Safe and Sound

Chapter 2

Chapter 2Taggart Floros watched the latest person step down from the mic at The Campus Cavern’s back entertainment room. A group of drunk undergrads clapped uproariously, and begged for an encore, but the student was clearly done making a fool of herself as she sang the INXS song “Need You Tonight.” It was just not a good Karaoke song. The lead singer’s vocals were too soft and, quite frankly, sexy, in order for an amateur to pull off, especially if someone wanted to swap the words for others, like so many students wanted to do when they had Karaoke night at The Campus Cavern. The student had merely mumbled at all the sexy parts, and then mumbled some more as she didn’t know the lyrics and was too drunk to read them off the screen. She still seemed happy, though, as she joined her friends. Taggart hoped that meant a good tip left behind, in addition to the dollars and spare change people had added to the stein of beer on the front counter where he’d worked most of the night. During the lulls of the Karaoke, Taggart had already counted out and divided the main tips among the other workers, allowing the waitress Hailee and the day chef Ken to go home early with their spoils. Now it was just himself and the main manager Joseph still lingering at their posts for the night, though Joseph was hiding in his office on the second floor of The Campus Cavern. He really didn’t need to do much past a certain point at night—but like Taggart, he preferred to stay at the bar until it closed, just to say he’d done something productive that day. And so the two could carpool back to their shared townhouse later on.

When another student stood and began to head towards the Karaoke machine, Taggart’s daydreams of what he was going to do for the rest of a relatively boring Thursday night came crashing down. He bolted into the main entertainment area and towards the machine much faster than the drunk-wannabe superstar.

“Hello everyone,” Taggart said as he tapped the mic. Everyone’s eyes were on him in an instant. He swallowed back a combination of annoyance and nascent fear. Despite his tanned complexion, he’d be red-faced in no time as his skin tightened from the sudden attention. He took heart from his position as bartender and commanded authority in his voice that he did not feel. “This is last call. I will not be serving anyone anything else, and we will have to pack away the Karaoke soon.”

“How soon is now?” one person from the audience asked. Since they didn’t seem too drunk, Taggart figured it was a real question and not a reference to a Smiths song that someone wanted to sing next.

“Ten minutes. Which means, at most, one last song. Okay? One last drink, too.” He surveyed the crowd and tried to muster his most serious teacher-face from his past. “Do I make myself clear?”

The room nodded and murmured. It had been such a long time since he’d been in a classroom—almost ten years probably, when he really thought about it—but he still felt the teacher muscles next to his bones. He grinned genuinely before he stepped down from the stage. The beginning notes to the appropriately titled “Closing Time” by the 1990s band Semisonic started up by a new student singer while three more people followed Taggart to the bar for their last drinks. Just as Taggart finished cashing them through, someone else burst into the Campus Cavern.

Taggart had never seen a person move that fast towards a bar in his entire life, not even the sad drunk philosophy students as they hammered away on their never-ending dissertations. The drunks and sad sacks on campus who haunted the student-run (and mostly student patronage) of The Campus Cavern were always slow moving. But this man—with almost golden hair and wearing a nicely tailored grey suit—was the complete opposite of those winos in so many ways. He was well-dressed, with recently trimmed hair, bright eyes, and a serious expression, none of which fit the image of the average patron at all—unless this was a PhD student after a defense. Taggart had worked some afternoon shifts in the past and had readied the boardroom upstairs for those kinds of celebrations, usually where an older professor plied his young protégé with pint after pint now that he was a doctor of philosophy, and everyone else greeted one another with “doctor” like a bit from the film Spies Like Us.

But it was nearly two in the morning. No defense in the history of the school had ever gone that late. Surely. Taggart was so baffled that when the man locked gazes with him, he could say nothing at all. He almost fell into the man’s startling blue eyes.

“Hi.” The man broke the silence. He looked around the front area of The Campus Cavern, which was more set up like a cafe, and then towards the larger room where the commotion of applause and singing was coming from, often referred to as the Green Room since its walls were painted in pine. The man furrowed his brows and then looked back at Taggart. “Is there any place I can sit that’s quieter than here?”

“Um.”

“I just need to make a call. Over Skype. This is the only place on campus that has power. And Wi-Fi, right? Is there a Wi-Fi password, too? Or is it just the school’s Wi-Fi access code?” The man’s words came out in a rush, yet each one was clearly articulated as if he’d practiced them beforehand. He soon took out a thin laptop from under his arm and balanced it on his forearm as he logged in. He touched the screen and then nodded. “It’s the school one. That’s good. So is there a quiet place? A second floor, I think?”

