Work Text:
Lance McClain is sick and tired of going with the flow.
His uniform is dirty from having tartar sauce spilled on it, San Antonio is muggy even in the middle of September, and if he has to hear Jimmy Buffett croon over the speakers about his lost salt shaker one more time, he’s gonna lose it.
Working at the Margaritaville as a waiter while he gets his bachelor’s in BioChemistry wasn’t all bad. The RiverWalk at night was beautiful, the money wasn’t bad, and it wasn’t too far from his shitty apartment.
That being said, he doesn’t absolutely love dealing with gun-toting hicks that demanded a whiskey, even though they were sitting in a Margaritaville and all they sold was beer on tap and every single margarita and margarita-adjacent drink the human mind could think of. Lance does like his job.
He does.
He likes the blue-sky-painted walls,the ocean animals hanging from the ceiling, and the giant margarita blender sitting just inside the doors to greet customers before a host sits them down.
“I want the poke nachos,” a woman says over her menu, eye makeup blue and crusty and far too heavy for Lance, “Without the sour cream and the green onions, and can you make the chips tortillas?”
Lance inhales, digging his teeth into the tip of his tongue and drumming his fingers on his lined notepad. “I’m sorry, ma’am, we don’t offer poke nachos. Those are only available at our luxury establishments.”
He’s serving a family of five, the woman, her husband who is equally engrossed with his beer and his phone, and their three kids, all guessably under eight, and have been left unsupervised. Hence the tartar sauce currently drying on his short apron.
“ No , you do sell them, I looked at your menu online and it said that you did.” She drops her menu onto the laminated table, narrowly avoiding the puddle of condensation from her second drink. “So, I want the poke nachos.”
The deep sigh in his chest almost slips through his lips, but Lance shifts back and forth on his feet, enough for his curls to shift, and swallows it down. “Again, ma’am, I’m very sorry, but we don’t offer the poke nachos. Perhaps I could interest you in the Volcano nachos instead? They’re an appetizer, but they have cheese, beans, corn, queso, pico, I think–”
“Are you calling me stupid ?” The lady snarks, crossing her arms over her, frankly ugly, shirt.
It’s green and covered in toucans. Go figure.
“Not at all,” He backtracks, “I was just—”
“I want to speak to your manager!” She demands. “I will be complaining about you–what’s your name? Lucas? Lyall?”
“Lance.” He sighs. “I’ll be right back.”
He’s gonna end it all. Truly. Lance flips his notepad shut, tucking it in a pocket on his apron, and drifts away from the table.
It’s second nature, dodging kids running amok and his fellow servers carrying weighed-down trays to get to the host’s stand where his manager Coran, odd-looking but with a heart of gold, stands talking to their newest hostess Axca, who’s fiddling with her short purple-blue hair.
They’re deep in conversation about water skis or something when Lance walks up and groans, “Coran, this lady at table six wants to see you. She’s going to bitch about me to high heaven because we’re not fancy enough to serve poke nachos.”
Coran looks over, fiddling with his thick orange mustache. He’s been the manager at this Margaritaville since Lance started working here as a freshman in college, showing up without fail in cargo shorts, flip-flops, and a red polo shirt. “Well, that just won’t do. Thank you for telling me, Lance. Could you–”
“No, definitely not,” Lance cuts him off, “I am covered in tartar sauce. I’m gonna take my fifteen, and after that, I’ll run whatever errand you need me to do.”
“Oh, alright, dear.” Coran’s mouth pinches briefly, but it’s gone in an instant. “Axca will take over for you while you’re gone, then. Is that okay with you, dear?”
Axca’s eyes flash with nerves but she nods resolutely, shuffling off to Lance’s section. Coran smiles at him from underneath the mustache and follows after her to try and fix the mess waiting at table six. Lance runs a hand through his hair, ruffling the curls until they lay across his forehead again, and treks over to the bar.
Their usual patrons prefer to sit at tables and eat when they’re at a Margaritaville. The only people that come here are old people with coupons, tourists, and the two strange men whocame in claiming they were eating at every Margaritaville in the country. He’d wished them good luck in Florida and went home to collapse on his couch. That didn’t leave much room for people who liked to sit at bars.
Despite this, they still have a bar, and its stools do get used. There’s only one man behind the bar tonight, a man he definitely does not recognize. He’s wearing a black polo shirt, and the bar hides everything else. In the entire time Lance has worked here, there’s only ever been, like, three different bartenders. Two of three of those bartenders quit a week after being hired, so it was really just the one.
What’s so captivating about him is the speed at which his hands move with the metal shaker, whipping it up and over his head and pouring whatever nightmare resided inside it into a pretty glass cup with a salted rim. Perfect. He looked like he could mix his alcohol, and that’s what Lance needed.
He sidles up to the bar and takes a seat. Lance knows he looks like a mess, his usually perfect Hawaiian shirt half untucked on his hip, hair mussed and apron splattered with tartar sauce, but he cannot find it in the depths of his soul to give a shit. “Where’s Romelle?”
“What can I get for ya— who ?” The bartender says, drying off a glass with the towel half tucked into his apron.
