The gray San Francisco afternoon vanished as soon as Maria, Sun-hee, and I stepped in through the side door of the Moonlight Lounge. We all had our dresses slung over our shoulders, our makeup bags and hair stuff in suitcase-sized purses clutched in our hands.

I put my stuff down with a groan.

“You gotta pack lighter,” Sun muttered.

“Like you’re any better?” I asked her, eyeing her duffel bag of stuff.

“It takes work to look this good, girls,” Maria said and fished her buzzing phone out of her pocket.

The door closed behind us, shutting us into the dark, silent cave of the empty club.

“Hello? ‘Ello? ‘Lo?” Sun joked, making her voice echo in the empty room.

“Jeez,” Maria said. “It’s freezing in here.”

The hair on the back of my neck went up and I wasn’t sure if it was cold or just the vibe of the place.

Across from us, on the far side of the room, was an empty stage, the dance floor spread out in front of it. The back wall had doorways and windows leading to what I imagined was the VIP section. The bar was on the other wall; it was all mirror and glass, and when it was lit up it was probably pretty impressive. But without the lights and the people, it looked empty.

It was empty.

Too empty.

“Where is everyone?” Sun asked.

“No idea,” I answered. “Are we early?”

“Nope,” Maria said, checking the time on her phone. “Six p.m.”

“Weird,” said Sun.

It was really weird. The bar opened in two hours and the place was completely still and silent. No band setting up. No servers. No sound guy.

And I wasn’t very smart about a lot of things, but I was awesome with vibes, and this room was waiting but not in a good way. Other bars we worked in, they were like parties about to happen. Energized and ready. A powder keg needing a spark—and I knew how to be that spark. My whole job was to be that spark.

But I didn’t know if I could create a big enough spark to warm up this cold, empty room.

“Look at this place,” Maria sighed, looking around at the shiny silver drapes and the huge chrome modern light fixtures with wide eyes. “It’s so classy.”

“Classy?” Sun-hee scoffed. Sun scoffed at everything.

“You don’t think so? The curtains and stuff?”

“Cheesy,” Sun said.

“What do you think, Abby?” Maria asked me, putting me in the standard position of tie-breaker between the two. I did what I always did when we went into a new club: I totally redecorated in my head. I replaced the silver curtains with velvet—something lush, indigo or purple. I replaced the very hip light fixtures with old school chandeliers and built a riser at the edge of the dance floor and put a row of low tables there, covered in white linen with small lamps on top.

Better, I thought, liking the vision in my head. Much warmer.

But the girls I worked with didn’t know I did this—they didn’t know that I renovated and revamped and reorganized every single bar we worked in, making it better if only in my head.

So I just said:

“I think we’re gonna make a shit ton of money.”

Predictably, it was the right thing to say, and Maria and Sun high-fived.

“Where is everyone?” I asked, and like I summoned him a voice said, “Ladies!”

We glanced around, looking for the man who belonged to that voice. I found him in the shadows, coming down a set of stairs that led up to the second floor. We watched him make his way toward us.

“Sorry I wasn’t here to greet you,” the man said, and gave us a little bow. Oh, Maria was going to eat that courtly bow shit right up.

The guy was seriously good-looking in a cold and perfect way. When my sister and I were kids, we had a Ken doll that looked like him: blonde hair, light blue eyes, slight build but tall. He looked pretty slick in his black suit and black tie.

But there was something strange about all his beauty.

He was young, too. Our age, even. But he seemed older.

And it wasn’t just that he didn’t look at us, look at us.

His gaze was vacant. He looked through us. Past us. Into the space we were occupying like he was waiting for us to be gone.

“We’re from Elegance Hospitality,” I said, because Sun and Maria were just staring at the guy. “Are you Mr.…Lazarus?”

That was weird, too, right? Lazarus? Like the guy from the Bible who rose from the dead?

This place was starting to give me the creeps.

“No. Mr. Lazarus is in meetings.” He gestured lightly over his shoulder toward the stairs and the windows that made up one whole wall of the second floor. Sun, Maria, and I all looked up at that wide-open eye of a window. It was black so we couldn’t see in.

People were watching us. Which was nothing new. People watching us was kind of the point, but a chill went down my spine all the same.

Whoever was watching us did not want us to see them.

And that window was so big, like we were on stage for them.

Creeeepy.

“I will show you to the dressing rooms,” the man said. So freaking formal.

“What about the bar and everything?” I asked. “Did the vodka arrive?”

“Patty, when she gets here, will answer those questions. She’s our head bartender.”

