Jenna hadalwaysbeen drawn to authority. Probably daddy issues. Not that she had a dad to have issues with, which was an issue in and of itself. Whatever the reason, it hadn’t surprised her at all when her first husband, Asher, who had been her high school boyfriend, went into law enforcement. He had a commanding presence even at fourteen that made people take notice, it madehertake notice. Whathadsurprised her was that she left him for her second husband, James the accountant, who she’d just caught banging her lifelong friend.
James was supposed to be safe. He was supposed to be home every night for dinner and raise a family with her. Not like Asher, who decided to take a position working undercover and then proceeded to disappear from her and Blake’s lives for days, weeks, evenmonthsat a time, where she couldn’t speak to him, get messages to him, or have any sort of contact. And when he was home, he wasn’t there. He wasn’t him anymore. He was a shell.
But look where safe got her. Safe got her coming home to her sex swing she bought being used by her maid of honor and the man who was supposed to come home every night for dinner, which also hadn’t happened. James took clients to dinner two to three nights a week and didn’t get home till nine or ten. At least that’s what he said he was doing. Who knows now?
“She…she…she…” The Abercrombie model beside her was struggling to get out his words because he couldn’t quite catch his breath.
A neighbor of Jenna’s had taught her at thirteen a very handy kneeing technique that pretty much incapacitated men for the foreseeable future. This technique providedher with at least a few hours of protection, which had saved her from some very bad things happening to her with the men who were always hanging around her mom. The key was to aim for the taint and drive up as hard and high as you can get. People usually don’t kick far back enough. It worked every time.
“I kicked him in the balls,” Jenna explained flatly, sparing the writhing pretty boy beside her only a pitying look.
“Yeah, I gleaned that.” The bartender’s tone sounded amused. “Just one question: Did you touch her?”
Jenna stared directly at Backwards Ball Cap Boy, daring him to lie. By then the kid was catching his breath and could stand. She couldn’t tell if he was more angry or embarrassed, but his face was red as he huffed and puffed and looked like he wanted to put his fist through a wall as he balled and unfurled his fingers at his sides.
Instead of answering the question, he took off his hat, ran his hand through his hair, and cursed, “Fuck this.” He rejoined his friends waxing poetic regarding what a bitch Jenna was.
“And they say chivalry is dead,” the bartender deadpanned.
Before Jenna even looked up, she knew the man connected to that voice had to be hot. There were just some certainties in the universe, and this was one of them: a baritone like that was never attached to someone ordinary, or even a little bit above average. She could already feel the gravitational pull, the way the room seemed to reorient itself around him, and she was prepared for him to be good-looking—prepared for the possibility of sharp cheekbones or a strong jawline, or maybe even those eyes that were more intent than polite. She braced for these things as a defense mechanism, the way an allergy suffererimmunizes himself with shots for pollen in the spring. What she was not prepared for, when her gaze lifted, was to see the most attractive person she’d ever seen in her life.
It was, as she would later categorize it, a “fuck me on sight” situation. Not a slow burn, not a gentle warming, not even a sudden spark, but a full obliteration, synapses-firing, tectonic-plates-shift-on-impact, brain-melting kind of attraction that made her want to reach through time and slap her past self for ever thinking she’d known what hot was. Her entire body seized, then tingled, as if a live wire had been pressed against her skin. For a moment, her thoughts became so incoherent that her own name felt foreign. She was aware of her jaw going slack and did nothing to stop it.
He was, in the most literal sense, arresting. Every feature seemed exaggerated in a way that dared you to call it out. His shoulders were broad enough to strain the rolled-up sleeves of his white button-down shirt, his arms corded and tattooed, the veins on his hands prominent even at rest. Thick brown hair that her fingers were itching to run through. His face dear, Lord in heaven, his face was symmetrical in a way that seemed genetically engineered, the kind of face you’d see in a modeling campaign, but softened by a five-o’clock shadow that blurred the edge between polished and primal. His nose looked like maybe it had been broken once, and the minor asymmetry gave him a dangerous, unpredictable quality. The eyes, though, were what did her in. Hazel brown ringed with the kind of lashes that were a crime against women on a man. It was hard to say if the color was cold or warm, it changed by the second, like the sea in a storm, and she had the distinct impression that whatever was happening behind those eyes was somehow both entirely her business and entirely not at all.