“Um. Yes.” Taggart shook his head and pointed to a door that people often confused with the bathroom at the back of the bar. He spoke the next words from memory alone. “That takes you upstairs. There’s a side room there called The Boardroom. It’s small and with the door shut is pretty quiet.”

“Perfect. Thanks for that.”

The man bolted towards the door in a rush. Taggart’s panic returned, especially as the song in the next room faded into guffaws from his drunken student crowd. A crowd that had just agreed to leave. “Wait. Sir—I—”

“What?”

“It’s last call,” Taggart explained. “We can’t serve anymore. We’re closing in less than ten minutes.”

“Hmmm.” For the first time, the man seemed truly crestfallen and panicked. He reached into his suit pocket and pulled out his wallet. He handed over his yellow and black student card, and then a silver VISA card. “Just put something on a tab for me. I’ll try to be quick, but it might be longer than ten minutes. I’m sorry. If need be…” The man smiled, slowing down for the first time since Taggart lay eyes on him, and revealing a slight lisp in some of his later words, “get yourself a drink, too.”

“Yeah?” Taggart took the cards by rote response. He tilted the student card around and saw a much younger version of the man before him, with a wide smile and messy, unruly hair. “You sure about that, Rory?”

“More than sure. Sounds perfect, actually. I’ve got a call to make. Bye. Thanks!”

“Thanks to you, too.” Taggart couldn’t help but smile as he watched the door swing on its hinges. Rory disappeared upstairs and would no doubt cause Joseph a sudden shock when he would come out of his office when he was ready to go home.

But Taggart didn’t care anymore. He’d stayed behind hours after closing when Joseph’s friends from high school came to visit, played a really bad set with their instruments, and then took almost two hours to clean up. As far as Taggart was concerned, Joseph owed him at least one late night.

So Taggart grabbed a drink of Coke from the bar, since he was technically still on shift and would need to count money in a bit and so he needed his head—but he hoped, for real this time, that this drink would not be his last of the night. Especially not alone.

* * * *

Taggart had counted the till, wiped down the counters, and stacked the chairs in the Green Room by the time he heard movement upstairs. He braced himself for Joseph’s lecture about why he was still serving people this late into the night, but the footsteps didn’t belong to Joseph. It was Rory, now looking a bit more red-faced than he’d first appeared an hour ago. His suit jacket was wrinkled at the sleeves, as if they had been bunched in his fists for a majority of the call he’d had. His blond hair, too, seemed to now be cow-licked at the back from fussing with it over and over again. He held his laptop at his side, his broad shoulders slumped.

Just the type of person who needs a drink. Taggart had never been happier that he’d not closed up the fountain pop area. The bar itself was shut down, and had to be legally at this hour, but the nozzles for the soda syrups were still functional. Taggart shifted from the Green Room to the centre of the cafe area, where Rory stood.

“Oh, there you are,” Rory said. “Thanks for letting me use the room, but I’d like to go home now, I think. I need my student card for the bus pass.”

“Of course, right here.” Taggart slipped behind the bar and grabbed the cards from where he normally stashed the tabs for the night. He hesitated before he handed it back. “You sure you don’t want that drink you ordered? I can’t serve you alcohol now, but everyone likes Sprite, right?”

Rory wrinkled his nose in distaste.

Taggart could only laugh. “You know, I think I just wanted the offer the order as a rhyme. Not everyone likes Sprite, but maybe…Coke?”

After a moment, Rory nodded. Taggart was unreasonably happy to serve him the mediocre fountain pop. He added a lime to it to make it seem that much fancier, but it was no Cosmopolitan or White Russian. Rory mumbled a thank you and took a sip, his laptop now perched on a dry patch on the bar.

Taggart gestured to the device. “The call didn’t go well, I take it?”

“No, not in the least.” Rory made another face, this time more pained as if he’d struck a toe. He took the lime wedge in his hand and squirted it into the Coke and stirred it with the straw. He seemed to stare at the bubbles in the drink rather than Taggart as he spoke, but Taggart was just happy that he was speaking. It always amazed him just how much people were willing to share with him when he was wearing a uniform that bore his title as Bartender, along with the university logo on the sleeve. The counter separating them also gave the illusion of boundaries, enough for most people to open up. Taggart knew it came with the job, and was not necessarily personal, but this time, he wanted to believe that maybe Rory thought he was worth opening up to.

“It was a job interview,” Rory said. “I know I didn’t get it.”

“A job interview at nearly two in the morning?”

“It was in England, so it was early morning. It was the only time we were all free since academic jobs always involve so many people.” Rory took another drink and shrugged. “I really should have boned up more on English Literature.”