A sigh heaves out of Lance’s mouth and he props his elbows onto the counter before dropping his forehead into his hands. “Romelle. Bartender. We’ve been on the same shift for over a year.”
The bartender doesn’t say anything, contemplating. “Oh, she quit.”
“She quit ?” Lance repeats, peeling his head from his hands and squinting at the bartender.
Now that they’re closer, Lance can see that there’s a faint scar on the bartender’s otherwise unmarred face, running from his jawline to the right side of his nose. His eyes are, like, forty different colors and Lance cannot tell for the life of him which one takes the lead, so he decides on a blackish-purple. They hide behind thick lashes and offer a no-nonsense look. “Yup. Quit two weeks ago. Don’t you work here? Why are you sitting at my bar?”
He shrugs. “I have had a largely horrible shift and deserve something fruity for my troubles. One table spilled two different cups of sauce on my apron, and this group of teenagers came in and tried to order a chalupa, go fucking figure, and I’m one of two waiters on shift tonight. I am in hell.”
The bartender recoils, shaking his head. “Point taken. Do you want, like, a soda or something? I think there’s a Dr Pepper hidin’ ‘round here somewhere.”
Lance feels his eye start to twitch, even though this bartender has been nothing but nice to him. “If there is not alcohol in my system in the next, like, five minutes, I’m gonna have to check into a psych ward as soon as I get off my shift. I would like something fruity and alcoholic that is going to make the rest of tonight suck that much less.”
“And you’re just…always like this? Weirdo.” The bartender mutters and turns around, collecting bottles and a shaker.
Since the bartender’s back is turned, Lance is free to ogle him as much as he’d like. He’s wearing cargo shorts and sandals, like a suburban dad, and Lance wrinkles his nose at them.
Poking out of the sleeve of his shirt is what looks like a tattoo of the jaws of life, just by the handles that sit above his right elbow. “Wonder what the story behind that is,” he says to himself, fiddling with the thin gold chain around his neck.
“The story behind what ?”
The bartender has turned around and is holding an obnoxiously red drink with a pineapple wedge lodged onto the rim of the glass, pushing it towards Lance over the bar with a straw.
Just by looking at it, Lance can tell, “This–isn’t on the menu.”
“There’s a brain in his head,” the bartender muses, drying off the shaker he used to mix the drink, “It’s an off-menu I picked up at a bar some years back, called a Rum Runner. Mostly rum, but it's got banana liqueur, blackberry liqueur, pineapple and lime juice, and grenadine. Fruity, as requested.”
“Call this thing a gaydar with how fruity it is,” Lance jokes, unwrapping the straw and taking a sip. “ Oh— Jesus, fucking Christ. That is. That’s… alright.”
“I have sold more of those than stains on this bar, it is not just alright .”
“Either your math is wrong or your eyes are broken, because this bar is one, not that dirty, and two, this is definitely not that good.” Lance holds the straw delicately between two fingers, sipping gently and wrinkling his nose every time.
He asked for fruity, he asked for this , but he didn’t mean thirteen-year-old friendship charged with homosexual tension fruity. Maybe senior-year theater kid fruity. Yeah, that sounded more like it.
“My eyes are fine , you pretentious fuck. I bet you drink whiskey and think it tastes good,” the bartender says, reaching for the drink.
Lance clutches it and leans back out of his reach. “Fuck off, this is how I’m gonna get through the rest of the night.”
“Are you only good at your job when you’re tipsy? If this is how you talk to customers, I can see why they spilled sauce on ya.”
“I am a delight to customers,” Lance hisses, taking a full drink and basically screwing up his whole face, “What about you, were you so bad at waiting tables that they banished you to the bar?”
There is a telling silence.
Lance bursts out laughing, his drink sloshing over and spilling a little onto the knee of his slacks. “That’s— oh my god —how do you get banished ? Just smile and act nice and pretend you haven’t heard the same joke about it being five o’clock somewhere when someone orders their third drink at two in the afternoon!”
“It is not that easy.” The bartender rolls his eyes and sets the shaker down, looking over Lance’s shoulder. “Coran is waving at me. Presumably to get yer attention, so I think your fifteen’s up… I don’t know your name–aren’t you s’posed to have a nametag?”
He glances behind him, and Coran is waving for him to come back over, so it is rightful to assume his fifteen minutes are up. Lance quickly polishes off his drink– it wasn’t very tall– and lets the glass bottom slam into the counter. “Company policy changed, baby. The name’s Lance, but don’t wear it out.”
Lance gets up, heart hammering out of his chest because why did he say that? Why does God allow him autonomy of his tongue, and why does he say shit like that? He’s halfway to Coran when he hears the bartender shout over the music to him, “My name is Keith!”
Keith. He turns the name over in his mouth, trying to attach it to the face, endlessly dark eyes, and dark hair, but it isn’t much of a struggle. The name slides into place right next to everything else he knew about the bartender, which was admittedly not very much.
“So, Lance, I fixed the problem,” Coran says as he’s walking up.
“Did you, truly though?” Lance drawls, taking his pad of paper and pen back out.
Coran nods, mustache bobbing. “She ended up ordering the volcano nachos.”
“I’m gonna fucking quit—I cannot take this anymore.” Lance breathes out, one eye genuinely twitching.