“I didn’t catch your name,” I said, knowing full well he didn’t give it.

”You can call me Bates.”

Like a butler? Maybe the guy didn’t know it was 2017.

I made the introductions to Maria and Sun. Bates did not shake our hands, only gave us that little head bow again. Out of the corner of my eye I watched Sun and Maria exchange glances.

Weird.

“You guys open at eight, right?” I asked. “Where is everyone?”

He looked around as if he was as surprised as we were to see no one was there. “We’re a new club and we don’t quite have all the kinks worked out,” he said.

“Are you the manager?” I asked.

“No. But you can ask me anything you need. Patty can help you, too.”

“Great,” I said, but I wasn’t sure I meant it. Bars and clubs worked only if management was on freaking point. Without good management, the place could be cool as fuck and full of beautiful people but it wouldn’t last.

“Follow me?” Bates said, and because we didn’t have a lot of choice, we all followed him across the dance floor.

Three nights. That’s all. We could do just about anything for three nights.

And the club wasn’t as empty as I thought it was.

One man sat at the shadowy far corner of the bar.

There was a book open in front of him and I watched as he quietly turned the page. The sound of paper sliding across paper was loud in the empty room.

The dude was reading. In a bar.

It was so out of the ordinary I stopped and watched him. Gawked really, like he was an exhibit in a museum.

He must have felt my attention because he lifted those eyes away from the book and caught me staring.

I couldn’t see him well in the shadows, but what I did see was attractive. Dark hair, dark eyes. A lean body with wide shoulders dressed well in a gray suit, a clean white shirt underneath it.

He was tall, filling up that bar stool like he owned it. And very very still.

Interest prickled under my skin.

Hello, handsome.

His gaze made its way over me, from my hair to my feet, and when he got to my beat-up Converse he smiled. Smirked really, and his dark face transformed into something else.

Something I wanted a closer look at.

Compelled by that smirk, I stepped forward and, still smirking, he looked up at my face.

So I did what I always did when a hot mysterious guy smiled at me like that: I flipped my hair, the straight white-blonde sheet of it, over my shoulder and gave him my best “come see about me” look.

It was proven effective, my look.

But Reader took one look at my smile and my hair and my eyes, and the smile fell from his face like it had never been there. In its absence his face was perfectly and completely blank.

Like he’d never smiled before. Ever. Much less at me.

And then he turned around, back to his book.

Ignoring me.

My jaw fell open for one second.

Men, as a rule, did not ignore me. They might not like me. They might think shit things about me, but they did not ignore me.

“You coming?” Sun yelled across the empty bar.

“Yeah.”

Whatever, I thought as I followed my friends through the doors to the dressing room. What was I going to do with a guy who reads books in a bar?

Nothing, was the answer. I was going to do nothing with that guy.

* * *

“I love this place,” Sun-hee said a half hour later as we sat in front of the big mirrors in the dressing room. “I love these dressing rooms. I love that stage…” She looked at me in the mirror as we put on our false eyelashes. “I’m going to be on that stage, mark my words.”

“I believe you,” Maria said.

Sun was making a name for herself in the music scene and she wouldn’t be working for Elegance for very long. We all knew that. And Maria was looking for another job—she and her husband just had a baby and she wanted something with better hours.

“Look at my sweet girl,” Maria cooed, flipping her phone around to show us a picture her husband had taken of their baby sleeping in a crib. Sun rolled her eyes but I took the phone and looked closely.

“She’s sitting up now, did I tell you?” Maria asked. “All by herself.”

“She’s so beautiful,” I said, so deeply envious I could barely stand it. Not just of the baby and the husband—which were pretty enviable things—but all of it.

Sun-hee and Maria had futures. They had plans.

Maria had a freaking home. A baby to love and spoil and a husband to love and spoil her. And Sun had all this ambition, like a path set out in front of her that she was so determined to see through.

I had… a bag of cosmetics. A growing savings account. A dream I never talked about. And an empty apartment.

Oh, and my sister.

I loved Charlotte, but she wasn’t keeping me warm at night, you know?

After Moonlight Lounge I was only moving on to the next club. And the next club after that. A different booze, a different outfit, same job.

I was putting money aside for this gigantic dream I had, but some days… most days actually, the dream seemed ridiculous. Like what was a person like me doing, dreaming a dream like the one I had? I barely had a high school diploma. I was a glorified fucking shots girl.

I couldn’t even say my dream out loud or really look directly at it. It was embarrassing to want something so big, you know?

Which was stupid, but I was known to be stupid.

