Author's Note: So, I've done a story with Caitlin as a bartender before... and it was possibly the most fun story I've ever written. (It also started a dream in me to become a bartender as a side-job, but that's another point entirely XD)
I've been talking with the wonderful Choco lately about how much I wished we had gotten to see more bartender Caitlin. I mean, her style was pretty great, she was cool and confident, and (again) I think bartending would be one of the most intriguing jobs.
Sooooo I figured I'd take my inexperience and write a story about a bartending Caitlin :)
Friday nights at three in the afternoon were usually pretty dead. Caitlin Snow, who ran the afternoon to early evening shift on Fridays, leaned her forearms on the edge of the counter and waited for someone to come in for a drink. All the glasses had been cleaned and dried, something she was very quick at considering how nit-picky she was about dust and grime in her science beakers and how often she cleaned them, and now there was nothing to do but fiddle with a damp cleaning rag and wait for some costumers.
A young woman walked into the bar. She had her brown hair up in a ponytail, and her bangs were died pink and dangled onto her forehead in fluffy puffs. She was closely followed by a man that looked only a little older than her. He was wrapping his arm around her waist, tucking his nose into her neck, anything, it seemed, to touch her. The girl was giggling, dragging him towards the bar.
"Hi," Caitlin greeted, watching them with her professionally neutral gaze that she had long practiced from giving medical reports to alarmed patients. "What can I get you?"
"Oh, um..." The girl giggled, trying to bat the young man away as he playfully tickled her sides. "Babe, what do you want?"
"I'll have whatever your having," her boyfriend replied, admitting defeat and stopping trying to tickle her.
"Okay, two Manhattans please," the girl said. "Uh, do you have Carpano Antica?"
Caitlin nodded and grabbed two glasses, watching the couple out of the corner of her eye as she mixed the first drink and popped a maraschino cherry on top. The two of them found seats, whispering to each other like two high schoolers flirting at the lockers. The guy took the girls hand and flipped it so it was palm-up on the table. He began to trace his fingers along the lines of her skin, murmuring something to her in a voice low enough that Caitlin couldn't overhear as she started on the second drink. The girl giggled and playfully slapped his shoulder.
After giving them their drinks, Caitlin's attention was diverted from them by another woman, this one much older, who had just come into the bar. Her hair was long and hung thick and wiry around her face, a dark brown with streaks of grey. She took a heavy seat at the bar and waved Caitlin over. "Get me a round vodka shots, please" she muttered, before putting her head down on the table.
Caitlin raised her eyebrows slightly and frowned at the pitiful sight, before lining up the vodka in front of the woman. She lifted her head and picked up the first cup, draining it in one sip and slamming it back down onto the counter. The couple a few seats away looked over at the noise, then turned back to each other.
By five o'clock in the evening, the normal crowd had started to form. The couple had left, a little tipsier then they had been when they came in but probably more drunk on each other then anything that Caitlin had made them.
There were three guys over by the darts table that kept trundling back to the bar, big enough the Caitlin figured it was going to take them quite a few of those beers to get as drunk as they seemed to want to be. They were roughhousing in the corner after each one threw a dart, slapping each other on the back and complaining in loud voices when they missed the dart board. Caitlin kept a loose eye on them. These were the kind of people that could be dangerous when drunk.
The woman with the heavy curtain of dark hair had take six shots and now had her head propped up on her arm, lazily making her glass spin with her finger. "You know," she slurred to Caitlin as she waved for another shot. "I really thought he could be it."
Caitlin stayed quiet and put down the shot, figuring she would cut the woman off soon. She seemed pretty lightweight and Caitlin didn't want her to hurt herself.
"I really thought," the woman repeated. "That he could be it." She sniffled and wipe the back of her hand across her nose. Caitlin handed her a napkin. "Thank you," she mumbled, blowing her nose. "Y'know he was just... so good to me. It was like all those music videos with the flowers and- like them," she gestured violently over down the bar, where the couple had been sitting earlier. Now there was a overweight middle aged man on his phone, holding a beer and occasionally glancing up at the television screen on the wall.
"And then," the woman continued, sighing heavily. "Then we got old." She tugged on a strand of her hair and sighed again. "We got old, and now he's filing for divorce papers and I'm left with more wrinkles then I have money for drinks."