“Remember to give two weeks notice!” Coran says over his shoulder as he walks away, grinning merrily.
Lance grumbles, looking around his section as Acxa seats a young couple. “Two weeks, my ass.”
He straightens his shoulders and shakes out his hair, pasting a charming smile onto his face that pushes his dimples into view, and then walks over to the both of them. “Hey, folks, my name is Lance, I’ll be your server today. It’s five o’clock somewhere, and that somewhere is right here. Can I get you two started with a drink?”
They both order iced tea, which is remarkably simple for twenty-somethings at a restaurant literally named “margarita town,” but as Lance writes it down along with their appetizer, the drink Keith mixed up for him still lingers in his mouth.
Maybe he’d have to keep having bad shifts. Keith seems remarkably interesting.
—
“Romelle, why would you quit on me?” Lance whines, clutching his plastic cup of green tea tight in his hand. “Now I’m all alone, working at a fucking Margaritaville!”
She shrugs daintily. “Because only gay people work at Margaritaville.”
“You’re dating Allura, who works at this coffee shop that we are sitting in, who is a woman .”
“So?” Romelle takes a sip of her drink. “I got a job that pays better and isn’t at a Margaritaville .”
“Yeah, but you left me! That’s the important thing!”
Allura walks over to the table, holding a dark blue mug. Her white hair is split into two braids down to her mid-back, and her eyelids are varying shades of pink and sparkly. Romelle tilts her head up in a stupid-looking grin as she approaches, gleefully accepting the kiss Allura drops onto her cheek. “I thought they hired a new bartender, Lance? Did you not say that he was handsome?”
“I did not ,” Lance gripes, sipping angrily, “I said he was intriguing but also kind of an asshole. And his outfit was stupid. He was wearing cargo shorts. And sandals. He works behind the bar, you’d think he’d be wearing close-toed shoes.”
“Well, apparently, you thought wrong.” Romelle snorts, reaching for Allura’s mug.
She hands it over willingly, watching Romelle with a besotted look as she takes a sip of whatever’s in it and passes it back. “Perhaps you should get to know your co-worker?”
Lance shakes his head. “Absolutely not. Impossible. I’m not going to befriend someone with the jaws of life tattooed on their arm and who wears sandals to work unironically.”
“I think you’re being impossible.” Allura comments. “Just get over it and talk to him. You obviously thought he was cute if you can remember what he has tattooed onto his bicep.”
He can’t say anything back to that without looking like the biggest fool in the land. So Lance settles for glowering at her over his drink, fiddling with the ring on his middle finger.
“When’s your next shift?” Romelle asks, leaning into Allura’s shoulder.
“Uhm… Saturday night.”
Romelle cringes. “Yeah, I don’t miss those. Wish him good luck from me. He’s gonna be able to make a Hurricane with one arm tied behind his back and blindfolded.”
“I will not .”
—
Saturday rolls around and Lance has pretty much reached his limit with how tolerant he was. When he got to work, he was all fake smiles and feigned amusement, fetching drinks and running orders.
A group of seven came in with no reservation and demanded a table, despite them being fully packed because of the hour, and that put a damper on Lance’s mood, but he was determined to not let it ruin his night. So he sucked it up and greeted them with a sunny smile and seven menus.
Almost immediately after that, the family sitting in one of the booths started to complain about the people sitting behind them– a single mother, a newborn, and two kids under five—and so he moved the family that complained. But apparently, that was not enough, because when he brought their next round of drinks by, they complained again about the baby wailing. Lance moved them one more time to basically the furthest corner of the restaurant, and that seemed to fix the problem.
He did feel really bad for that mom though, so he bribed Ezor, one of the waitresses on shift alongside him with brown skin and long coral-colored hair, to take over his tables for an hour. She agreed to it, and he dropped off an iced tea on the house for the mom and evenwatched her children while she got to eat.
It wasn’t a part of his job, and certainly not required, but he grew up in a big family. They were a nightmare whenever they ate in a sit-down restaurant, and Lance knew for sure that both of his parents were bone-tired. He didn’t mind, and neither did the mother. She passed her baby over to him with a tired smile and a glint in her eyes, which was more than he could say before Lance offered. Her newborn, which took a shine to Lance almost immediately and fell asleep in his gently bouncing arms, and her fraternal twins Maven and Asher.
Asher was the problem, Lance could tell within five seconds of meeting the boy, but Lance had lots of experience in managing The Problem.
That single parent got to eat, and her children were entertained, so Lance didn’t mind at all. There was a little spit-up on his shoulder from the newborn, and his shirt was black , but he could wipe it off.
By seven o’clock, Lance was gritting his teeth at every change to an order and every complaint. Not that any of them were his fault, but because he was the guy in the Margaritaville shirt with the notepad, he got most of the blame.
“Lance, have you taken your lunch yet?” Coran asks from the host’s stand as Lance is bustling by, an empty tray tucked underneath his arm.
He stops and thinks. “Uh… no. I have not.”
Coran shakes his head. “There’s a reason you have those, dear. Take your lunch, you’ve been working since you got here.”
Lance exhales, unclenching his jaw and relaxing his shoulders. “Sure. Thanks, Coran.”