“So what are we doing tonight?” Maria asked when I reluctantly handed back the phone and the picture of her daughter. Maria was looking at me. Sun looked, too.

Honest to God, I didn’t understand why I was the one making these decisions. Maria had been a part of the company the longest and Sun had the bigger personality, but it didn’t seem to matter.

At some point I had been voted leader.

“I’ll work the floor, Maria you work VIP, and Sun will float,” I said. “Check in at midnight and switch if we need to?”

“Works for me,” Sun said. Maria nodded and it was decided.

I was wearing my hair in a classic twist and keeping my makeup real retro, a look that went with the outfits and the club. The lights around the mirror were reflected in my pupils and it looked like I had empty golden eyes.

“That blonde guy creeped me out,” Maria said.

Sun laughed, low in her throat. “You know what all these guys do, right?” she whispered.

“What?” Maria asked, looking up from her phone all wide-eyed.

“They’re like gangsters. Mobsters,” Sun whispered. “Lazarus is like one of the biggest drug traffickers in the whole Bay area. I heard he traffics women, too.”

“No!” Maria said, all incredulous. “That’s just the vibe of the club. It’s not real.”

Sun laughed. “It’s totally real. My cousin told me. Watch them—”

“Shhhhh!” I shushed everyone, because real or not it wasn’t something we needed to be talking about while in the dressing rooms.

“You don’t believe me?” Sun asked, because she could not let anything go.

“No. And you need to stop talking about it,” I whispered, glancing around.

Sun shook her head at me like I was something to be pitied.

“There’s a guy at the bar reading, Sun. Does that seem very gangster to you?”

“I think you got a thing for the guy at the bar.”

“What are you talking about?” I needlessly swept more mascara over my eyelashes. “I didn’t say two words to him.”

“No, but you gave him your come get in my pants look and he did not take the bait.”

Maria laughed and I tried to scowl, but Sun jostled me with her shoulder and in the end I smiled. “Totally struck out,” I said with a laugh. “But I don’t think he’s a gangster.”

I didn’t want this place to be filled with gangsters. I didn’t want The Reader to be a bad guy.

I’d learned my lesson with the bad guys.

My first boyfriend, which probably told you everything you needed to know about my instincts, gave me a black eye.

I liked the grumpy guys, who gave their smiles only to me and weren’t super excited to meet my friends, but would do it because they loved me.

The assholes with temper issues and inferiority complexes were not for me.

That was another skill I had developed over the years: differentiating the harmless grumpy guys from the asshole grumpy guys. I was so good at it I could smell it on them.

Reader wasn’t one of the bad ones.

I was mostly sure of it.

The door opened and a beautiful black woman with dreadlocks, who wore a man’s vest and cigarette pants, poked her head in the door.

“I’m Patty,” she said with a tight smile. “The bartender. You guys good in here?”

“Fine,” I said.

“Your vodka arrived. When you’re done let’s get things organized.”

“Sounds good,” I said and Patty vanished.

Caprice Vodka was paying Elegance a stupid amount of money for us to come into this bar, dress up in their custom costume, and give away their overpriced potato juice. Introduce people to the product, make the first experience so amazing they had to come back for more. It wasn’t a hard job. Not when you looked like the three of us.

“You guys need a little party-starter?” Sun asked, taking out the small amber bottle of coke she had tucked in her bra. She did a bump and so did Maria, but I shook my head.

“No thanks.”

The vibe of this place made me feel like someone needed to be clear-headed tonight.

“Suit yourself,” Maria said and put her feet in her high-heeled leather booties, fluffed her skirt, and headed out to the bar. Sun followed, fierce and glittering.

In our costumes we looked like old school cigarette girls, with sparkly short dresses, puffed out by itchy netting. We wore black hose with the seam up the back and we carried little boxes with straps around our necks, but instead of smokes we sold shots.

But really we sold a feeling.

My sister didn’t understand. She said she did, but I knew deep down she thought I was a glorified stripper or a high-end prostitute.

But I wasn’t either of those things.

I was a party-starter. A human version of what Sun had in her bra. And I got paid well to do it.

I gave myself one more second in front of the mirror to put on my lipstick. A bright red that made my eyes bluer, my hair brighter.

I looked hot in this dress. My makeup was perfection. My hair, too. This was me. I had this shit in the bag. And the men staring at me to prove it. To remind me. To show me, when I wasn’t sure or I forgot, who I was. What my value was.

And if that made me sad? If I wanted more?

The baby and the husband and the future and my dream.

I’d get over it.

I’d adapt.

I’d start the party.

It was what I was good at.