Cole locked eyes with me. Neither of us said a word, but the gaze was definitely more than just glancing. He probably wondered what the hell I was doing there. I was wondering if Phoenix had invited him here so the two of them could intimidate me into some shitty sexual act.
But Cole did not come any closer to me. He walked over to Phoenix, and the two started chatting like old friends. I was left alone.
I, however, wasn’t particularly interested in doing anything right now. My father’s chat had shaken me, so much so that I didn’t want to move, I didn’t want to go anywhere. I couldn’t really, even if I wanted to.
It was kind of funny how this morning, I had hated Cole for the way he’d spoke to me and I’d given him such sass, and yet compared to my father, he was an absolute gentleman. The two could not have been less alike, even if there were shades of one in the other, what with Cole’s compassion somewhat buried in my father and my father’s brutality far beneath the surface in Cole. I didn’t know how such a thing was possible, but if the two of them could just sit down and resolve their differences amicably…
Well, I was probably a tad more optimistic—delusional, more like it—than most were.
Cole and Phoenix only spoke for a few minutes before Cole suddenly stood up and moved to... an opposite corner from me. Suddenly, this bar was laid out in a very odd manner, like we were forming a triangle to try and take up as much space as possible. Cole hadn’t left his conversation with Phoenix looking angry or annoyed, so trying to venture a guess as to why he had moved was impossible.
Curiosity got the better of me. I stood up, ostentatiously to go to the bathroom, and stopped at Cole’s table.
“You come in here to say hello to your friend and then go to drink by yourself?” I said.
Cole shrugged.
“Yeah, well, you know, sometimes I just like to be alone,” he said. “I’m pretty good at it.”
The hell does that mean?
“Are you now?”
Cole nodded.
“Been that way most of my life,” he said.
“I would think someone who had been alone most of their life would want to be in the company of others.”
“And I would think someone who has been oppressed since childhood and has only now gotten freedom would want to avoid others.”
Touché. I turned around, grabbed my drink and bag, and sat across from Cole.
“Big difference between having freedom and spending it with who I want versus spending it with no one,” I said.
Cole had no reaction.
“You really just wanted to be alone? You two seemed to be yakking it up—”
“They’re a couple and need their own space.”
So. He got tired of them sweet talking to each other.
“I let them have it. It’s something I’m good at. Let them do their thing and let me do my thing.”
“The eternal bachelor, huh?”
I’d meant it as a sort of pithy, off-the-cuff remark, but the sadness that filled Cole’s eyes was unexpected, to say the least.
On the one hand, after this morning, I would have liked to feel justified in making such a statement. But on the other, I was not an asshole like my father.
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t even know that you could call me the eternal bachelorette. It’s hard to call yourself that when you don’t have the space or opportunity to choose to be single or taken.”
Cole folded his arms and eyed me very closely. He wasn’t looking me up and down so much as he was looking into me, as if trying to break through my eyes to peer into my soul.
“You really grew up with no childhood and no adulthood, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
“And you?”
“I grew up with a childhood and an adulthood, but I’ve been yearning to establish myself all the same,” he said. He strummed the table. “What are you going to do about it?”
Boy, that was why I was here, wasn’t it?
“I... I don’t—”
And then I paused. I heard something nearing.
Motorcycles.
