The Night Shift: A Red Dead Redemption 2 AU

i. Help Wanted

Mia North slumped against the side of the ATM and sighed. The sigh was present, spiralling out of her nostrils in a vapour in the cold, November air. She squinted at the screen as she rubbed her hands together.

Account Balance: $157.62

How had it all gone so fast? There was the first and last month's rent she'd had to pay to her new landlord, for an apartment, in an unfamiliar neighbourhood, that was half the size of her old one but managed to cost twice as much. There was the furniture to fill it; and small as it was, mattresses and plates and glasses and towels did not come cheap. There was the repair service to try and fix her drowned phone, after her ex-boyfriend, Jonah, threw it into the filled kitchen sink, and then the new phone after the repair hadn't worked, years of passwords, contacts, and photos lost to her. And, there was the fall coat she'd bought at the beginning of October that was already too thin for the encroaching winter; Jonah still adamant that she not come back to the apartment, and she, frankly, too scared of him to try.

Mia dug her hands deeper into her pockets and brought her shoulders up around her ears, trying to stay warm against the wind that rushed through the buildings downtown. "Tomato soup weather," is what her dad would have called the grey, unforgiving conditions, and she'd have killed for a bowl just then, not even a can opener in her place meaning she'd been surviving on peanut butter on untoasted bread.

Her salvation from thin coats and bland meals lay across the street. Outlaw was a restaurant that managed to be smack in the middle of the city and yet, not a trite, tourist-friendly slinger of chicken fingers, but a real culinary happening. The exterior was dark-grey stucco, the horizontally-panelled wooden front door a cheeky nod to its western-inspired name. The name, Outlaw, in gold stencilled letters repeating across the giant front windows, so subtle you could miss it.

Mia had been a server for years but never at a place like this, where the wine glasses perched on the small handful of tables - because of course, the diners would be having wine - where the lighting was expressly intimate and the music in the dining room low, where none of the menu items were a pun or turn of phrase. Classy, she thought. She'd always wanted to go to Outlaw, begged Jonah to take her, but they always ended up at places that suited his picky palate: pubs, chain restaurants. If her interview went well, she could settle for working there, instead.

She crossed the street at a dashing jog, glancing at her reflection in the front window and attempting to fix her face gone rosy in the cold, her windswept hair. She inspected her black manicure only to have her heart sink that her index finger had chipped, and pulled a sharpie from her bag to hastily colour it in. Mia let out another exhale and pulled open the heavy front door, greeted with the interior of the place.

The restaurant was empty save for a prowling server, all in black; her hair tastefully wrapped up in a black scarf, nimble, dark fingers picking up and scrutinizing the flatware, the glasses; rubbing at an invisible smudge. Outlaw was more gorgeous than she'd even imagined: the fourtops not white wood but marble, a dull, warm gleam to them. Teak chairs with black leather seats waited in perfect alignment for their diners. Along the far wall, navy-velvet booths at rounded half-tables were spaced by arrangements of white flowers: lilies, sprays of orchids. Mia felt herself gravitating towards the velvet, wanting to touch it, when she heard her own name.

"Mia North?" She whirled around to see the bar - tucked behind the entryway, she'd missed it - made of dark woods and etched glass and equally as beautiful as the rest of the place. A bartender stood slicing limes and putting them into a big plastic bin, scars bisecting his handsome face under a curtain of dark, stringy hair.

She cleared her throat. "Yeah, uh, that's me."

"Love the certainty," he grinned at her. "Come on over and sit here, if you like. Dutch is just in the middle of a meeting, said he'd be held up for fifteen minutes or so."