“Of course. Drop off your tray before you go.”
He follows orders, stopping into the kitchen to deposit the large circular tray on top of a pile of others, and leaves with a basket of fish and chips he batted his eyes at the nearest chef for. Lance looks around for a spot to sit and eat, but every table is taken, even the ones outside by the canal. There’s a spot at the bar, and he moves toward it, but Keith is the one standing behind the counter shaking up drinks.
The man looks no different than he did three days ago, but his hair is up in a ponytail that swings behind him. He’s even in the same shirt, but Lance himself owned several of the polo shirts he’s wearing right now, so it depended on whether he was wearing the same cargo shorts.
Lance stands there holding the plastic basket until someone almost bumps into him and he apologizes on reflex and starts walking towards the bar. He slides into the empty stool, dropping his basket onto the bar with a light thump , and leans over slightly to see Keith in the exact same cargo shorts and sandals.
“Did you even change ?” Lance comments, popping a still-warm fry into his mouth.
Keith turns around from where he’s wiping bottles down with a clean rag. “What?”
“I asked if you changed,” Lance says again through his full mouth, “You’re wearing the same pants.”
He looks down, like he hadn’t even realized or something, which is stupid. “This… is my work uniform.”
“Yeah, but most people at least have like, a second pair of work pants. I have three. One stays in the break room so if something gets on my pants and I can’t live with it, I can change them.”
“Just—wipe it off?” Keith’s eyebrows pinch, and he sets his rag down on the counter.
Lance rolls his eyes. “Yeah, but if it’s like, spit-up or something, like there is on my shoulder right now, and I can’t wipe it off. Then I have a– hey, fuck off! This is my break fish and chips!”
Keith has half a french fry dangling out of his mouth and a look like a deer caught in headlights, shoving it all the way in with the back of his hand before responding. “You’re gonna ask me for a drink or somethin’, I know it. So I’m just… getting payment before you do it.”
“This is the second time we’ve ever met,” Lance gripes, tearing off a piece of fish and dipping it into the small metal sauce dish, “There’s no way you’d know that.”
“I just know.” Keith shrugs, and Lance groans, chewing and swallowing the piece of fish he’d torn off.
“Well, if you’re going to stereotype me because I’m Cuban, can I get…uh…something fruity but less fruity than last time?”
Keith’s face pales, accentuating the scar across his face, and it brings some small joy to Lance’s heart. “I am not–I wasn’t—fucker. One second.”
Lance grins, picking away at his fries while Keith pops the tap of a can of Sprite, pouring it into a glass and adding grenadine and a little splash of vodka.
“A dirty Shirley Temple. Bon appetit.”
He picks up the glass and swirls it around, mixing up the grenadine until the whole drink is a fizzy pink. Lance takes a sip, unaware of how Keith watches every minute detail with intent and swallows. “Yeah. That’s a Shirley Temple. Are you sure there’s alcohol in this?”
Keith shrugs, turning. His hair swings and Lance cannot pry his eyes away from the back of his neck. A small inked constellation sits on the top of his spine, usually hidden behind his hair. “You watched me put vodka in it. How often do you drink that you can’t tell the taste of vodka?”
“So you’re still stereotyping me!” Lance takes a sip of his drink, enjoying the mix of cherry and bubbles on his tongue while the tips of Keith’s ears flush red.
“I am not! Finish your food or get away from my bar.” Keith demands, still turned away from him.
He will do nothing of the sort. Instead, Lance watches Keith’s turned back with cat-like, predatory interest, cataloging the way his shoulder blades shift under the loose polo shirt, and sips his drink.
Keith mixes up four margaritas in the time it takes for Lance to drain the last of his drink, swallowing syrupy grenadine and half-melted ice. “You’re good at that,” he comments off-handedly, setting down the glass and swiping a finger through the pool of condensation below it, “Is this your first gig bartending?”
“Oh, so you don’t listen when I talk,” Keith snorts, turning back around, “I worked downtown at a nightclub when I was 21.”
“And… how old are you now?”
“I’m seventeen.” A small, private smile quirks at the corner of his mouth.
Lance isn’t sure whether he wants to memorize that crooked dimple or lop it off with a meat cleaver. Maybe another drink might help. “That’s not how age works. Did Hick University not teach you that?”
“I was making a joke,” Keith says, huffing out an exaggerated sigh, “I turn 24 next month.”
He’s an entire year older than Lance? That seems like a cosmic injustice and he pouts down at his empty glass about it. “Can I have another one?”
“Do you have fifteen bucks?” Keith retorts, taking the glass from in front of Lance.
“They cannot be that expensive,” Lance recoils a little at the price. He’s almost glad he works at a Margaritaville and isn’t required to dine at one yearly and spend a quarter of his monthly salary.
“Lance, stop flirting with the fucking bartender! Your break ended five minutes ago!” Axca shouts to him as she’s coming out of the kitchen and dropping three tickets off in front of Keith.
Keith’s mouth quirks but he wisely doesn’t say anything, picking up the tickets and turning around to the maze of bottles. Lance feels his face flush and he squawks, shoveling his fish and chips into his mouth so he can stand up faster. “I am not—I was not flirting with the bartender, Axca! People from this fucking backyard-shooting-range state don’t deserve it!”