"I'm sorry to hear that," Caitlin murmured, momentarily distracted as the group of men in the corner yelled for more beers. When she made it back to the woman she had held the shot glass up to her eye and was peering through it like a kaleidoscope.
"Do you ever wish," she mumbled to Caitlin. "That you could just close your eyes and then no one could see you? Poof... you'd be vanished. No one would remember you were there and you could just walk... away..."
The shot glass fell from her hand and landed on it's side on the table. Caitlin lunged over and grabbed it before it could fall of the edge, setting it carefully down on a shelf so she could wash it later.
"Sorry about that," the woman sighed. "Look at me... almost just broke something else." She got up slowly and put some money down on the counter. "Keep the change," she told Caitlin, waving away her attempts to tell her it was too much. "You didn't have to listen to my heartbreak but you did. I guess I needed that more than a drink."
Caitlin reached over and touched her wrist. "Don't drive yourself home tonight," she advised. "Make the right decision and get a cab, okay? Drink lots of water and try not to make any big decisions until the hangover is gone."
The woman laughed humorlessly and patted Caitlin's hand. "Probably not the worst ideas," she agreed, before rubbing her face. "Word of advice from an old person to a young one... enjoy the moments you have with your loved ones while you can. There'll be time enough for riffs and broken hearts and fighting."
With that, she stumbled out of the bar and into the night.
Caitlin watched her go, eyes remaining on the door long after it had swung shut, carrying a cool draft of fresh air into the bar as it did. The words had clearly come from a place of pain and bitterness, but it was good advice nonetheless.
A dark haired man with a grey beard and deep creases around his mouth sat down at the bar, making Caitlin blink and look over. "Old Fashioned," he ordered, winking at her.
"Bourbon or whiskey?" Caitlin asked in reply, reaching for a glass.
"Bourbon," the man told her, taking off his remarkably billowy coat and draping it across his knees.
The middle aged man also sitting at the bar let out a whoop of celebration as someone in the soccer game playing on the television scored a goal. "Nice one, nice one," he muttered to himself, taking a long swig of beer and leaning forward on his phone to text someone.
Caitlin set the drink down in front of billowy-coat man and he smiled at her. "What's a nice girl like you doing in a sleazy place like this?"
If Caitlin had a dollar for every time she had been asked this by guys trying to pick her up over the past few months, she wouldn't have to work at the bar anymore. "If it's so sleazy then why are you here?" she replied with a pleasant smile before the group of men in the corner waved her over for still more beers.
"You know," billowy-coat guy said when she got back. "I think we started out on the wrong foot. See... I shouldn't have assumed that you were a nice girl." He sent her a wink and Caitlin sighed, turning her back slightly as she reached for a glass to wash.
"My name is Jorge," the man introduced himself, holding out his hand.
"Caitlin," she told him, taking his hand and giving it a shake. "Now, I've got a bar to look after so if you don't mind I'm going to get back to my job."
She didn't mind people talking to her, in fact, Caitlin quite enjoyed hearing their stories. But she wasn't here to make friends or start any new relationships. She was just here to work, observe, and maybe learn a little bit about human nature.
Jorge took the hint and gave her a ruthful smile before picking up his drink and moving from the bar. He headed over to one of the low tables scattered around the restaurant area of the bar and slid into one, waving down a scantily clad waitress and ordering something with a charming smile and one of his winks.
Caitlin sighed and reached for another glass to polish. A moment later, however, someone at the dart table took it too far.
"You think you can cheat, man?!" one of the guys roared, giving another man a push. "You already went three times!"
"I went twice!" the other guy shouted back. He was beefier than his accuser and less drunk, and it wasn't hard for him to give the instigator of the fight a solid punch in the face.
The first guy stumbled backward and crashed into a table. One of the waitresses screamed, and a couple that had been at a nearby table hurriedly got to their feet and backed away.
Caitlin sighed. This kind of thing happened fairly often here, but it didn't make it any less annoying to deal with. She reached over to the wall and buzzed in the bouncer located at the front door. "Hey, Steve, there are two drunk guys about to get into a real brawl. Could you come break it up?"
