particular staleness of a weekend nobody had prepared for. The festival had been supposed to be moderate. The festival had instead been a siege. Every stool in the taproom taken by two, a line out the door until the sun went down, and her voice was already down to a rasp from calling last pours over the roar of a hundred strangers who'd all decided simultaneously that this was their weekend to discover craft beer.

Her feet throbbed. Her shoulders were knotted into something geological. And God, it felt good to sit on a filthy floor and not be needed for one single second.

"Pedro texted," she said, eyes still closed. "Wants to know if we're alive."

"Tell him barely," Ira said. "Tell him we're sending word from the afterlife."

"Tell him," Cristian said, "that we closed out the drawers and the numbers came out clean, so if we're dead, at least the audit won't be a problem."

Angelica smiled without opening her eyes. She thumbed out a reply. Alive. Cellar. Dying slowly. Love you. Pedro would read it, grin that easy grin of his, and go back to whatever he was watching with the dog on his chest. He'd stopped asking when she'd be home around month two of this job. He'd figured out that festival weekends swallowed her whole, and instead of sulking he'd started leaving a plate in the oven and a light on the porch, and she loved him so much for it that it was almost annoying.

"Okay," she said, and hauled herself up the wall like a climber with bad news. "Drawers are done. Floor's mopped, mostly. I'm calling it."

"Calling it," Cristian agreed.

"Calling it so hard," Ira said, and then ruined the moment by trying to lift the hose coil again and making a sound like a wounded animal.

They climbed the stairs in a slow procession, Angelica first, and came out into the darkened taproom. The chairs were all legs-up on the tables. The long bar gleamed where she'd wiped it down, three separate times, because sticky was a personal insult she took professionally. The neon Copper Lantern sign above the taps was switched off, so the only light came from the streetlamp outside and the little blue glow of the dishwasher chugging through its last rack of festival glassware.

And there, sitting on the bar top like a little shrine somebody had forgotten to take down, was a flight paddle. Four small glasses, still mostly full, each one beaded with condensation.

Angelica stopped. "Whose is this?"

Ira and Cristian looked at each other with the particular expression of two men who both know exactly whose it is and neither wants to say.

"That would be mine," Ira admitted, "from a thing I was doing. Earlier. With my mouth."

"You poured samples for yourself during the rush?" Cristian said.

"I poured samples for quality assurance during the rush, which is a completely different thing, legally."

"It's the same thing."

"It's the same thing," Angelica confirmed. "But." She looked at the flight. Four pours: the pale ale, the amber, the coffee stout they'd only had on for two weeks, and the saison that Cristian had brewed in secret and pretended wasn't his passion project even though everyone in the building knew it was. "But we're all adults here, and it'd be a crime against brewing to pour these out."

"She's right," Ira said immediately.

"She's usually right," Cristian said. "It's exhausting."

The dishwasher hummed on. Somewhere in the back, the walk-in compressor kicked over with a familiar shudder. Angelica looked at the flight, then at the two of them, and made the call she'd make a hundred more times over the next few years without knowing it yet.

"Dishwasher's still running. We're not driving anywhere till it finishes. So." She picked up the paddle and carried it to the far end of the bar, the good end, the one with the window and the streetlamp light slanting across the wood. She set it down with care. "We drink it here. Slow. And then we go home."

Cristian came around the bar without a word, which, from Cristian, was a whole speech. He didn't hop the bar like Ira did, all knees and elbows. He walked the long way through the gate, unhurried, and took the stool at the corner as if settling into his own kitchen. Ira vaulted over anyway, landed with a thump, and slid onto the stool next to Cristian with the grin of a golden retriever who'd never once been punished for anything.

Angelica took her own stool on the staff side of the bar, and that little detail mattered to her more than she'd have said out loud. Three stools, three people, one bar between them. It felt like something. She didn't examine what.

"Saison first," Cristian said. "Before Ira ruins his palate with the stout."

"My palate is bulletproof."

"Your palate is a crime scene."

Angelica slid the glass across. Cristian took it, and she watched him taste his own beer as she always did, a thing she'd decided a long time ago not to think too hard about. He didn't perform it. No swirling, no ceremony. Just a sip, eyes half closed, and then a small nod to himself, private, as if the beer had told him a secret and he was deciding whether to keep it.

"Well?" Ira demanded.

"It needs two more weeks," Cristian said.

"It's perfect," Angelica said.

"It needs two more weeks," Cristian repeated, but he was looking at her when he said it, and there was something in his face that wasn't about the beer at all. "Thank you."

They worked through the flight in no particular order after that, argument by argument. Ira did full theatrical tasting notes for the amber, all of which were lies. Angelica defended the pale ale against nobody, at volume, purely because her voice was wrecked and it felt good to use what was left of it. The dishwasher clicked through its cycle, marking time. Outside, the street was empty, the festival tents down the block already dark, the whole town finally done with them.

By the time the machine dinged its last cycle, Angelica had her elbows on the bar and her chin in her hands and a warmth in her chest that was half beer, half exhaustion, half something she wasn't naming. Her math was off. She didn't care.

"You know what I figured out tonight," she said.

"Oh no," Ira said happily.

"Shut up. I figured out what we should be paying ourselves for this weekend. Because it wasn't hourly wages. It wasn't any hourly wage that exists. We worked a double times two with no breaks and I only swore in front of customers eleven times, which if you knew me is a miracle of restraint."

"Twelve," Cristian said. "I heard the twelfth."

"Twelve. Fine." She waved her half-empty glass. "So we can't afford to pay ourselves what it was worth. Which means we owe each other something else. Which means, and I want it on record that I'm joking, we should be allowed to bill our overtime in an alternative currency."

"Alternative currency," Cristian said, flat.

"Alternative currency," she confirmed. "Company scrip. Favors. Something better than money. Something you can't spend anywhere but here."

The words came out joking. They were joking. Ninety percent joking, anyway, which was the exact percentage she'd been doing her best thinking at her whole life.

Ira leaned his chin on his hand and looked at her with those big warm eyes going just a little bit careful, like he'd caught something under the joke and wasn't sure if he was supposed to. "What kind of favors are we talking about?"

"I don't know. Good ones. The kind you'd actually want to collect."

The dishwasher hissed and went quiet. The taproom went so still she could hear the streetlamp buzzing outside.

Cristian turned his glass a slow quarter turn on the bar top. When he looked up, his face was doing its usual careful nothing, but his voice, when it came, wasn't quite level, and that little crack in it did something to her spine she wasn't ready to think about.

"I'd want to collect," he said.

It hung there. Three people, one bar, the blue light off the glasswasher dying down to nothing. Angelica's heart fell into a slow, heavy cadence, and every tired muscle in her body went strangely, electrically awake.

She should have laughed. She should have said something to put it all back in the joke box where it belonged. Instead she looked at Ira, who was watching her with his mouth slightly open, and then at Cristian, who hadn't blinked, and heard herself say, in the calmest voice she had left:

"Then maybe we should talk about rates."