“Like you’re not from here,” Keith chimes in.
He shoots Keith a glare that bounces harmlessly off of his back. “I’m not from here. I was born in Cuba. Which you know, because you were stereotyping me!”
“Wow, Keith, stereotyping an immigrant? Oh, how the mighty fall.” Axca chuckles and takes the drinks Keith pushes across the bar to her, red and yellow and forty other different colors. “There are two tables full in your section, Lance, when you’re done ogling.”
She breezes off, the glasses balanced precariously on her circular tray. Both Keith and Lance are briefly united under a common enemy, glaring at her retreating form into the hustle and bustle of seafood and sticky tables. “Well—I better get, uh, going. Thank you for the drink. I guess.”
Lance pushes his stool back and slides off of it, picking up his empty basket and holding it in both hands.
Keith looks over at him, face unreadable in the colored lights. “Cuba, huh?”
“Yeah,” Lance hums, almost breathlessly, “She’s home. Grew up on the beach.”
“Is that why your eyes are like that,” Keith murmurs to himself, forcing Lance to strain his ears just to hear it.
“Like what?” He’s nosy. The nosiest bitch in the land. He’s gotta know.
Keith is half-turned away. “Brown, blue, and little flakes of gold. Dirt, water, and sand. Beautiful places, beaches.”
Lance is going to give up listening for Lent next year. He will. He’ll go and repent in church and everything. Did Keith just inadvertently call his eyes beautiful?
Stupid—damn country bumpkins and their whiskey-smooth accents. “Okay–well—this was nice, but I’ve gotta go back to work now–sooo, bye!”
His exit was graceful if you’re blind, deaf, have been alive for three seconds, and had never seen someone exit a conversation before.
Axca laughs at him on his way into the swinging doors of the kitchen.
—
Despite his fumble, Lance sits at Keith’s bar more and more. September winds down into early October, and after Lance basically kills himself on his midterms, Keith whips him up something blue that tastes like pineapples and leaves him totally miserable for the rest of his shift.
Axca makes fun of them no less than seven different times for being gay in a Margaritaville until Lance reminds her that she’s coming to Veronica’s birthday and he will introduce her to every family member possible. He doesn’t always deny that they’re being gay in a Margaritaville, though.
Lance can’t tell when it started. Maybe it was the night when someone had spilled a beer down Lance’s shirt and he’d gone and sat at the bar, expecting to be laughed at. Instead, Keith had passed over a work-worn black jacket.
Or the night when Keith had his hair pinned up, like actually pinned up with a golden, dragon-shaped hairpin that left his choppy curtain bangs hanging in his face, but the rest of it fanning out behind his head. Every time it caught the light, a year was shaved off of Lance’s life.
It all came to a head in mid-October.
Surprisingly, he wasn’t having a terrible night. Sure, there was your average bitchy customer that wouldn’t accept a no from anyone except God or maybe Jimmy Buffet himself, and a couple of young kids had spilled ketchup on their table, but that was standard. It wasn’t Margaritaville without a little ketchup spillage.
He sat down at the bar on his break, sitting silently with his fingers linked and his chin propped on top of them until Keith turned around and honest-to-god jumped.
“Fuckin—Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Hey, Calamity Jane.”
Lance’s eyebrows pinch. “Are you seeing other women? Even after I caught you with Jeanine? You no good, disloyal dog!”
Keith shakes his head; his hair was left down, nothing gold keeping it up.
“Calamity Jane is a—nevermind. Whatever. I don’t have to explain myself to you.” Keith starts to dry off a glass, but Lance won’t let him go yet.
“We’ve been married twenty years! Why would you just go and do that to me?” Lance wails dramatically, flinging himself onto the bartop.
“I’m not making you a drink if you don’t cut that out.”
Lance sits up. He knows what hand feeds him. “So, whatcha got for me tonight? Cowboy whiskey?”
Keith turns away. Two weeks ago, he got Keith to buy a collared black long-sleeve so he’d stop wearing that damn polo shirt, and that’s what he’s in right now. “Not… quite.”
“Not quite ?” Lance pushes. “It’s either cowboy whiskey or it isn’t, it can’t be a little cowboy whiskey.”
“Okay, well it isn’t, so shut the fuck up and let me make it.”
How fast Lance shuts his mouth is between him and God. He watches Keith as he pours tequila and blueberry liqueur into a shaker, along with some other bits and bobs. The way he tosses the shaker up in the air and catches it without even blinking is just so astounding to Lance. He looks like he was made to handle knives or something, not mix drinks.
A short, crystal glass is set in front of him with a sugared rim and a small blue flower sitting delicately on top of the ice.
“I call it a Bluebell.” Keith leans against the bar, arms folded over each other.
“A… Bluebell?” Lance questions as he picks it up, sniffs it, and takes a sip.
It tastes like that scene in Ratatouille where colors and sparks are floating across the screen and Remy is tripping major balls. This drink tastes like tripping balls. “I fuck with it.”
“I’m glad,” Keith says with that full, crooked smile of his, and the dip in his bottom lip where he’d sunk his teeth into it and caused a permanent divot that Lance wants to memorize by feel, “Named it after ya.”
