“Get her number!” shouted the bride. The bridesmaids shrieked and applauded. People started taking out their phones. Get her number! Get her number!

Jeremy stopped at the landing, his friends jumping up and down behind him, and greeted the blonde. She was older than him. Thirty? Maybe thirty-five. She wasn’t awful but she was not the hot chick he was going to fuck tonight. He and the boys were not following a bachelorette party to some dumb club—though Chris might have loved that.

“I’m Beth,” she said. She was smiling but she looked sad. Jeremy figured maybe she’d just been dumped. “Sorry, my friend is drunk and crazy. You were great up there.”

“Thanks. Wanna give me your number?”

He put it into his phone under “Beth”—no real point in asking a last name. She was probably from Long Island just like him. Probably worked in a health club or a bank. She couldn’t get him anywhere.

“Thanks, Beth,” he said, winking. It all felt like a performance. “I’ll text you.”

And then he kissed her. Grabbed her around the waist and laid one on her. The crowd went wild. Beth didn’t push him off and when he pulled away she was laughing. She waved and pushed up the escalator back to her cheering friends in pink and white. Jeremy took a bow.

The plan was to get a drink and a shot at the Bryant Park restaurant where Jeremy’s brother, Lars, tended bar, then head back to the Village. Lars had been working for the same restaurant group for more than a decade, first in Rockville Center in high school, then the Upper East Side, now Midtown. Lars would hook them up for a couple rounds, and after that they’d go to Down Under on Bleecker, where their IDs worked. Down Under had three-dollar PBRs, and Chris had once gotten a blow job in the bathroom from a stage manager at the Lucille Lortel.

Bryant Park was crowded. Green Day fans loading up before heading down into Grand Central and the train home to wherever; workaday men and women in bad suits, held too late at the office; and tourists on expense accounts, red-faced and handsy, sleeves rolled up, signaling the waitstaff for more more more.

“How was it?” shouted Lars from behind the bar, waving them over. Dante and Kingston and Chris talked over themselves to tell of his little brother’s triumphs. Shots were poured and pounded.

“This kid got our mother’s talent and her looks,” said Lars.

“What’d you get, Lars?” asked a man who looked like a regular. Shaggy gray hair, yellowing moustache, a Levon Helm T-shirt.

“I got you bastards!” Everybody laughed.

“I’m so proud of you, little brother,” said Lars, popping caps off bottles of Bud for the boys. “You know who’s gonna want to fuck you now? Claudia Castro.”

“What!” said Dante. “You fucked Claudia Castro?”