I take the bottle out of the well, and without looking at Cillian, I do the one and only bar trick I know how to do, which is to flip the bottle and catch it on the back of my hand. It hurts like a motherfucker, I can only do it with nearly empty bottles, and I only manage it one out of every five attempts, but the stars align for me to show off, and I do it perfectly.

Magic truly is afoot.

There’s an eruption of appreciation from the customers who saw me. I can hear snippets of people asking, “Since when can Meg do that?”

After pouring the whiskey and taking the money, I slide past Cillian to get to the register, as if I didn’t do anything at all.

“Excuse me,” I say as I pass, my entire backside making brief contact with his entire front as I move past him in the narrow bar.

“You think you lost your mind,” he says into my hair as I go by. “I think I’m losing mine.”

Cillian shuts the doors and says, “Thank God they wanted to leave, I didn’t have a lock-in in me tonight.”

“Okay, you said those words earlier and I didn’t know what they meant then either.”

He furrows his brow and then says, “Oh, a lock-in. It’s basically when the bar is shut but no one leaves. The good’ns stay on a bit.”

I nod. “We kind of have that in America. But not in an official sense.”

He smiles and I get the feeling that anything that might occur to me to tell him I may have already said to him. Not in a bad way. In a cute way, actually. Like, in every world, I would want to tell him every stupid corner of my mind. And he’s nice enough to not look tired of me.

I am filled with a sense of satisfied well-being I never once felt at the bars I worked in LA. I was always counting the minutes until it was time to leave, hinting heavily to managers that I wanted to be cut early, or even sometimes feigning an illness to get out of the slowest shifts when I could see they were overstaffed. Working with Cillian tonight was totally different. It was fun. Now it’s quiet, and we’re listening to The Rhythm of the Saints album by Paul Simon on the speakers. I’m running the mats through hot sanitized water, and he’s picking up all the glasses from the dining room and putting them on the counter. I can’t hear him but I can see that he’s singing along with the lyrics to “She Moves On.”