#love my new coworkers. job itself is hard but gratifying

[infamouslydorky]

Why is it so controversial to want to be able to have a life outside of work? Why is it expected to work extended periods of time with heavy workloads to the point that by the time you get home, you're too pooped to actually do anything? I don't mind working but I don't want it to be my whole life. I want to work to live, not live to work

[searchforthescars]

Saying Your Names

Emori walks into the bar Murphy manages. Romance ensues. Part of a universe I plan on expanding eventually. Inspired by true events.

Merry Christmas, my dear @maelidpoetree. I love you lots and lots and I’m so glad these crazy kids brought us together.

Title, excerpts from Richard Siken’s Saying Your Names. Also on Ao3.

Imagine a room, a sudden glow. Here is my hand, my heart, my throat, my wrist.

As Emori stands in the center of the room, holding a drink in one hand and a purse that isn’t hers in the other, she renews her commitment to never forgive Raven Reyes for dragging her out of the lab on a Friday night.

Thankfully, it’s only 8:30. The bar is nearly empty; most of its patrons are in the back room playing pool or outside on the patio. No one is drunk enough to be entertaining, and the music playing is a surprisingly eclectic mix of pop hits and soft rock. She hasn’t even seen a bartender, although she knows there must be one since Raven didn’t make her own drink. 

Actually, maybe she did. Emori wouldn’t put it past her coworker to shove back behind the bar and do it herself.

“What, you’re not having anything?” the object of her ire asks, coming up behind her and taking both drink and purse in one fell swoop. “Emori, come on.”

“No.” Emori says, firmly. She hears footsteps behind her but doesn’t turn around. “I don’t drink.”

Raven snort, taking a sip of hers. “You do too. I saw you and Monty at Bellamy’s party.”

“That was beer.”

“So get beer. It’s all alcohol. It’ll all get you drunk.”

“Are you trying to get her wasted or get her laid, Reyes?”

Emori turns toward the sound of the voice. He’s standing behind the bar, bracing both hands against the worn wood counter. When his eyes meet hers, they rest there for a moment. Blue, like ice. They calculate something she can’t name. His face, lit up eerily by the neon signs behind him, shifts in recognition. She doesn’t know why. Isn’t sure she wants to

Raven lifts a triumphant middle finger. “She’s new in town, she never goes out and I’m bound by the contract of friendship to make sure she has a good time.”

“Friendship?” He raises an eyebrow at Emori before smirking at Raven. “I thought I was your only friend.”

Emori opens her mouth to answer but a snapCRASH from the back tears her concentration away. 

“Excuse me,” the bartender says, half-jogging around the bar. “Reyes, sit down. I’ll be right back.”

He jogs toward the pool hall and Raven magnanimously takes a seat on one of the rickety silver bar stools. Emori reluctantly follows suit, clasping both her hands atop the counter and staring at the red wall ahead of her.

There’s a rather respectable assortment of alcohol displayed there, everything from Jack Daniels to blueberry vodka, which Otan told her is the worst-tasting alcohol out there. Above the tiered bottles are the standard licenses, all haphazardly framed and hung in crooked patterns. 

“Cool, aren’t they?”

Emori knows Raven can’t be talking about the licenses. “What?”

“The drawings.” Raven gestures. Emori looks to the side, at the pieces of paper tacked into the flaking plaster, waving in the lazy breeze from the rotating fan.

“Are those bar napkins?”

Raven nods. “Yeah. Sometimes people draw on them. J pins up the good ones.”

“J?”

“John. Everyone calls him Murphy, though.”

“Hmm.” Emori squints at the drawings. Most of them are caricatures of who Emori guesses are bartenders, but there are some perspectives of the bar itself that surprise her. Whoever drew those wasn’t drunk. Either that, or they were too highly-trained for it to matter.

She watches as Raven’s friend – John – rounds the bar. His eyes immediately go to her and, despite her instincts, she stares straight back, gratified when he looks away, a red flush rising to his cheeks.

