Invisible String

C.1: drunk on something stronger than the drinks in the bar

"What does that mean?" Madison exclaimed, gathering a little attention from those around them, the man at the end of the bar in particular, who Rosa waved off. 

Rosa shrugged her shoulders once more, before opening her mouth to speak, "You give off the same strange energy that he does," Rosa waved Madison off, "Now go enjoy, I demand that you do."

Madison rolled her eyes at her hopeful new acquaintance before making her way down to the man.

"I figured I should thank you properly," Madison said as she hovered around the man.

"Of course," he gestured to the stool next to him.

It took Madison a few seconds to get situated. He raised his beer and held it out for Madison to cheers with. Which she did.

"If anything I should be thanking you," He nodded towards the piano that had been left completely abandoned since she left, clearly nobody was drunk enough to embarrass themselves.

"For getting everyone else to stop playing?" Madison quipped before taking a sip of the drink he'd bought her.

He shook his head, chuckling to himself.

"You're pretty good."

"I haven't played for more than one person in, I want to say years." Madison shrugged her shoulders, "but thank you."

After the pair introduced themselves to the other, they slowly started to talk, getting to know each other. He never once explicitly mentioning what it was that he did, dancing around the questions she asked. Madison cringed internally as he directed the question back at her.

She took another drink from her almost empty glass. Trying to stall for time. Deciding that the truth would be the best decision.

"I'm technically homeless and unemployed so my mother thought that it would be for the best that I get a job. So here I am," Madison gestured around her, "I thought playing for tips in a bar would be what she wanted for her daughter."

The man across from her snorted.

"So you say I'm pretty good but not that good? Because if you are, I won't share my tips with you," She joked, knowing that she was going to spend the little money she managed to get with him, buying them drinks.

"I can't take it."

This admission caught Madison's attention, and his reluctance to answer her previous questions about his own job. This only meant one thing. Something in the governmental section. Same as her. If she were slightly more sober, she would have just left right there and then, made up some excuse, one that didn't exactly have to believable. 

"Well," She drawled out, "I wasn't physically offering it, I was just going to buy us drinks," before managing to flag down Rosa, who seemed happy that Madison was no longer moping around.

The man laughed, genuinely, for what seemed like the first time in a long time.

Madison genuinely and truly smiled back at him for the first time since she arrived back in the capital. The past month had been hard for her, leaving her job with next to no notice and back to America, in particular moving to New York City before burning out in the city in a few weeks of job searching, anything she applied for she was told that she was overqualified and as a result she wouldn't get the job. And now she was crashing in the childhood home that wasn't really a childhood home, a childhood resting pad if anything.

"You good?" he asked.

"Yeah..." she paused for a brief second, "The job market is just hard to break into, I guess." She shrugged her shoulders, giving a vague answer as she wasn't really how to correctly explain her situation, especially given that she didn't know this man.