“What, no hello? No how are you? Geez, business lady, huh?”
“Haha, OK, fine,” I said in a playful voice. “How. Are. You. Phoenix?”
“See, there you go,” he said, but his voice sunk right after. “I’m good.”
A six-year-old could have seen that him saying it that way was hiding something. I think my stare and my arched eyebrow said as much.
“OK, maybe not so much,” he said. “The club meeting today wasn’t the most enjoyable thing in the world.”
“No?” I said. “You wanna talk about it?”
Phoenix immediately shook his head.
“Well… I’ll just say that there’s some small possibility of my past catching up with me,” he said.
“Oh, that’s always fun.”
“Well, catching up is the wrong word, because it’s not really my past so much as it is just people from my past. But, regardless, let’s not worry about that. I’ll take a Blue Moon and a chance to talk about how happy I am that I don’t spend most of my time in Springsville.”
“Now that’s something I can toast to,” I said as I reached down to the beer fridge for a Blue Moon. “I can’t do it with alcohol; old Tom—”
“Would be mad if you took one, sure,” he said. “But what if I paid for your drink?”
Oh, that was a dangerous game. Bartenders were supposed to be the most sober people in the bar. If Tom came back and saw I’d had a drink, I didn’t think I’d get fired, but this early into working for him, I didn’t think that that was a good impression.
“I think I’d have no choice but to accept you on your offer,” I said with a giggle.
I pulled out another.
“I’m trusting you to stay quiet. Not even your biker buddies can know.”
“Please,” he said. “Half of them don’t even know my real name. I’d like to keep it that way.”
“Will I get to know your real name?” I said as I cracked open both beers and handed him his Blue Moon.
Phoenix chuckled.
“It’s gonna take an awful lot for me to share that with you,” he said. “Hell, it’s going to take a lot to share that with Cole. Half the time, I can’t believe he and his brother just use their regular names.”
“Maybe they just are comfortable with who they are.”
I hadn’t meant to sound condescending or mocking of Phoenix, but the twisted grimace suggested that I back off this train of humor.
I held out my bottle. He clinked with me, and I took a sip. I found a spot behind the bar to put my drink in case anyone else came in.
“I’m serious, by the way,” I said. “No sharing that this happened.”
“Our little secret,” he said with a smirk that suggested he was more than happy to have a secret between us.As am I, honestly.“In any case, this is better than Brewskis. I don’t have to worry about the other side coming in.”
He took a massive gulp of his drink, far beyond just a mere sip.
“I take it that you are happy to be out of Springsville?” he said.
“Oh, yeah.”
Before I let my words get carried away, I decided that it was probably wise not to say anything about moving completely away from Southern California. That was almost certain to happen, but it wasn’t one hundred percent set in stone, and frankly, before I headed out...
Well, I couldn’t quite bring myself to say or even think what it was I wanted from Phoenix, as if acknowledging it would jinx it, or if I even really wanted it. But, certainly, I found the dude handsome and funny. That was, admittedly, ninety percent of the attraction puzzle right there.