Without saying anything, he grabs a glass and fills it with ice, then water. “Here,” he says, sliding it to Emori. “If you work with Raven, you probably never eat or drink anything that isn’t absurdly unhealthy.”

He’s not wrong. “Thanks.”

He looks disarmed all of a sudden, as if unfamiliar with the concept of gratitude. “For what?”

“For the water.”

He blinks, slowly. “It- no problem.” A frown creases the skin between his brows, but he doesn’t say anything, just crosses to Raven’s other side and leans his forearms on the bar. “What’s up with you, Reyes?”

Raven launches into a rant about people and things Emori doesn’t know but John clearly does. In the absence of anything else with which to entertain herself, Emori does what she does best: waits and watches and studies.

John’s profile is sharp, all angles and corners, a defined jaw and delicate mouth, strong nose and long eyelashes. When he smiles, it’s sharp and sudden like a knife, slashing across his face for a moment and vanishing the next. He laughs, once, when Raven recounts something Bellamy did, and it sounds sarcastic and doesn’t quite reach his eyes.

She doesn’t know why, but she wants to touch some part of him under all that gruffness. He keeps cutting his eyes over to her and she keeps looking away. He keeps talking to Raven and she keeps listening to the room around her while staring straight at his face.

Emori’s water is half gone when the front door creaks open and Raven hops to her feet. “Is that Lexa?” she asks, half teasing. “At a bar? Who knew?”

“Fuck off,” Lexa grumbles, adjusting her blazer, her shoes tapping on the floor as she sidesteps Raven and heads straight for the pool hall. “I’m going to hit on the hottie playing pool back there.”

“That’s your wife!” Raven yells, at the same time another unfamiliar voice shouts, “Don’t objectify me, woman!”

Lexa vanishes and Raven follows, seemingly unaware that there are people in the back she might know. Emori can’t help but laugh as she goes. When she turns around, John is smiling.

“Something funny, John?”

He frowns again, that same soft crease in his brow. Emori frowns too, reflexively. “No,” he says, and she doesn’t believe him. “Raven’s just…. Raven. I’ve known her long enough to find it all funny.”

“How long have you known her?”

John sighs, thinking. “Since fourth grade, I think. We both had shit moms and no dads. I’d bring her food and she’d help me with my homework.”

Something in Emori’s chest shivers. “That’s... I’m sorry.”

He shrugs, lean shoulders working under his worn grey shirt. “I’m guessing you had the same time of it that I did.”

Emori frowns, tilting her head. “Why?”

He taps his cheekbone where the thick knife scar peeks through her makeup. Then he taps the spot where her tattoo arches above her eyebrow. “No one gets a tattoo like that for fun.”

She doesn’t want to fight with Raven’s friend, so she doesn’t get defensive, even though every fiber of her being begs her to. But she’s trying to be different. Not necessarily better. But different.

“No,” she agrees softly. “I didn’t.”

They regard each other for a quiet moment. His eyes go soft, then hard, then soft again. “Where did you come from?”

“Baltimore.”

His mouth twists with the hint of a smile. “How the hell’d you end up in Virginia?”

“I drove.”

He does smile at that. “I mean, why here?”

“There wasn’t anywhere else to go.”

She could’ve gone into detail. There’s a story there, one about her high-achieving roommate at MIT, every bit the scholarship kid Emori wished she was, and how said roommate inherited a mechanical engineering lab somehow and begged Emori to come work with her.

“You can get your masters online,” Raven had said, propping herself up on one elbow, resting her head on Emori’s shoulder. They were reclining on Emori’s narrow bed in her even narrower studio apartment that felt like a converted alleyway with how little space there was to move. But it was cheap. “You’re super qualified even now with all your experience-”

“Criminal acts-”

“Experience, and no one has to know about your-

“Criminal record-”

“Past indiscretions, so will you please shut up and take the job?”

Obviously, she did take it. A few years later, but she took it nonetheless. But that’s not a story she thinks John wants to hear.

