Vaughn
Two weeks in. I'm starting to learn Robin's patterns.
Tuesday Robin arrives at the bar buzzing — electric, fizzing with energy, draping himself over the counter and stealing Jason's fries and telling a story about a soufflé so animated that even Silas looks up from his book. Tuesday means the event went well. Gordon either wasn't there or was in a decent mood. Tuesday Robin is the closest to the real Robin — bright but grounded, performing less, laughing more.
Wednesday Robin is brittle. He arrives smiling but the smile is structural — load-bearing, keeping the rest of his face from collapsing. He flirts too hard, laughs too loud, drinks his first beer too fast. Wednesday means Gordon was bad. I don't know the specifics because Robin won't tell me, but I can read the pattern the way I read an engine that's been stressed — the micro-tremor in his hands when he picks up his glass, the way his shoulders sit an inch too high, the flinch when his phone buzzes.
I've started tracking it. Not on paper — I'm not that obsessive — but in my head, filing away the data points. The days Robin shows up tired. The days he can't stop performing. The days the light in him is on versus the days it's out.
Friday is neutral ground. Good days and bad days in equal measure. Thursday is almost always good — story hour with the kids resets something in him, brings back the real brightness instead of the performed kind. Today is a Friday, and Robin is curled on the couch in the bar's back room, reading a book.
Not a cookbook. A business book —The E-Myth Revisited,dog-eared and underlined, the spine cracked from rereading. I've noticed them stacking up in his room at Ash's house. Business plans, small enterprise management, something calledSetting the Tableby a restaurant guy. He reads them the way Silas reads fantasy novels — hungrily, quietly, like they're describing a world he wants to live in.
"What's that one about?" I ask, settling into the other end of the couch. Not touching, but close enough that he shifts his feet into my lap. An automatic gesture, comfortable, the kind of casual intimacy that Robin does with everyone but that means something different when he does it with me.
"How most small businesses fail because the owner is good at the technical work but bad at being a business owner." He doesn't look up. "Like, a great baker doesn't automatically know how to run a bakery. You have to learn the systems."
"Sounds practical."
"It's terrifying is what it is." He turns a page. "Did you know most restaurants fail in the first year? Like seventypercent. And the ones that survive the first year, half of those fail in the second."
"You thinking about opening something?"
He looks up then. Something crosses his face — want, so raw and naked it's almost painful to see, followed immediately by the shutters coming down. "Just reading. It's interesting."
I let it go. File it away.
Robin closes the book and puts it on the shelf behind the couch — I notice he's built a small collection there, his business books mixed in among Silas's fantasy novels and Jason's cookbooks. Nesting. Building a presence in this bar that looks temporary but keeps getting more permanent.
"Dinner?" he says, swinging his legs off my lap. "I'm starving and Jason's making some kind of pasta situation."
We eat with the pack. Knox and Toby, Jason and Ash, Silas reading between bites, Ezra doing something on his phone that he won't explain. Robin is Friday Robin — somewhere between Tuesday and Wednesday, present but watchful, laughing at the right moments.
His phone rings during dessert.
I watch his face. The caller ID makes his expression go flat — not scared, not angry, just... empty. He stands, smiles at the table. "Just work. Be right back."
He takes the call in the parking lot. Through the window I can see him pacing, one hand in his hair, nodding. His body language screams deference — shoulders curved inward, head down, making himself smaller. I've never seen Robin make himself smaller for anyone.
He comes back smiling. "Gordon needs me to come in early tomorrow. Big event."
"How early?" Ash asks.
"Three thirty."
"Three thirty in the morning?" Jason looks appalled.
"Corporate breakfast. Three hundred people. The prep cook called in sick, so." Robin shrugs. "It's the job."
The table accepts this because Robin's selling it, and Robin is very, very good at selling things. He pivots to a joke about setting four alarms, steals the last piece of garlic bread, touches my hand under the table.
I let him perform for the table. Wait until later, when it's just us, Robin in my jacket again because the night is cold and he keeps "forgetting" to bring one.
"Your boss treats you like shit," I say.
Robin goes rigid. Not the performative stiffness of someone acting offended — the real thing, every muscle locking at once. His hand drops from my arm.
"Excuse me?"