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They didn’t know what was going to happen, but he still had a job. No one was sleeping well these days. And it was a weird sort of comfort to know that he was background for all of it, he wasn’t a target. People wanted beer, and other people would pay him a wage to put beer out. But the last few days were days that made people put their heads down. The lady and the guy couldn’t leave the bar fast enough, or casually enough, when Jinx walked in, but he had to stay. It was Jinx. It was fucking JINX.
She sat. The thump of her sitting and then the thump of her forehead on the wood of the bar told him that he needed every bit of customer service he’d ever learned.
“Cider?” he asked.
He put the cup in front of her. She hadn’t answered yet, but it was just a cup of cider and it wasn’t important. He wanted to run, honestly.
“Don’t talk,” she said, and then she looked up at him. He saw her shoulders lift as she breathed.
He remembered his mother, he remembered the shed that he hadn’t finished building behind the house. He saw the faint pink light of Jinx’s eyes glinting off the countertop. What the hell. This was all…it was just a job? And everybody knew what Jinx had done. What she could do.
Her eyes didn’t move as he put the cherry into the cup. They were pointed at him.
Oh wow he wanted to leave.
“It’s fucking juice,” she said.
“With bub-” He started, reflexively, but cut himself off. There was a glass on the counter, something the couple who had left had been using. It wasn’t important which one of them, it was just a glass. He lifted it and turned away from the bar to stow it in the washer.
“JUICE, Chuck.”
She made an odd noise, and he glanced back over his shoulder to see her standing up. Her braids swung in a broad arc as she came around the end of the bar, palm planted on the wood, and then she was wrapped around him. Her arms knotted together at his back, and he flattened his palms across her shoulderblades; what else was there to do?
“Shut up,” she said.
She sort of melted for a few seconds and he kept shutting up because that was clearly the best thing to do. It was weird, and he patted her shoulder and she didn’t kill him. His bartender instincts were telling him to say something comforting but what the hell was this, and also he was in moderate danger of voiding bodily waste out of fear. This wasn't the first time she'd done it, the stains hadn't come out of the last shirt, but there are things that don't, like, EVER stop being a mortal horror.
“...on the house,” he said, eventually, patting her shoulder again. She let go, coughed, and stepped back on her heel. Then she looked at him, and that’s all it was, just eyes pointed at him. There wasn’t anything else there. “I’m-" he said, but she made a swipe of the hand. No, Chuck, shut up.
She picked up the cup on the bar and left, and just outside the door he heard the sound of ceramic breaking on brick.