John is watching her expression. He hikes himself up to sit atop the row of coolers behind him and braces his hands on his thighs. “Do you like it here?”

Emori looks around. Shrugs. “Yeah. It’s okay.”

“This town is boring as shit,” says the guy sitting down the bar from her. “You’re from a big city; you should know.”

“You’re welcome to fuck right back off to Richmond, Miller,” John says easily, rolling his eyes conspiratorially at Emori.

“Richmond isn’t even a big city,” Raven says, effortlessly reinserting herself into the conversation. Her long hair swings against Emori’s arm when she settles in. “Go to Philly. That’s a big city.”

Miller says something derisive into his beer. Raven cracks a smile and switches to Emori’s other side so she can rib him some more. Emori used to be good at that: talking to people, making them like her and trust her, only so she could use them later.

She doesn’t want to use people anymore, and she doesn’t trust that those old habits have died completely, so she stays in her seat and watches John move about the bar.

“Do you- sorry- do you have any more quarters?” a slim woman with wild dark hair and big brown eyes asks, sliding in next to Emori and leaning across the counter. “Lexa’s bill got stuck in the change machine again.”

John nods, popping over the cash register. “I keep trying to get that thing serviced, but…”

“That’s what he said!” Raven calls, making Miller cackle. The woman beside Emori rolls her eyes. John hands her the quarters with a flourish. Their skin - his light, hers dark and smooth - contrast beautifully. 

“Don’t spend it all in one place,” he says cheekily. The woman makes a motion with her hand and fingers, elegant and fast. “Hey!” he squawks. “Did she just tell me to fuck off?”

“I think so,” Emori says, laughing a little. “My ASL is rusty but…”

John shakes his head ruefully. “The number of languages I’ve been cursed out in is growing.”

“Maybe don’t be such a caberon,” Raven says smoothly.

“I didn’t say anything!”

“Yeah, this time.”

John turns his back on Raven, fixing those strange blue eyes on hers. “Will you come back here, do you think?” He sounds like a hopeful child, looks about the same, too.

Emori shrugs. “Maybe. Bars aren’t really my scene.”

John nods, slow. “Fair. But you’re nice to talk to. I could use the company.”

Raven reaches over to pluck John’s cell phone from his shirt pocket. “She’ll call you,” she tells John, typing in what Emori assumes is her number. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I will text him,” Emori gripes, slapping Raven’s arm, “and only if I feel like it.”

“Text, call, whatever,” John says. Raven replaces his phone. “I’d like that.”

The woman who asked John for quarters earlier comes back up, squeezing in beside Raven. Raven overbalances on her bad leg, trying to brace herself between the counter and the stool, and falls forward onto Emori, ripping the wrap from Emori’s left hand in the process.

“Shit, I’m sorry!” Raven grabs the cloth from the floor and hands it to Emori. The woman behind Raven is also apologizing, but Raven waves her off. “You okay?”

Emori balls up the cloth in her hand. “Fine.” John is watching her. Great.

“Where’ve you been hiding that?” he asks, voice all boyish admiration and respect. “Damn, you could take out a guy with that. Might wanna make you a bouncer here.”

Emori smiles a little at that, at the impressed way he’s staring at her hand, so different from the awkward half-stares she usually gets. “I normally don’t cover it up anymore. But I didn’t want to embarrass Raven, so-”

“You don’t embarrass me,” Raven snaps, flicking Emori’s ear. Down the bar, someone signals. As soon as John turns his back, Raven leans forward. “Emori!”

“What?”

“You like him!”

“I don’t know him.”

Raven shrugs. “You still like him. There’s no harm in getting to know him.”

“Raven.”

Raven’s eyes go soft. They glitter in the faint neon lights. “Look. I know you’ve been hurt. I know you’re trying to put down roots. You deserve to love and be loved back. You deserve to give yourself a chance. So give yourself, and Murphy, a shot.”

