#bartender liam

It’s something like her fourth trip in that week (and it’s only Wednesday) when Liam finally says something. She comes in in a huff, shedding raindrops from her fashionably belted trench, and instead of her Cosmo reliably at hand, it’s only him, leaning on the bar with a raised eyebrow. “I think they send people to rehab by this point, you know.”

“What? You’re my bartender, not my therapist,” Regina snaps, undoing her jacket and tossing it on her usual chair. “And I’m your best customer. Get me my drink, now.”

“Apologies, Madam Mayor.” That slight incline of the head, that flash of the pale blue eyes that makes her think he’s not in fact backing down at all. “After all, it is my job. But I couldn’t help but notice you seem to be in here quite a bit.”

“I’m not bothered here.” Regina sits, crossing her heeled ankles with a snap. “Including by you. Usually. If you want me to spend my money somewhere else, I’m happy to.”

“Where?” He takes the towel off his shoulder, polishing a glass. It’s raining outside, and they can hear it steadily on the windows, an early spring night where the leaves are just turning green. “I can’t see you becoming a regular at the Rabbit Hole, I’m afraid.”

Regina grits her teeth, infuriated with how easily he’s read her. “I want my drink.”

He pauses, then nods, mixing up her usual and slipping a cocktail napkin across the silky-smooth wood of the counter; you carve your initials, or heartfelt paeans to eternal drunken love, into Liam Jones’ bar on pain of instant death. He takes pride in the place, clearly. Keeps it up. Doesn’t know he ever had any life before this. Doesn’t know it was made by a curse, that it’s all a lie. Just like the rest of them. Not that she cares.

(She went looking in the archives for his last name. She still doesn’t know anything else. For once, briefly, she feels the pain of what she has destroyed.)

Liam hands the highball glass over, and Regina takes a drink, letting it run down the back of her throat. For a moment the world is right again, settled. She closes her eyes, savoring it, until something occurs to her, and they flash open. “This is virgin. You didn’t put any vodka in it.”

He looks straight back at her. This is not a man to swerve from his purpose, or anything else. “Ran out earlier.”

“Like hell you did.” Regina slams the glass down, splashing it, and gets to her feet. “You’re a bar, you didn’t run out. You don’t want to give it to me, and that’s none of your concern.”

“Is it?” He picks up the towel again, polishing a margarita glass to a shine and hooking it into the rack. “You too drunk to do your job isn’t my concern, as a law-abiding citizen of this town? I’m a bartender, not a drug dealer. I have a right to refuse service to intoxicated or problem customers.”

“You don’t have a right to refuse service to me!” She starts around the bar toward him, fingers aching for her vanished magic. One fireball, see how he likes it. “I’m the qu – mayor!”

“Yes,” he says, still unflinching. “And funny how this entire town does what you say, isn’t it? Even to the point nobody will stop you from yourself?”

That brings Regina up short. Much as she’s still chafing at his defiance, if he’s trying to step out of line and be a burr in her foot, but if he thinks, however misguidedly, that he’s trying to help. . . she has been burning the midnight oil plenty, has been relying on her three Cosmos a night to function, to sleep. She is still a few feet away from him, fists clenched, staring at him, but he stares right back. He’s quite a bit taller than her, and with no magic, she’s not going to be a match for him if he decides to physically eject her. He works as his own bouncer too; she’s never seen someone else here. He doesn’t have a business partner, or any other partner that she can tell. Maybe, just maybe, he’s as utterly alone as she is.

Not that she wants to think like this. Not that it’s anything to her. Still, for the moment, she backs down, retreating around the bar and back to her chair. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Can I please have a regular one?”

He looks at her for a long moment, as if judging her sincerity, and she’s not sure she likes whatever he sees there. But he nods, takes the glass away, and mixes up a proper one, handing it to her as she sips without a word. She’ll make it last. Damn if she’ll give him the satisfaction of asking for a second one.

The night passes as usual, clients filtering in and out, Liam greeting them by name, fixing their preferred libations. It should make Regina angrier than it does to see them all comparatively. . . well. . . happy. They’re not supposed to be relaxing, unwinding. She wants them miserable, that’s why she made this. But she supposes she can’t enforce that every minute of every day without turning pleasant, bucolic Storybrooke into a dungeon of hell and terror, and she values her own comfortable existence enough that she’s not about to do that. Besides, Liam would certainly cut her off in that case, and the Rabbit Hole beckons. She can’t do that.

