Below the sign, amongst a knot of other patrons, a girl who looks a touch familiar lifts her arm in a gesture meant to attract the bartender’s attention but as her arm moves over a tray of glasses waiting to be delivered to a table Dorian sees the purpose of the motion. The almost invisible trail of powder that settles into the sidecar with no sugar below and dissolves into the liquid.
The girl leaves without getting the bartender’s attention at all, slipping first into an anonymous cluster of drinkers and then out the door. Don’t stay to watch. He knows that one. He used to break that particular rule occasionally, to be certain. These newer recruits don’t take the time to see the nuances around the guidelines. Certainty is worth bending rules for.
He could let it go.
He has performed similar actions himself, many times. And worse. He thinks of the last time—the last time—and his hands start to shake. For a moment he is in a different city in a dark hotel room and everything he thought he knew is wrong and his world tilts and then he collects himself again. He puts down his book.
He wonders if the powder in this particular glass is the low-grade amnesia version or the serious stuff. Either would be undetectable, leave its recipient woozy in an hour or two, followed by passing out and waking up terribly hungover or not waking up at all.
Dorian rises from his chair as a waitress picks up the tray and by the time he reaches it he has decided both that it probably is the serious stuff and that it doesn’t matter.
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It is simple to knock into the waitress, to send the tray and its contents crashing to the floor, simple to apologize for fabricated clumsiness, to offer to assist and be waved away, to return to his table as though that was always his destination and not his point of origin.
How did everything lead to this? One book, one man. Years of mystery and tedium and now things insist on happening all at once.
He’s too interested already. He knows that.
Why did he have to be interesting?
The unexpectedly interesting young man gets up from his table, leaving the two women chatting. He turns and walks to the back of the bar, something in his face changes as soon as he’s out of sight of the table. Not a drunkenness but a dreaminess, a not quite there, lost in thought fog, maybe with a bit of worry thrown in. Curiouser and curiouser.
Dorian glances back at the table and one of the women is looking right at him. She breaks eye contact immediately and continues talking, writing something down on a cocktail napkin. But she saw him. Watched him watching.
Time to go.
He puts his book away and slides more than enough cash for his single cocktail and a good tip under his empty glass. He’s outside in the snow avoiding the puddles of light from the streetlamps by the time Zachary Ezra Rawlins returns to his table.
Dorian can see the table from here, a hazy shadow through a frosted pane of glass but distinct from the other shadows moving through the space.
He knows better than this. He shouldn’t be here. He should have walked away a year ago, after a different night in a different city when nothing went according to plan.
How many dramas are unfolding around us right at this very moment?
Again his hands start to shake and he shoves them in the pockets of his coat.
Something broke then but he’s here now. He doesn’t know where else to go. What else to do.
He could leave. He could run. Keep running. Continue hiding. He could forget all this. This book, his book, the Starless Sea, all of it.
He could.
But he won’t.
As Dorian stands in the snow with shaking, near-frozen fingers and scotch-warmed thoughts, watching Zachary through the glass, he isn’t thinking about everything that’s inevitably about to happen.
He’s thinking, Let me tell you a story.
There is a stag in the snow.
Blink and he will vanish.
Was he a stag at all or was he something else?
Was he a sentiment hanging unspoken or a path not taken or a closed door left unopened?
Or was he a deer, glimpsed amongst the trees and then gone, disturbing not a single branch in his departure?