In a few moments, Steve the bouncer was dragging both men (and there more innocent friend) out and the peace had been restored to the bar. The waitress that had screamed began to pick up the broken pieces of the table and another one went for a broom to sweep up the broken glass from a shattered beer bottle.
Caitlin ran her hand through her hair and shook her head. The bar, which had gone completely silent at the start of the fight, slowly resumed it's chatter. The only man still at the bar turned away from the restaurant and back to his phone and the soccer game. The couple sat back down.
At around 9 o'clock that night a group of college aged girls came whirling into the bar. They were giggling and seemed to already be drunk as they claimed a table and waved Caitlin over. She walked toward them, looking over their bare arms and the tank tops and shorts that seemed to have an absurd amount of purposeful holes in them.
"What can I get you?" she asked.
"Let's- let's all get daiquiris," one of the girls, with long dyed blond hair in a large messy bun, spoke up. She giggled and then hiccuped, which sent all the other girls into titters of laughter. "I always liked the jelly bean flavor. We can pretend we're at a- a fancy party."
Another girl with similarly blond hair, dark smokey eyeshadow, fake eyelashes, and a lip piercing, burst into giggles and then abruptly into tears. "I don't- don't get invited to fancy partiesssss..." she wailed as the other girls rushed to comfort her.
"Six daiquiris it is," Caitlin murmured, turning toward the glasses and the pre-sliced limes ready for her use.
By the time the drinks were being lined up, lip-piercing girl had calmed down, though her mascara was running down her cheeks like zombie makeup. The girls clinked their glasses together and took neat sips, before starting to giggle all over again and wandering over to the DJ. Caitlin watched as they leaned around his table and starting playing with their hair and rubbing his arms. A couple minutes later they were dancing to a song he had just put in for them. And a couple minutes after that, predictably, one of the skinniest girls had vomited all over herself and had to be raced to the restroom.
Caitlin checked her watch. Her Friday shift ended in a half hour but her coworker, Cameron, was frequently late. Somedays she was stuck behind the bar until 10:30 instead of 10:00.
Another man walked into the bar, with a thick beard, bushy eyebrows, and two different colored eyes. He sat down heavily at a barstool and glanced over his shoulder.
"Can I get you anything?" Caitlin asked, watching him curiously when he didn't place an order.
"Yup," the man grunted. Another guy walked in at that moment, with similarly bushy eyebrows and beard. The sleeves of his flannel were cuffed, but one of them was pushed all the passed his elbow while the other had fallen half-way down his thick, hairy forearm. He looked like a lumberjack, not the type of guy Caitlin was used to seeing here.
The bushy eyebrowed man already at the bar gave a exclamation of greeting, and Caitlin waited while they clapped each other on the back shook hands and then clapped each other on the back again. Then they sat down and ordered two beers. Caitlin grabbed them from the fridge and popped their tops off using the edge of the bar, before sliding them down the table. The men caught them and clinked the bottoms together so hard that the beer sloshed over their hands, before they tipped back the bottles and took long sips.
The man who had been watching the soccer game and texting for the past four hours was starting to pack up. He waved Caitlin over and paid her for his drink, then tucked his phone in his pocket and trundled out of the bar.
It was about then that Cameron decided to show up. She walked out of the back room and nodded at Caitlin, yawning. Cameron had violently purple hair and at least ten different piercings scattered between her ears, lip, nose, and eyebrows, and was dressed in a cropped black sparkly tank top and ripped jeans. Caitlin handed her the drying towel and turned around without another word.
She walked back into the seedy Employees room and grabbed her jacket, shrugging it on before swinging her purse over her shoulder. Then she pushed through the back door and stepped into the comparatively fresh night air.
The heavy door swung shut and locked automatically, and Caitlin left the bar behind.
Author's Note: Ummm... so admittedly that turned into a writing exercise on character distinctions/specificities but it's fineeee XD
Seriously tho- if you are trying to practice making more original, realistic and imaginable characters, try popping someone into a scene like a bar or a coffee shop and just write about the people that come in. It's actually really fun.
I'm sorry I haven't been posting that much (or like at all) lately. I have been so INSANELY busy, and I honestly just haven't been inspired. Of course I'm still going to finish Snowbarry Season 4, and the odd other story. I guess I just need the Flash to come back on or something... or just find something inspiring.