“You mean British?” Taggart said, wrinkling his brow. “I mean, isn’t Canadian fiction technically in English Literature, but not British? Even if we have the U in colour…”

Rory laughed. It seemed genuine. He met Taggart’s eyes again, and then looked back at his drink, as if something profound had happened. “Exactly. You’re right. I made the same mistake and I think it made one of the interviewers mad. Like I didn’t appreciate the output of his culture.”

“So you haven’t read enough Charles Dickens,” Taggart said, and when Rory didn’t correct him, he was relieved at his memory from his own limited exposure to British Lit. “But everyone’s read Harry Potter, so I mean, it’s sort of like British Lit is everywhere?”

“Exactly. You know, that sounds like something one of my friends would say.” Rory smiled. “But I should have, I don’t know, read something by Julian Barnes or even Allan Hollinghurst. Someone who was niche, but still relevant. Even though it’s not my area of expertise at all. Even though that’s not the position I wanted, either…I should have realized there would always be some kind of national pride going on and I should bone up.”

“Eh,” Taggart said, shrugging his shoulders in an overzealous way, hoping that the similar carefree attitude would rub off on Rory. “Maybe it’s for the best. If you didn’t like their books, then there’s not much else it’s got going for England. It rains all the time, and their food is terrible.”

Rory chuckled but tilted his head curiously. “You’ve been?”

“No, no.” Taggart held up his hands in surrender. “But my manager here trained as a chef, and he says English food sucks. Other than fish and chips, really. But that’s a universal food. Even the pickiest of picky eaters likes chips. Or fries.”

“True,” Rory said. “Everything else there is boiled, right?”

Taggart nodded slowly. “Joseph, that’s my boss, but he’s also my roommate and my cousin, so I trust his opinion on food. He makes me eat a lot of it.”

“So what cuisine is the best, then?”

“Why, this cuisine, of course!” Taggart gestured to the chalk display board behind him that declared the bar’s menu with a special place marked for their ever-rotating daily specials. The kitchen had long since shut down for the night—they didn’t serve full meals past nine—but the menu, even without photos or smells to entice, was decadent enough. Rory read over the items carefully and seemed to nod along in agreement.

“Maybe I should come here more often,” Rory said. “That soup of the day sounds good.”

“It is. I’d give you some to take home, but we’ve packed it all up.”

“Right.” Rory glanced down at his phone, seemed to balk at the time, and then grabbed another swallow of his Coke. It was mostly all ice and lime rind now. He pushed it towards Taggart across the bar with another weak smile. “Thanks again for this. It was a nice treat after a letdown.”

“No problem. We’re open most nights but Sunday. But we only serve the soup of the day, well, in the daytime hours.” Taggart bit his lip. He didn’t know what had gotten into him, other than a slight lack of sleep and a cute guy in front of him that was probably—maybe?—gay, but he wanted to keep talking. “I’ll be working days during the last half of the week.”

Rory tilted his head as he nodded. He smiled, but it was still weak. “I will keep that in mind. Thanks again.”

“No problem. Sorry again about your interview. Maybe your luck will change?”

“Maybe.” Rory conceded. “It would certainly be good for my love life if it did.”

Taggart couldn’t help but feel a wave of disappointment roll through him. His years of training, first as a teacher and then as a bartender, allowed him to hold back all of his emotions. He simply smiled and waved as Rory exited the bar. Then he let out a deep breath as he ran their glasses under the sink and put them in the dishwasher before he turned the machine on. The roar gave him a break from the beating of his heart, tinged with all too familiar disappointment. I really should get used to that, he told himself. All the things I want, maybe, I just shouldn’t have.

Just as Taggart locked the front door so no other patrons could come in, he heard Joseph’s looming steps. He braced himself for a small lecture about taking so long to close, but Joseph only greeted him with a smile. Half of Joseph’s round face seemed to bear the impressions of paper and a pen, as if he’d fallen asleep at his desk once again, and over the noise of Karaoke and everything else.

“You ready to call it a night, big guy?” Joseph asked. “There’s still time to catch that movie marathon I saw on the SyFy channel, if you’re interested.”

“Sure, man. Sounds good.” Being the big guy next to Joseph at six foot four and nearly two-twenty-five pounds was impossible. Taggart was only five ten at most, average in almost everything, and not especially big.

But next to Rory, who was tall but slender…He shook his head before the thought caught hold. Rory had a boyfriend, didn’t he? Why else would anyone interview for a job at nearly two in the morning, in a country that had terrible weather and even worse food? He said it was good for his love life, and so, Taggart really needed to let this other fantasy, no matter how small or nascent, go and enjoy some Mars Attacks! or whatever other B-movie romp the SyFy channel was offering with his cousin.

It was what he did every night, anyway.

Yet, three hours into the marathon, while Joseph was fast asleep next to him, Taggart knew he wanted so much more than this.