Notes

The bar of Jack's choice for the night is the kind of hole-in-the-wall dive that makes all the other average, regular, garden-variety hole-in-the-wall dives look like fucking Michelin-starred Parisian cafes, in comparison.

It’s grimy.

Dimly-lit.

In possession of several literal, actual holes in its literal, actual walls.

There isn’t a drink menu or a wine list or a quaint little chalkboard sign with all the beers on tap for the day scribbled in chicken-scratch alphabetical order down the front; it’s in a narrow, ramshackle building that Jack could’ve sworn used to be a tackle shop, on the very outskirts of town, right across the road from the two-pump no-name gas station that still sells cigarettes to kids if they ask rudely enough. There’s no parking lot, just a huge, scraggly patch of dirt littered with warped bottle caps and long-lost arcade tokens and stubbornly sprouting dandelions.

Jack is valiantly pretending to be interested in what the guy in front of him is talking about. What's his name again? Rick? Jack /thinks/ it must've been Rick. They're leaning against a wall in one of the darker corners of the bar. Jack's brown hair is perfectly tousled, like he doesn’t pay attention to what it looks like but it’s incapable of working against him: scruffy and falling in his eyes. He takes a quick sip of his vodka, draining it, and then glances away, shoving his unoccupied hand into the back pocket of his trousers. His trousers aren’t really designed for that, though, for the pockets to be useful, so it’s a tight fit. A struggle. An exercise in abject futility. Whatever.

He tosses his hair back, the motion easy and practiced and extremely, excessively deliberate in that it’s designed, engineered, fucking /choreographed/ to show off the elegant line of his throat.

He can feel Rick's eyes on him.

-

It takes less than ten minutes for them to end up outside. Jack gets shoved against the crumbling red brick wall next to the back door of the bar, a few feet away from the halo of a flickering, unflatteringly yellow security light.

"How much?" Rick drawls by his ear, hands already groping his pert ass.

"Five hundred," Jack says.

The silence that follows is thick, suffocating, oppressive, like some kind of not quite deadly but fully fucking annoying allergic reaction—it’s justifiably awkward, too, in a way that it probably should’ve been the entire time, hovering between them like an obviously preposterous smog cloud. Rude. Unwanted.

Rick's hands have stopped feeling him up but his mouth is still firmly attached to his neck when he speaks. "That's an awful lot for a dirty little fuck behind a bar."

Jack pushes Rick away in an instant. "Five hundred or I'm going back inside."

Rick scoffs. "Are you serious? Come on, we're having fun, aren't we?"

Jack storms off, making sure to slam the door behind him as he walks back into the bar, gaze fixed resolutely on the floor. He looks thoroughly pissed when he harshly collides with someone, his head snapping up, eyes fiery and wild.