Leo winced. “I’m sorry.”
Leo watched from the booth, a small, wet smile on his face. He raised his glass—not to the flag, not to the label, but to the two of them.
Leo was quiet for a long moment. He traced a crack in the wooden table. “You know how I got here tonight? I walked past a sign that said ‘Gay Men’s Chorus Auditions.’ I was in that chorus in ’92. We lost thirty members in two years. And you know who showed up to our funerals when our own families wouldn’t?”
Leo reached across the table and turned her palm up. He wrote something on it with a dry bar pen: .
Sam shook her head.
Sam was staring at the rainbow flag draped over the bar’s dusty mirror. “I was just thinking about the word ‘community.’” She pulled the sleeve of her sweater over her thumb. “Everyone says, ‘Welcome to the family.’ But sometimes I feel like the weird cousin they have to explain.”
“You’re quiet,” Leo said, pushing a bowl of peanuts toward her.
The walls of The Haven were the color of a bruised sky, a deep purple that seemed to hold the sighs of everyone who’d ever leaned against them. It was the oldest LGBTQ+ bar in the city, a creaking ship of a place that had weathered AIDS, riots, and the strange, gentrified peace of the 2020s.