“They’re both moody. Tanner’s just more reasonable about it.”
“They look alike,” I muse as I contemplate stealing my fries back. “But they’re not the same.”
Eve hums. “You’re so right and so wrong. They’re both super bad at communicating and talking about their feelings, but Tanner’s better with people. He’s just forgotten it.”
“Why?”
“You’d have to ask him that. You wouldn’t want me telling him all your secrets, would you?”
“I don’t want you telling anyone my secrets, but to be fair, most of them are on YouTube.”
Eve shoots me a dark frown. She hates it when I’m flippant about what happened in Cali. But sometimes it’s all I have. Gallows humor. It’s a thing.
We spend the evening eating junk food and drinking cider at a bar in Winooski—well, I drink cider. Eve sticks to hot chocolate and laughing at me, then she drives us back to Burlington and I walk home to V and V from her new house, letting the brisk air sober me up.
It’s not that late, but when I look for Tanner behind the bar, he’s not there. Molly is, tapping stealthily at her phone with a pout on her pretty face. “He went up a while ago,” she says. “He’s coming back to cash out the registers.”
That’s a new one, but I’m hoping it means Tanner’s taking some time for himself. In the short while I’ve known him, I’ve never seen him do it. Even on his infrequent days off, he’s still downstairs taking care of his crew.
Or upstairs making me tea and talking me out of digging in higher up the Black Claw trails because he thinks what I’m looking for can be found lower down.
I buy two bottles of the belly-warming local cider and take them upstairs. I’m quiet as I let myself into Tanner’s place in case he’s in bed, but I find him in his kitchen, perched on the counter, poking at his phone. “All right, mate?”
He glances up and nods. “I will be if I can figure out a way to upload this video clip to the bar’s Facebook page. It keeps crashing.”
“Show me?”
Tanner hands me his phone. The clip he’s working with is already grainy as fuck. “You know Facebook is gonna compress this, right? It’s going to look terrible by the time they’ve finished with it.”
“It looks terrible already. Molly filmed it on her phone.”
“What’s it supposed to be? Promo for the open-mic night?”
“Not specifically. My boss wants V and V’s social media pages to be more dynamic, but I don’t have the time to be running around with my phone all night.”
“Sounds like you need a cameraman. I know one of those.”
It takes Tanner a moment to connect the dots. Then his dark gaze sparks a light. “As it happens, so do I. You think he’d charge me a good rate?”
“He probably wouldn’t charge you anything if you threw in some cider.”
“I’d throw in the cider regardless of how much he charges. Man, don’t work for free.”
There isn’t much I wouldn’t do for him, including sweeping my camera around his bar a couple of times for nothing but his smile and a drop of free booze, but Tanner has a face you don’t argue with, so I name my price for a night’s work, and he taps into his calendar to figure out the best night of the week to use me. “Does next week work for you?”
“I’d imagine so.”
Tanner grins a little. “You don’t need to check?”
“Check what? I don’t do anything except work and kip on your couch.”
“I didn’t know if you’d still be here then. It’s payday soon, right?”
“Wednesday. But wherever I go, it won’t be far. I can be here whenever you need me to be.”
“That right?”
For a fleeting moment, a pause stretches between us, hot and loaded. Tanner stares hard at me, and I stare right back. I let myself imagine that he’s seeing in me what I see in him. That the heat climbing inside me belongs to both of us. But he blinks first and goes back to his phone.
