Thread: Over the Tracks (Corybantic + Blinkk)

Harrison shook his head as he returned to work. He'd right royally fucked that up, no question, and it didn't even need words when he got back behind the bar. Kenny and Yvonne spotted the strike out, hang dog posture as he re-entered the serving area. She found the self-destruct button. he offered by way of explanation and poured himself a gin, the drink of melancholies the world over. It took a few minutes, but he slowly got back in the rhythm of tending bar again, letting the ebb and flow of pour and mix flow over him in a zen meditation way. He saw Joe a couple of times shortly after their aborted attempt at a meeting of minds, and true to his work he gave the girls a round and got an approving ogle from a brunette for his trouble, and anytime Joe came back he fixed her a drink. She still fired his imagination and made his pulse race when he saw her, but he knew that that ship had sailed. After about an hour and a half she stopped coming back to him for drinks, and he lost sight of her for quite a while at the crescendo of the night, between 1 and 3 in the morning. He thought she might have gone home, as he was seeing less and less of the other girls as well. Somewhat ironically, he had made back the cost of the round of drinks and more thanks to generous tips from the girls and the guys trying to impress the girls, returning to him because he'd given them one freebie early on. It was about 330, and Harrison had been at work for almost 10 hours at this point. His shift was almost over as they left the closing duties to the junior trio of servers who came in from midnight and bussed the room for the first half of their shift. Finally Harrison got a good look at Joe, and the reason he hadn't seen her for so long. She was in the 'care' of Rufus, a bottom feeder of the lowest order, in Harrison's personal hierarchy of scum. He was fairly sure that he was some sort of sociopath or something. Rufus was handsome enough, but never quite managed to manufacture the charm or empathy needed to make a connection, whatever the intended outcome. So he operated by helping things along, chemically, as it were. It was subtle and gradual, and his methods of delivery innocuous enough that even the best had been caught out. Now any and every bartender in the strip learned to stop caring about this kind of thing, rationalizing it as the need for personal responsibility on the part of the girls, or if they didn't, they just left. Moved to more upscale premises where the police actually showed if you called them, and could not be persuaded to let things slide for an envelope every so often. Oh, most, if not all of them made sure that their products were clean from the outset but it was just too much trouble to try and constantly be on the lookout. But Harrison felt the responsibility hang on him like a heavy chain. He had been the one enabling her to reach the point beyond judgment, and now she was making a very. bad. call. He was still trying to work out the best way to salvage the situation, when he saw Rufus heading towards the door, a glassy-eyed and unsteady, almost sleepwalking Josephine in tow. Harrison grabbed the nearest bussy, Bart and told him to take over, as Harrison just found out about an emergency and had to do something about it. Inwardly, he fought down panic and guilt as he pushed his way through the crowd and noise towards the door.