milliways_bar | (no subject)

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Mike isn't so much seated at Bar as he is slumped over her. He hates days like today. You know the kind, where what you've been putting off all week just has to be done.

The concern du jour is the lack of writing on this week's Happy Hour schedule. There's just no amount of squinting that's going to make writing magically appear on the calendar before him, and he knows it.

It's just unfair the way the universe works, you know? That procrastination can't continue indefinitly.

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"What's bad about it is that it's all it says. What it's supposed to also have on it is like, a list of when people are working this week...only no one's written in something, which means that no one is working this week."

"Then the bar will draft men again, will she not, as she did last week?" Teja asks. "I was drafted on Saturday, and did a brisk trade in mulled this-and-that."

Long, long pause.

Then, a deep sigh of the sort that precedes a very difficult admission.

"It was fun," Teja says.

Mike grins.

"Got under you skin, did she?"

"You might say so," Teja says, venturing a small smile.

And yes, he does accept now that Bar is a 'she', as a matter of course.

Bar gets a pat for her troubles.

"She can draft people, and she does...but I'd prefer to go to sleep without having to worry about it myself, you know?"

"May one volunteer?" Teja says.

Mike blinks.

"Please?"

"May one volunteer, to take a shift?" Teja asks again.

Mike looks left.
Then he looks right.

"Yes. Yes you can."

Why? Because Mike says so.

"I might volunteer for Saturday again," Teja says, "and offer hot mulled drinks again, rather than be drafted when I least expect it!"

"I think I have an opening here that you might fit."

Says Mike without the slightest hint of innuendo.

"Then I shall take my place here on Saturday, you might write my name in your book of days, and feel somewhat better," Teja says.

"Excellent!"

And Mike does just that.

"Does she call on you often to step in? You know, out of curiosity."

"This was perhaps the fourth or fifth time, since I arrived," Teja says. "It is not bad. I was truly displeased the first time it happened; but this time it was" --- long pause again --- "fun. Yes."

Mike's eyebrows go up at the mention of four or five, and he begins to flip through the calendar for confirmation.

"Woah, she likes you a lot."

"In more than a year!" Teja says. "It is not that much!"

Smirk.

"Back pedal all you want, I know the truth. Bar likes you."

The Landlord have mercy on your soul.

"How can she like any, or like any less?" Teja asks.

No, he is certain he is no dearer to this long wooden piece of furniture than any other man!

Mike shrugs.

"Who knows? But she does, and that's all that matters."

"That may be as it is; but in any case, I will serve of my own free will next Saturday, and then not be drafted again, one assumes, for quite some while!" Teja says.

"You know what they say about people who assume..."

"That their assumptions will be proven wrong?" Teja guesses.

"Is that the same as making an ass out of u and me?"

"Huh?" Teja says, deeply puzzled.

He thinks he is speaking Gothic; that pun would not pun.

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