With those eyes looking at her, everything else ceased to exist. The bar with its sticky floors and neon-lit gloom dissolved. The college kids, shouting across the dartboard, became background noise, the elderly man at the end of the bar nursing his Guinness, the couple in the corner booth sipping their spicy margaritas… nothing. She could not have described a single object in her immediate vicinity if she’d been threatened with violence, all her working memory was commandeered for this moment. Even the pain in her head, the burn in her throat, and the dull ache behind her sternum, all the emotional debris of her day, went silent.
There was a pause, and in the pause, something passed between them. Not a glance, not a look. An entire conversation in the time it takes a heart to beat. She knew, right then, that he knew. He saw her, all of her. The pain she thought she wore a mask over, the self-loathing, the brittle anger, and the need to forget. He saw right through every layer she’d built for the sake of survival and found the raw, shivering center. The bartender had the same look as a cop in a high-speed chase, hyper-focused and unshakeable, as if he’d been hunting only her all his life and now that he’d caught up, he was going to take his time with the arrest.
In that instant, every bad decision she’d made, every time she’d ignored her gut, every time she’d picked safe over honest, every time she’d chosen to stay rather than fight, became irrelevant, because the part of her that was alive and real and wanting screamed that nothing, absolutely nothing, in the world was more important than seeing that look again.
His breath hitched and he looked away, casting his eyes to the ground. When that happened, she glanceddown at the bar and wondered what in the world had just come over her.
Was she having a nervous breakdown?
A midlife crisis?
Was this how those things started?
Because that was not a normal response to seeing another person. She had to be crazy. Today had been too much for her, and she was having some sort of mental breakdown where she thought she had a cosmic connection with the bartender and their souls were celestially intertwined.
She felt and heard him move down the bar towards her. With each step the effect he had on her only amplified. Tingles. Shortness of breath. Butterflies. She lifted her head only to find him still looking downward. She wished she were the kind of woman who could play it cool, who could lean into a bar and toss off a clever one-liner or a sexual innuendo, but her brain was stuck on the emergency broadcast signal. Instead, she sat, mouth half-open, looking up at him as if waiting for a benediction or a death sentence, maybe both.
As he approached, the ambient lighting shifted, and for a brief second, his face was illuminated by the green glow of a Guinness sign behind him. She caught the faintest hint of a tattoo snaking up his neck, something black and angular, and wondered what it would feel like to trace it with her tongue. The thought made her flush, and she prayed it didn’t show on her cheeks. He stopped right in front of her, and somehow the space between them became negative, a void that collapsed all other distances in the universe.
Their eyes met again, and this time she swore she could feel the air move. If she’d believed in fate, or serendipity, or some kind of metaphysical bullshit, shewould have said the molecules themselves were reconfiguring to allow for this conversation. She wasn’t drunk, but she wanted to be, she wanted an excuse for how the room tipped and spun around her.
He leaned his forearms on the bar, bringing his face within a foot of hers. She could smell him, soap, sweat, and something astringent and clean. He was so close she could see the flecks of gold in his irises and the small scar above his left eyebrow, which only made him more compelling.
She didn’t want to look away, but she had to, so she let her gaze drop to his hands. The hands. They were large and sinewy, scarred in places, and had nails trimmed but not obsessively. She imagined those hands around a beer glass, or a steering wheel, or the curve of her hip and was instantly furious at herself for being so basic.
When she lifted her eyes back to his, she didn’t find him checking her out. He just stared, as if trying to decode her, or maybe daring her to decode him instead. In the seconds of silence, she felt her mind start to whirl again, collecting data points and making assessments. There was something about him that was familiar, and she combed her backlog of memory for context. Not a celebrity, not a one-night stand—that would be impossible since she’d had sex with a total of two people, and they’d both ended up being her husbands. It was deeper. Like she’d met the prototype of this man in a childhood dream, or maybe he was the grown-up version of every crush she’d ever had, distilled and bottled and poured out in front of her now.
She was so locked in the moment that she almost missed the way his mouth tilted at one corner, subtle but unmistakable. A real smile. Not polite, not performative. It looked as if it hurt him a little to do it, which somehow made it more valuable.
Her heart—her actual, traitorous heart—fluttered. She wanted to kick herself for it, but that would mean looking away, so instead she just let it happen. She hated how good it felt.
Finally, mercifully, he spoke. “Bad day?”