“That’s great—wait, you what ?” If this drink weren’t so damn good, he might’ve spit it out to process that.
A sigh bleeds out of Keith’s chest. “Yeah. Ya just—remind me of a bluebell, yeah? Don’t ask me to explain it. I’m just minoring in entomology.”
Lance’s face is hot. Airfried, even. He doesn’t say anything, because if he opens his mouth, he’ll ask Keith to go to Cuba with him and he absolutely cannot say that. Instead, he chugs the drink down, sinking his teeth into the delicate blue flower and finding that it doesn’t taste too bad.
He has to do it. Right now. If he doesn’t do it, right now, at this very moment, Lance will never give himself the chance again.
“Keith,” he starts, fishing in his pocket and pulling out fifteen bucks.
Whatever was in that drink Keith made him must have been strong, because his heart isn’t crawling up onto his tongue like he thought it would be. “I need you to make me something fruity.”
Keith looks at him like he holds a loaded gun instead of two green, wrinkled bills. “Like…what kind, exactly? Your definition of “fruity” is very loose.”
Right now. At this very moment. He inhales and slaps the fifteen bucks onto the counter.
“You.”
Well, it’s out there now. He couldn’t take it back if he tried. Lance waits in silence, except for Jimmy Buffet playing over the speakers, lips pressed together so nothing else comes out of his traitorous mouth.
Keith’s beautiful eyes that look like rough-cut crystal and the ocean at midnight are wide and placid. Is he broken?
Did Lance read him wrong and Lance is going to get fired from Margaritaville for being homophobic? Of all the places to be homophobic, Margaritaville was kind of the place.
He picks up the fifteen dollars off of the bartop, turning them over in his hands a couple of times before looking up at Lance with those soulful eyes that would make any man give up his chair and his wallet. “I get off of work at seven.”
“So do I,” Lance says dumbly. Nice going, Romeo.
Keith tucks the fifteen into the back pocket of his jeans (his jeans! He owns jeans!) and picks up the empty glass. “Hows about you meet me in front at…seven-fifteen?”
“That sounds good.” Lance stands up from the stool, wringing his hands in his apron. “I’ll, uh—see you then?”
“See you then. Don’t get lost, Bluebell.” Keith flashes one more smile at him and then turns away to pour something into a glass. Which is rude, Lance only got lost walking to his car once and he ended up buying himself a pair of bell bottoms that made his ass look fabulous, so he considered it a win.
Bluebell . It sounds like a beach house in Varadero and Shirley Temples every night and Keith’s stupidly beautiful eyes being the last thing Lance sees every night before he goes to bed to the sound of sloshing waves.
Their date… It was a date! Good God in heaven, Lance asked Keith out on a date and he said yes and it worked , the lord is kind and merciful just this one time. Their date had only been scheduled for a few minutes, but as Lance’s feet meander back towards his section, he finds a dopey, besotted smile etched into his face that he couldn’t find the heart to get rid of.
—
It’s seven-ten.
He’s checked his blue Moana watch no more than nine times to confirm that it is, in fact, seven-ten. Lance is standing outside of the Margaritaville in a deep blue turtleneck and black slacks he reserved for non-work purposes. Small gold hoops sit in his ears, and there’s a thin golden band on his right thumb.
Axca had thrown her travel bag full of makeup at him when he pulled her into the cold storage room to tell her. She told him to use whatever he wanted to pretty himself up, so he skittered off to the bathroom to do so.
Lance had ended up with a coppery shimmer on his eyelids, brown mascara, and a peachy lip gloss. She had a travel-size body spray in there, and while it wasn’t His Smell, clementine and forest wasn’t half bad.
He checks his watch again and it’s seven-eleven. Keith had said seven-fifteen, and he was probably punctual as all hell, so Lance would be waiting for another four minutes. Which was fine. He knew Keith wasn’t going to stand him up because he’d watched him close up the bar for the night and had almost upended a glass of water on himself when Keith looked up from scrubbing at a sticky spot on the bartop and winked. Damn cowboy.
“Were you waitin’ long?” Keith says from behind Lance.
“ Fuck –dude! Announce your presence or something!”
He shrugs, adjusting the collar of his jacket. Keith, unfairly, is beautiful in a cropped, red leather jacket, black t-shirt, and close-fitting jeans. His belt has an honest-to-god silver buckle with what looks like a lion on it. “I did. Just now.”
Lance huffs. “Whatever. Fuck you. You clean up nice, I guess.”
“Oh–thanks.” He gets to delight in the peachy tinge on Keith’s face for a minute.
“You’re welcome. Now where are we headed?”
Keith, honest-to-god, offers his arm out to Lance instead of answering. He stares, feeling a little bug-eyed, observing the leather-clad elbow like it would kill him. “You’re so fucking gross, this isn’t sixteenth-century London, I don’t need to be guided like some princess,” Lance complains, but because on the inside he’s a disgusting sap, he takes it and drapes his hand above the crook of Keith’s elbow.
“Sure, Bluebell.” Keith hums, and they start to walk, arm in arm, along the babble of the RiverWalk.
