vacabdication: (Default)
pagan min ([personal profile] vacabdication) wrote in [community profile] fourstrings2020-03-28 04:08 pm

I'm on my second drink but I've had a few before



[ The bar doesn’t have a name. Not officially, anyway; what it has is a big neon sign sculpted into a peacock sweeping over the doors and doormen (he insists on doormen, “bouncers” is so crass) who admit people based on a list of requirements that changes nightly, because it’s amusing to keep people on their toes. Pagan calls it the nest, because peacock, and because despite the neon lights, the thumping music and the permanent fog of smoke in the air it’s his place and that makes it cozy. Yuma calls it “that fucking hole”, but Yuma still can’t be dissuaded from calling him Gang unless they’re literally doing a deal at the time, so he tries not to worry too much about what she says. It hardly matters what she says, anyway. She thinks he hung the moon, and it’s about the only bar she can be in without people assuming she’s a teen prostitute, so Pagan knows no matter how she teases him she likes being there.

What he likes less is the fact that currently, she’s winning. The young woman sitting in Pagan’s lap is very attentive and very pretty and currently shifting against him in a way that he suspects she thinks is subtle, but she’s not even close to as pretty as the woman who is currently stealing sips from Yuma’s glass. He wonders if she’d stop if he told her just how recently Yuma got back from vanishing with a different very pretty young woman and that he’s damn sure she didn’t pause to brush her teeth, but that would probably be cheating. So instead he smiles at Yuma, who cuts him a sly grin, points to the girl in his lap, and mouths her too.

He has to hand it to her, she certainly doesn’t lack ambition. And she did introduce him to those twins the other night, so he’ll take his loss with good grace.

The idea of throwing the bet becomes even more appealing when he looks up for one of the staff and his eyes land on... someone else. It’s a man, a few years older than Pagan, probably, Asian but definitely not Chinese. His thick, dark hair is wavy and he’s got only one of his sleeves rolled up, for some reason, and his dark eyes are scanning the bar like he’s looking for something.

Pagan decides that something is going to be him. He doesn’t even wait to ponder why he wants that when the man is, quite clearly, a man. There’s something magnetic about him, and he needs to know why.

He unwraps a hundred from a roll of bills, presses in into the hand of the girl on his lap and tells her to get herself a bottle of something before standing up and very nearly dumping her on the floor. He’s across the room in a few long strides, and he can hear Yuma noticing and laughing in the background, but fuck it. The mystery man is even more interesting close up, and Pagan crowds up into his personal space. ]


Drink?