Finally, the last patrons leave, she’s still on the dregs of her first drink, and has barely paid attention to whatever heaps of paper she’s put her signature on. She wants to get up and go, but she doesn’t, watching the muscles in his arms move as he wipes down the bar, rinses out the sticky shakers, and puts the glasses in the sanitizer, setting out mixes and garnish for tomorrow and restocking the napkins and straws. Suddenly she wants to ask him where he lives. Presumably in the little bachelor apartment upstairs, which she’s sometimes stopped and looked at from the street, trying to see in the windows. Just out of curiosity. Nothing else.

“We’re closed, Madam Mayor,” he says at last, tossing the dirty rags in the laundry bag. “I’ll see you to your car, if you want.”

Slowly, Regina gets to her feet. Shuffles her papers back into her briefcase, clicks it shut. She glances up at him again, which is a mistake. In the low light, his eyes are very blue, his shoulders very broad, and she detects the vaguest whiff of some very masculine cologne, something that twists her lonely chest in half. She can’t breathe, she doesn’t want to go, and damned if she doesn’t know exactly why. No. She can’t. Not with – with him.

(They’re all her subjects. It’s her right to take what she wants.)

Their eyes remain locked an uncomfortable instant too long. Liam doesn’t run away screaming, which he would if he knew who she really was. For a moment she feels a demented urge to tell him, just to see. The Evil Queen.

But she doesn’t know who he is either. Might as well keep the playing field level.

The air hums and crackles between them. He takes a step toward her, and she fights the urge to back away, as he’s reaching for her arm as if he actually intends to do something gentlemanly and escort her out to her car, as if there’s anyone in Storybrooke who would actually have the presence of mind, or the temerity, to lurk outside her Mercedes with a crowbar late at night. The curse has almost eliminated petty crime, one can say that for it. But then his hand is on her arm, bare flesh to bare flesh, and Regina feels it like a shock down to her feet. Before she knows exactly what she’s doing, she reaches up with her other hand, cups the back of his neck, and pulls his mouth down to hers.

Liam jerks, but he doesn’t back down. Instead, after the kiss remains frozen and tentative, barely a chaste touching of lips, for several instants, he exhales hard through his nose, shifts their position, and presses her back into the wood of the counter, cupping her face in his hands and kissing her thoroughly. It has been forever and a day since Regina was kissed like this, so completely and consumingly, until she is clawing at his curls, trying to get a grip on him, trying to get him nearer, trying to breathe in strangled gulps between their devouring, heads turning, tongues dueling, teeth scraping, lips bruised and wet. Hungry, hungry, hungry. Oh God, this feels good. And hence by its nature is most dangerous of all, but she suddenly does not have the ability to give a single damn about it.

Liam boosts her up onto the counter, her legs wrapping around his waist, her hands finding the hem of that sweater and running up beneath it. But even as they’re entangled, as he’s between her legs and her mouth opens as he grinds into her, he stops. “Madam Mayor, this is. . . it’s late, you’ve had a drink. Please allow me to see you home.”

In answer, Regina runs her hand down and around to the waistband of his jeans, brushing lightly over the front, as he hisses and closes his eyes. “How about,” she purrs, “you call me something else for now?”

“Did you have a suggestion?” Sweat is standing on Liam’s forehead as he manfully tries to ignore her palming his clearly evident hardness. “And I don’t think this is – ”

Regina slips one finger inside his belt, and he makes a deep low noise that she enjoys so much it’s all she can do to hold back from trying to coax another one. “Nobody needs to know.” She crooks a heel into the back of his thigh, pulling him closer. “If you call me Regina tonight.”

He looks at her for a long moment, clearly doing his best to say no to this, but his hand is already skimming up her back, under the silk blouse and cashmere sweater, toying with the clasp of her bra, and she moans, bending into him. She reaches up to grab hold of his hair again as he buries his free hand in hers, and they kiss and kiss until neither of them are thinking straight, his sweater is off and his shirt unbuttoned almost to the navel, and hers is completely off, scattered across the bar as he buries his head in the creamy swell of her breasts, breath hot on her skin. She hasn’t done this in a long time – allowed someone to make love to her, instead of just satisfying her demands and getting it over with. She should make him stop, she should.