“But-”

“I’M NOT ABOVE SHOUTING OVER YOU!”

Emori laughs. “Damn, okay!”

------

Say hallelujah, say goodnight, say it over the canned music and your feet won’t stumble, his face getting larger, the rest blurring on every side. 

It’s not pretty when John bleeds.

Emori enters the bar to absolute chaos. In addition to the usual Friday night crowd, there also appears to be a fight going on between John and a patron, one the door guards are unsuccessfully trying to break up.

So Emori tries, with middling results. She takes the woman’s elbow to the cheek and someone’s shoulder to the jaw, but manages to haul John outside by his shirt and deposit him rather aggressively on the curb, where she stands over him and watches unapologetically while he spits out blood.

“What the fuck?” She still sounds breathless despite the minimal physical exertion on her part. “John, dammit, what were you thinking? Actually, no, don’t answer that.”

He blinks up at her, the blood on his pale face standing out like a scar. “I got carried away?” Emori snorts. He shakes his head. “I’m sorry. I just get...too angry sometimes.”

“Murphy!” Harper sticks her head out the door. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Don’t you have barbacking to do?” he snaps back, absent any real heat. Harper rolls her eyes in Emori’s direction and disappears. John heaves a sigh and hangs his head. “I fucked up.”

“At least you won’t get fired,” Emori says, dry. “Being the owner and all.”

“Small mercy.” He lifts his head again. “Don’t tell Raven.”

Not like it would do any good. “Okay. Sure. But if she asks, I’m not gonna lie.”

“Fair.” He hikes himself to his feet. “Sorry you had to see that. And jump in.”

Emori feels her cheek throb. “It’s okay. I’m good at breaking up fights. Better at being in them. I brawled in alleys a lot as a kid.”

“You- What?” There’s a laugh in his voice that catches. “I can’t picture that at all.”

Emori only realizes how close she is to him when the air of his words skates over her flushed cheeks. “Ask Raven. I’m a fighter.”

“I don’t doubt it.” It sounds like his mouth, as well as his tone, is dry. “It’s a little scary, come to think of it.”

“Guess you’re going to have to keep an eye on me then.”

His eyes drop to her mouth. She steps back. A cool wind blows, taking music from the outside patio with it. Emori hasn’t been drinking but her vision still swims.

“I should get the blood off my face,” he says softly, turning halfway towards the door. “Don’t want to scare the children.”

“If there are kids in the bar, you have a whole other set of problems.” John laughs. Emori follows him inside.

As soon as she enters the pool hall, she’s accosted by Lexa, collar askew and hair a mess. “What the fuck happened in there?” 

Emori waves it off. “Nothing. John just lost his cool.”

“I’ll say. He’s lucky that bitch didn’t want to press charges.” Lexa adjusts her shirt cuffs. Her wife, Costia, appears behind her and fixes her collar. “I helped throw her out.”

“You seriously don’t know who that was?” asks a third woman, tall and imposing, lounging in a corner booth and nursing a Long Island iced tea. “That was Ontari.”

“Who?” Emori asks at the same time Costia winces and Lexa snarls, “the fuck is she doing here?”

“Lexa, shush. Ontari is Murphy’s ex.”

“That’s one word for it.”

“Echo, you too. Hush.”

Echo takes a sip. “Sorry, Cos.”

“She was awful to Murphy and none of us have really forgiven her for it.”

Now Emori wishes she would’ve done some damage. “He didn’t say anything.”

Costia smiles. “He wouldn’t. I didn’t even hear the fight until it was over.”

Lexa passes her a pool cue. “That’s because you turn your hearing aid off when you shoot pool.”

“It helps me concentrate,” Costia snaps without any heat. She turns to the table and Emori turns to Echo.

“Why did she come here? Do you know?”

Echo stares at Emori for a long moment before she answers. “Ontari doesn’t do well with the word ‘no.’ Or with anything requiring consent or boundaries.”

Emori feels nauseous. “Oh.”

