My jaw pops as I clench it. “Then what is it?” I ask, just to make him admit he’s lying.
“A reward.” He shrugs. “You survived. I’m offering a single meal in a public place with bright lights and witnesses. No pressure. No expectations.”
“That sounds like a hostage negotiation.”
His laugh is quiet. “I’m being strategic.”
I watch him for a beat. He keeps his eyes on the road, hands steady on the wheel. No push. No guilt. No pouting.
It’s… disarming.
Which is suspicious, too.
I sigh through my nose. “Fine. One hour.”
Evan’s smile turns softer. “Fine. One hour.”
He pulls into a small bar that looks more like a neighborhood watering hole than anything fancy — a squat, brick building, a neon sign, a couple of cars out front. The sign’s illegible, except for the words “Logger’s” and some Paul Bunyan-like mascot. It’s a place where nobody cares who you are as long as you pay your tab.
We duck into the bar, and the first thing that smacks me is the heat, like opening a dryer right as it finishes its cycle. Then the scent — fried mozzarella sticks, cheap beer, and something under it all that’s like freshly baked pie. The bar itself is all battered wood, old neon beer signs, and a wall-mounted TV showing sports highlights. The few people here glance up, clock us with the lazy evaluation of locals, then pivot right back to their fries or screens. We could be ghosts. Or royalty. Or anything in between.
Evan picks a booth in the back, away from the center but still visible. He slides in across from me. The waitress comes over, all eyeliner and efficient politeness. Evan orders a whiskey, neat, because of course he does. I go with whatever beer is on tap because it’s cheap and doesn’t require me to make a personality decision. She leaves, and the silence between us expands, not awkward, just dense with things I refuse to name.
When the drinks arrive, Evan picks up his glass and raises it just high enough for me to notice. “To surviving demons,” he says, as if it’s an inside joke only we share.
I clink my bottle against his, careful not to spill. “To never doing that again,” I reply, voice rougher than I want. “Except probably twenty more times until I get my damn degree.”
He takes a sip, watching me over the rim. “You look like you want to bite someone.”
“I might,” I say. “Depends on how the grading goes.”
Evan smiles. “You always this intense?”
I give him a dead stare. “You always this nosy?”
“No,” he says easily. “Usually I’m worse.”
That gets a reluctant huff out of me — almost a laugh — and I hate that he notices.
I bite back a smile, not because it’s funny, but because it’s almost impressive, how he can be so blatantly himself despite everything I’m doing to him. I know I’m not making this easy, I know I’m pushing him away — because I have to.
“So,” he says, pivoting, “Business degree. That’s the endgame? Why?”
I shrug, keeping it casual, keeping it armored. “Because I don’t want to be behind a bar forever.”
“That’s not a why,” he says. “There’s a lot of things you could do to get out from behind a bar that don’t involve getting a business degree.”
I take a long pull of beer. The bitterness steadies me. “Because I’m tired of being stuck.”
Evan’s gaze holds mine, quiet and focused, as if he understands that word in a way I didn’t expect.
“Yeah,” he says softly. “I get that.”
Something tightens behind my ribs, and I’m tempted to talk more. To tell him I’m not just doing this for me, but for everyone in my family in the Twisted Devils. That having a degree isn’t just good for me, but means I’ll be able to do more for them, too. Help them grow just as much as I grow. But I look away first.
I don’t like being seen.
To cover it, I say, “So what’s your deal, Wilder? You always hang around college parking lots waiting for women to finish tests?”