It’s only for one night anyway.

Liam’s thumb comes around to spring the clasp of her bra, as deftly as he handles his drinks, and he stops to glance at her before sliding it off her arms. Regina, breathless, can barely nod, thinking that it will surely be some kind of scandal if the mayor is caught in flagrante and topless with the bartender, but she owns the sheriff and the newspaper, so she has every confidence that any incriminating pictures will not be taken, much less make it to press. Sidney won’t be skulking around outside with a camera anyway; she has better things for him to do. She has better things to do.

She wraps her arms around Liam’s neck, pulling him into another hungry kiss, as she reaches to return the favor when they break for breath. She almost rips his shirt getting it the rest of the way off him, and he looks just as good without it as she’d imagined. She runs her hands over it, forearms and biceps and shoulders and chest, around to the back, as he lifts her completely onto his precious bar and she spreads her legs, one heel dangling off her foot. Takes his hand and guides it between them, pressing into her, needing the friction, both of them feeling her wetness, and they groan. “Why don’t you pillage and plunder a bit, Captain?” she whispers.

He jerks again. Stares at her in something that’s not lust, but confusion, as if he thinks he should know that or recognize that from somewhere. It hangs over them, threatening to break the moment, until she pulls his hand against her again, grinding into it, and takes his mouth with hers again, pulling him half on top of her. He’s fumbling at his jeans, getting them down over his lean hips, as she arches her back to get loose her silken lingerie. Kicks her panties off, hitches them up, and utters a mew of frustration as he won’t quite come to her. Glances at her again. “Mada. . . Regina, is this what you want?”

She opens and shuts her mouth. She wants him, she knows that beyond anything right now, and she’s thrown that he keeps bothering to ask her permission, when heaven knows she doesn’t take anyone else’s wishes into consideration and has no regrets over the fact. It’s plain enough that he wants it, pressed hard and hot against the inside of her leg, but he still holds back from that moment of entry and consummation. If she says no, he’ll stop.

If she says yes, she doesn’t know where this is going to lead her. It’s not something she does.

But right now, for this, she wants to find out.

She meets his eyes and nods.

Liam takes a heavy breath and shifts his position, moving between her legs again, pressing gently at her as she hisses, reaches down and takes hold of him, guiding him into her bit by bit and then in a sudden, stretching stroke, all at once. She gasps, mouth open, head thrown back, as he fills her solidly to the hilt, hips grinding and gyrating lightly at first to even out the fit, then harder. He’s new in her, rough, raw, different, but not at all unpleasantly. She wraps her arms more tightly around his neck, panting in his ear, sweaty hair sticking to the back of her neck. “Oh God,” she whimpers. “Oh God. Yes. There. That’s good. There.”

Liam gives her a minute, then thrusts, possessing her fiercely in one smooth, deep movement that she feels to the back of her throat. She clutches harder, rocking on the bar, legs sprawled and ankles twisting around the back of his straining thighs. Her makeup is smeared, her lipstick ruined; it’s bright as a brand on his face. She has rarely felt less put together, less icily calm and in command, less anything but deep, searing heat. She bounces her hips, pulling him forward and half on top of her, the glasses in the rack above quivering in time to the impact of her back on the counter, gripped in his strength and urgent, unceasing strokes. God. So good. God. So good.

Liam grunts low in his throat, grasping hold of her, eyes half-closed, lashes fluttering, as he drives his full weight behind the last staccato rhythm, as she rises up to meet him and takes him home, once and again and again, elbows starting to ache from bracing both of them but still unable to break the spell. She can still hear the rain outside, pattering on the eaves. For a moment the world is gone, Storybrooke or no Storybrooke, as if they’re floating in a sea of black ink, the lovers in the cave as the air runs out, as they lie down together to die. She clasps his head to her shoulder, kissing his hair, as he stiffens, jerks, and loses his flesh in hers, pounding her down flat onto the wood, the heat and strength of orgasm spilling through them both.

She lies there and looks at the ceiling as he’s still atop her, gasping. Can see the red lights reflected in the glasses, like a sea of flaming stars.

This is only one night, she reminds herself.

This is only now. It changes nothing. Nothing ever will.