From the arch of Echo’s brow, Emori can tell she knows Emori understands. “He’ll tell you if it matters. But I wouldn’t ask.”

“I won’t.”

It’s a little awkward, standing there, cheeks still hot, Echo is sizing her up, face unreadable. “You’re Raven’s friend.”

“Yes.”

“She speaks highly of you.”

“I’m...glad.” It sounds like a question. The corner of Echo’s mouth twitches.

“Quit giving her a hard time,” Raven says, rounding the corner aggressively and plopping down near Echo. “Emori, J wants to see you up front.”

Grateful for the escape from Echo’s prying eyes, Emori weaves toward the bar. It’s calmed down notably since the fight; John has wiped the blood from his face and is jittering around near the end of the bar.

“Go out with me,” he says in a rush as soon as she gets close enough to hear him. “Please?”

She wants to pretend she couldn’t hear him over the loud music, but she did. She wants to pretend she has a reason to say no, but she wants to say yes.

She nods. “Okay.”

He smiles, sharp and quick, disbelieving. “Really?”

She nods again. “Yeah.”

His smile widens. Before she can think twice, she gets up on her toes to kiss his cheek. John groans when Raven starts cheering obnoxiously from the doorway to the pool hall. Emori hides a smile against his shoulder. 

----

Here are the illuminated cities at the center of me, and here is the center of me, which is a lake, which is a well that we can drink from, but I can’t go through with it.

He shows her the rooftop above the bar, a tiny balcony with a door that leads back to his apartment above the establishment. She figures it’s a special place to him, somehow; he talks about it quietly and tells her she’s one of three people who has seen it. But that’s all he says as they regard the expanse of homes, dark in the 3 a.m. quiet. 

“It’s nice.” He hums. “Peaceful.”

“I didn’t know you were a criminal,” John says suddenly.

“What?”

“Someone was talking shit at the bar.” He’s not looking at her. “But I looked it up and it’s true.”

Emori’s heart sinks to her feet. “John, I-”

“I don’t care,” he interrupts. “But why wouldn’t you say something?”

“I didn’t realize you were entitled to my past.”

“Isn’t that something you tell the person you’re dating?”

Emori laughs. “That’s rich coming from the guy who won’t call me his girlfriend.”

“You know-”

“I know you’re good at loving me when we’re alone, but not when anyone else could see us, let alone call you on it.”

Her bitter words just hang there. They stare at each other, chests heaving, the humid air heavy in their lungs. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, soft. “I had no right to-”

“It’s okay.” Emori’s never been good with apologies. “I’m sorry too.”

He shakes his head. “You’re right. I’m just scared.”

“Of me?”

“No. Of- People look out for me here. It’s weird, but they do. And I don’t want them to come after you if this doesn’t work.”

“Do you think it won’t?” 

She tries to convince herself his answer doesn’t matter. But when he shakes his head, relief floods into her bones. “I really like you, Emori.”

She smiles. “Me too.”

He takes her hand, the big one. “Would you let me kiss you someday?”

Emori laughs a little, low in her throat. “Let you?”

“Hey, I’m a classy guy. I always get permission.” He says it with that boyish smile Emori adores, and it’s enough to prompt her rising up and pressing her lips to his.

“Oh,” he breathes when they break apart. “Okay.”

Emori laughs out loud, the light and joyous sound ringing over the streets below. “That bad, huh?”

He catches at her waist to pull her closer. “The opposite,” he murmurs, mouth brushing hers. She closes the gap, pressing her tongue to his lower lip, hand tightening on his shoulder when he lets out a soft sound.

“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” she breathes when they break apart, resting her forehead against his. “I wasn’t supposed to get attached.”

He kisses her nose. “Is it so bad?”

A humid wind whips her hair. “I guess not.”

John kisses her again. “Good.” Another kiss. “Be a shame if you regretted-” Another kiss- “All this.”

Emori leans into him, pinning him to the wall near the door. “Nope,” she breathes. “No regrets. Not even one.”