It is a Thursday and the place is half empty, which is the correct amount of empty. Busy enough that nobody is watching the room. Quiet enough that everything carries.
I am at the near end of the bar with one drink and no intention of having four. You are at the far end and you have been there longer than I have.
Twenty minutes without looking away properly
You are good at it, I will give you that. You are talking to the man you came in with and you are holding up your end of it, nodding in the right places, laughing when you should.
And every forty seconds or so your eyes come down the bar.
Not a glance. A glance is fast and it is over before it registers. This is slower. It starts at the glass in my hand, comes up, and arrives, and stays about a second past the point where a man would look away if it were an accident.
Then back to your mate. Then thirty seconds. Then again.
The bar is the perfect room for this
Nowhere else works this well. In a gym you have to have a reason to be standing where you are standing. At a party someone always interrupts. On the street it is over in three seconds.
A bar gives you an hour, a legitimate reason to be facing the room, and a drink to look into when it gets too much.
It also gives you distance. You are twenty feet away, and twenty feet is exactly far enough that neither of us has to do anything about it, and close enough that we both know precisely what is going on.
What I do with my end of it
Very little, which is deliberate.
I do not stare back. Staring back ends it too early. It turns a slow thing into a fast thing, and the slow version is better for both of us.
What I do is stop moving. I put the glass down and I do not pick it up. I turn about fifteen degrees, so that I am no longer entirely facing the bar and I am not entirely facing you either.
And once, at a moment you were not expecting, I look straight down the room and hold it, and do not smile.
That one is not an accident and you know it is not, and it changes what the rest of the evening is.
The door at the back
You noticed it about the same time I did, which was almost immediately, because everybody notices it.
It is past the end of the bar. It has a sign on it that has been screwed on crooked since about 2011. Nobody goes through it very often on a Thursday.
Neither of us has said anything about that door. Neither of us is going to. But you have looked at it twice, and I have watched you look at it twice, and that is now a thing that exists between two men who have not spoken.
What has to happen next
One of us has to move. That is the only rule.
It will not be me. Not because I do not want it to be. Because a man who has spent twenty minutes working himself up to something needs to be the one who does it, or it does not count for him.
So I wait. I let my drink get warm. I let your mate go to the toilet, which he will, because they always do.
And then there is a gap of about ninety seconds where it is just you, the bar, and the fact that I have not gone anywhere.
What happens after that
Either you cross twenty feet of floor and say something, or you do not, and both of those are fine and I have had both.
The ones who do not, think about it for a very long time afterwards. I know that because a fair number of them have found their way to me later, one way or another, and every single one of them mentioned the bar.
What happens if you do cross the floor, and what happens after that with the door at the back, is not something I am going to write out on a page that anyone can read on their lunch break.
Why I never go over
I have done it. Years ago. It works often enough, and it is the wrong way round.
If I cross the floor, you get to be surprised. You get to be flattered. You get to tell yourself afterwards that it happened to you, and you never have to admit what you had already decided twenty minutes earlier.
If you cross the floor, you have said it. Out loud, with your feet, in front of a room. And everything after that is honest.
That is a different room entirely, and you already know where the key to it is.