BEXLEY BRIAR
but if i gave up on being pretty,
I wouldn’t know how to be alive
I wouldn’t know how to be alive
This bar sounds significantly dingier and seedier than Bexley’s usual haunts, but beggars can’t be choosers, can they?
Denocte is still strange to her, not quite home, and her usual haunts are entirely out of reach, kept behind lock and key of Raum’s dictatorship. (The thought makes her teeth itch; when she sees him in the back of her mind it is like a knife to the chest, impossible to breathe around.) He took her husband. Her country. And now this. Even her fucking bars.
The markets roar with activity, even this deep in the night. Fires blossom in charcoal pits and violins sing from the street corners, and as Bexley passes through row after row of market stalls, voices eventually start to follow her. Oh, there she goes. That’s her? Yeah, look at the scar—she does not bother glaring as they pass; there are far too many of them for her to pick out one by one, and anyway their comments are far less important to her than picking up a buzz.
At the very end of the stalls rises an old door. Warm light floods out from underneath it and washes the cobblestone in pale yellow. She can hear the dim murmur of voices, leaching from inside the walls, and the knowable sound of glasses and mugs clattering together against tables and stools. It sounds like her old life, something woefully familiar she can’t quite yet back. For a long moment Bexley hovers outside the doorway. She watches the still shape it makes and feels the gentle pull in her chest; watches and waits, as if poised on a step.
Then she shakes her head and pushes in, shedding her doubts as easily as a summer coat.
Inside it’s not much more impressive. A few scattered patrons cast in dim, sooty light. A singular bartender rattling in the back. The customers turn to give her a glance, but one watches longer than all the others with a gaze that burns like ice—bald-faced and slender-bodied, coated in grays and blacks. The gaze does not move for far too long. Does not move even as Bexley saunters toward her, closer and closer to the open seat at the bar.
Finally they are level. Bexley glances sideways at her with a gaze that is both caustic and fuck-me.
"If you want to look so bad," she murmurs,"you might as well buy me a drink."