It’s a beautiful shopping district. Lance really does love it, even if Margaritaville is the cause of all his misfortune. “Thank you for… saying yes, I think?”
Keith looks at him sidelong. “I should be saying thank you, I’m the one that gave you a time and a place. So it’s my date.”
“It is not ,” Lance argues vehemently, a pain in the ass down to his very core, “I gave you fifteen bucks and asked you, so it’s my date.”
“Are you sayin’ I can be bought like a cheap whore?” Keith ponders this for a moment, chewing mindlessly on his lip. “Well, I can if it’s you buyin’, I guess.”
Lance could probably make it look like an accident if he fell into the canal and drowned. This is just too damn much, so instead of responding he makes a vaguely argumentative noise and looks off at the lights reflecting on the water.
They walk in amenable silence until they come to a brick building aglow with warm yellow lights. There are tables out front with little succulents on their centers, stretching all the way out to the side of the canal with a space between for the walkway.
Keith lets Lance’s arm go, regretfully, but he does it to open the door for Lance, so he can overlook this infraction. God, he wants Keith so bad that simply the sheer force could change the tide of the ocean. He walks inside and the vinyl printed on the door says Niche Coffee Co. It’s homey inside, with lots of exposed brick and just one bar to order coffee.
There are a few empty tables, so Lance isn’t worried about not being able to get one. He waits inside for Keith to finish holding the door open for this little old lady, chivalrous motherfucker, and then leads them to the register. The menu is on a TV screen, and Lance squints at it because these hipster fuckers have never seen a chalkboard in their lives.
“Welcome to Niche Coffee Co, can I get something started for you?” The barista says with a soft smile and a pen held aloft. She’s tall and well-built. She could probably squish Lance’s head like a grape. Her name tag says “Shay,” with “she/they” written underneath it.
Lance takes a little bit of joy in the way Keith also has to squint up at the menu.
“Can I get a… small chai latte with caramel?” Lance’s grin is easy.
“Sure.” She scribbles it down onto a cup. “Anything for you?”
Keith blinks like he’s just snapped back into his body after three long years away. “Oh, ah, can I get a hot English breakfast?”
“Small or large?” She looks up from the cup they’re writing on. Her eyes are a mossy, olive green.
“Large.”
“That’ll be ten even,” Shay says, “How’re we payin’ today?”
“Cash, ma’am.” Keith hands over the ten-dollar bill that he fishes out of his back pocket.
Shay rings up their order and sends them on their way with a wave and another polite smile. Lance drifts away and finds a table outside, as close to the canal as they could possibly be. Water splashes onto the cobbles next to Lance’s shoe and he loves it. Keith sits down across from Lance, one arm slung over the back of the chair and the other drumming on the table.
“I can’t believe I didn’t know about this place,” Lance says when they’re both settled in, “I’ve worked here for a while and I’ve never seen it.”
Keith shrugs. “They haven’t been open for very long, and it’s not a chain.”
“Well, it’s a nice spot,” he declares.
Then they sit in relative quiet, listening to the water lap on the sides of the canal, and someone drops off their drinks. The cups are plain white. Lance takes a sip and relishes in the way syrupy caramel coats his tongue.
“I don’t know much about you,” Lance comments after the dead space starts to get to him.
Keith sips at his tea and looks up at him through his eyelashes. “...You know that I work at Margaritaville. I bartend. You know I have a dog.”
“What’s the story behind your tattoos?”
“The jaws of life on my bicep are for my dad,” Keith explains, “He was a fireman. Using them was usually his job, so when he passed away, it felt fitting. The one on the back of my neck was because I could.”
“So now I know five things about you,” Lance says with a roll of his eyes.
“Is there something in particular you want to know?”
Lance stops for a second. He hadn’t gotten that far. “Well…ah…do you like boys?”
“You are so fucking smart,” Keith starts with a sigh, “And yet so fucking stupid.”
“So…do you—”
“Yes, Lance, Christ above. I like boys.” He looks off at the river. Maybe in shame. “What clued you in?”
Great question, one Lance doesn’t necessarily know the answer to. “Probably when you made me a drink and called it Bluebell, and then started calling me Bluebell.”
Keith looks at him like he’s the stupidest motherfucker in the universe and like he’s more precious than gold and whiskey at the same time. “Not the time I gave you my jacket. Or the time I brushed an eyelash off your cheek. Or the time I mentioned the time I had a crush on a dude?”
Lance shakes his head. “Nope. Definitely the Bluebell incident.”
“Why? Why is it you ?” Keith groans, dropping his head into his hands.
“What the fuck do you mean, why is it you ? I am a delight !”
Lance stares Keith down with half-slitted eyes, sipping his chai judgmentally. It’s a minute or two before finally, Keith peels his forehead out of his palms and makes direct, soul-stealing eye contact with Lance. “I have thought you were the most beautiful person to ever cross my bar since the night that I met you. You were covered in tartar sauce and bitchin’ to high heaven but your eyes were like the desert under the stars and I wanted to build a shack right there and live in the dirt for the rest of my days.”
“Um.”
“And then you kept coming back and I kept making you drinks and I don’t know, you just… made sense to me like no other person has in a long time.” Keith takes a deep drag of his tea.
What does he say? There’s literally nothing he can say to that except to lean across the table and kiss Keith square on the mouth. Which he doesn’t do. So he stares at Keith like a freak, digging his fingers into his paper cup.
“Are you going to… say anythin’, or am I just going to sit here in silence until I launch myself into the canal?”
“I’m literally lost for words. That is a hard feat to achieve, too.” Lance drums his fingers on the lid of his coffee cup. “That’s… like the most poetic way anyone has ever called me hot.”
Keith sighs. “I’m majoring in classical literature. So… I’m a writer. By trade.”
“That makes sense. I thought you were beautiful too, if that makes you feel less like you’re going to throw yourself in the canal.”
“I can’t tell if it does.”
Lance opens his mouth, maybe to say something so much less beautiful than Keith, or to make fun of him, but the heavens beat him to it. He glances up when water splashes onto his nose just as the clouds roll and rain starts to pour in twilight-doused San Antonio. “Oh, are you fucking kidding me?”
“It wasn’t supposed to rain today,” Keith grumbles, getting out of his chair, “I checked –”
“You checked ?” Lance stands up too.
There’s just an itch he has to scratch every time he sees Keith in the form of pissing him off. Keith frowns at him, pushing his hair off of his forehead where it’s sticking to the skin. “Like five fucking minutes before I met you in front of Margaritaville.”
Lance steps forwards and prods Keith in the shoulder, forcing him to take a half-step backwards. “Dude, my hair is gonna be ruined!”
“ How is that my fault?” Keith half-shouts back, raking his hair back again.
He’s…. really cute when his hair is wet. That’s upsetting. Keith isn’t allowed to be beautiful when he’s pissing Lance off.
“Because you checked the weather!” They go back and back and back, too caught up to notice where Keith’s heel rests. “And you didn’t see that it was going to rain! Which makes it your fault!”
“Maybe you should have checked the weather if you—oh, shit shit shit , Lance—”
Keith’s heel slips off the edge of the side of the canal, his arms pinwheeling to try and stop his fall. Some sick part of Lance’s mind laughs at Keith for slipping off the edge, but the more rational, kind human being that takes up the rest of him reaches out and catches him by the waist.
Lance can see the slowly babbling canal behind him. “You’re fine, cowboy. Not gonna let you fall.”
“Put me down,” Keith demands, winding his arms around Lance’s neck anyway. “We look stupid.”
Lance’s hair is stuck to his forehead and Keith’s to his neck. “Would you rather be sitting in a canal right now?”
“Yes,” Keith says with certainty. “I would rather be face-down and drowned in the canal.”
“That canal is less than five feet deep.”
“Don’t care.”
The two of them lapse into silence, blinking slowly at each other. Lance inhales shallowly through his nose, unable to keep his eyes from wandering down to the small scar on the bow of Keith’s upper lip. “Keith,” he starts, voice low and unsteady, “I’m. Um.”
“You’re?” He prompts with an eyebrow raised.
Okay. Try again, Lance. “I’m going to kiss you now.”
“Sure.” Keith nods lazily.
Lance does not kiss Keith at that moment. He hesitates, leans in, and then leans back out. The look in Keith’s eyes makes him want to vomit from how fond it is. Finally, he commits to it and kisses him, eyes sliding shut.
The taste of tea with milk lingers on Keith’s lip, caught on the scab from biting into it. This is great. Keith’s fingers are loosely knotted into his hair.
Does kissing boys usually come with the feeling of vertigo? Sure, he’s kissed boys, he knows he’s bisexual, but he’s never kissed a boy on a riverwalk, so maybe that’s it. “Lance,” Keith says, less than an inch from Lance’s mouth when he pulls away, “Lance, we’re falling –”
Oh. Shit. They’re falling.
They topple into the RiverWalk canal, splashing into the sluggishly moving water. Lance sits up, his fingers brushing the brickwork beneath him. He was right; it was only, like, two feet deep. There’s frantic splashing on his left and he glances over to see Keith flailing in the water.
He can’t help but laugh. It’s his god-given right as a man that kisses other men. Tears spring out of his eyes and his ribs hurt by the time he’s done, and Lance stands up. The water rushes up around his knees, but it doesn’t move any faster.
“Keith,” Lance calls out, brushing the solitary tear off his cheek, “Keith, stop flailing, you freak. Sit up.”
It takes Keith a couple of seconds to hear and compute, but when he sits up his face is a vibrant red and he is pointedly looking away from Lance.
“Wow.”
“Lance, shut the fuck up–”
“It’s two feet, you’re tiny but not that tiny—”
“I am going to come over there and kill you, don’t fucking test me—”
Lance walks over to Keith in the pouring rain, holding a hand out to him so he can get back onto his feet. Keith looks up at Lance with his endless eyes, grabs his hand, and hauls himself up to kiss Lance again.
They topple over because of it with another splash.
“Keith, what time is it?” Lance asks as they’re hauling themselves out of the canal.
Keith looks at his watch, squinting. “It’s eight-fifteen.”
He leans in for one last kiss when he gets a foot over the wall and is standing on the rain-soaked ground again. “Well, it’s five o’clock somewhere.”