The question, so unremarkable on the surface, struck Jenna like an expertly aimed dart. She might have laughed, had she any oxygen left in her lungs. Instead, the words seemed to echo through the hollowed-out spaces inside her, reverberating in the parts of herself she usually kept locked away. It was almost cruel, the simplicity of it, a question so ordinary it could have been asked by a dentist or a barista or a stranger at a bus stop, yet in the context of this man and this moment, it felt like an existential probe, a demand for her soul’s manifest.
He straightened, moving his face farther from her, his large hands now resting on the bar, drawing her attention to his tattooed forearms. Jenna had never been one for tattoos, but on his skin the ink looked less like rebellion and more like a natural extension of his body. He seemed born, rather than made, to be the way he was.
The air between them felt electrified, or maybe ionized, like the static charge before a lightning storm. Jenna had no idea if he felt it too or if this was just the byproduct of her own deranged hormones, but she swore the ambient decibel level of the dive bar dropped by half. The college kids, now at the pool table, were narrating their shots, and the elderly couple were still dissecting the minutiae of their bingo winnings, but it all seemed to recede, as if the universe were muting every audio channel except the one carrying his voice.
He waited. He didn’t rush her or append the question with an apologetic joke or dropping it completely with a, “What can I get you?” Just sat there with his large, capablehands braced on the bar, his posture a study in controlled stillness. There was an alertness about him, a wary patience that she recognized from the many, many hours she’d spent with people in her chair who were either about to say something unforgivable or hear something they’d wish they hadn’t. He was ready for her answer, whatever shape or weight it would take.
Jenna knew the criminally hot bartender was just doing his job. As a hairdresser Jenna understood that in theory. Maybe in another life, in another hour, she would have said, “Yep,” and left it at that. Or maybe she would have smiled flirtatiously, tried out some clever banter, and let the encounter die a natural death before it got interesting. She was, by all accounts, an expert atnotletting anything get interesting with men. She’d been doing it her entire life.
But this day had atomized her usual defenses. It had reduced her to pure nerve endings, and when she inhaled, the air felt sharp in her lungs. She looked down at her hands trying to pull herself together. She was not herself tonight, or maybe she was more herself than she’d ever been, exposed, unadorned, desperate for a witness who wasn’t invested in her beyond the next forty minutes and the tip she’d leave on the counter. It was a freedom, of sorts, an anonymity so complete it made confession feel like an obligation.
Still, she intended to just say, “Yeah, bad day.” That was the plan she’d settled on. But when she lifted her eyes to the bartender’s face, she discovered that her body had never agreed to this plan. Her throat tightened. Her heart, which had gone into arrhythmic spasms the second he looked at her, now felt like it was trying to punch its way out.
The bartender was watching her with that sameunflinching focus. His attention was a weight and a shelter at once, as if he knew exactly how much of a burden it could be and had trained himself to carry it without flinching.
He waited. She could see it in the set of his jaw and the way his lips were pressed together, not tight, not angry, just… patient. He was giving her the option to lie, to make up something palatable or small, or to say nothing at all. In a world full of people who expected women to be either pleasant or silent, the permission to just exist felt enormous.
Jenna’s mouth opened before she realized it, the words bypassed her brain entirely. “My mom died, and I found out my husband has been cheating on me with my best friend for four years.”
She said it flatly, no inflection, the way you’d recite your phone number or social security digits. It was almost mechanical, the way it fell out of her, as if she’d rehearsed it for a therapy intake form and was now just reading the lines. She did not wince or look away, just let the silence settle in the wake of her confession, like dust after the collapse of a building.
The bartender’s expression didn’t change to shock, if anything, he looked sadder, his mouth tipping at one corner in a gesture more sympathetic than any platitude could have been. He blinked, once, deliberately. “Fuck,” he cursed on an exhale, then grabbed a bottle of Jameson and two shot glasses and poured them each a double.
As he did, her phone buzzed in her purse, and she pulled it out. She would have ignored it completely, but Blake was in California with her dad, he’d taken her there, to a small town called Hope Falls, for a fresh start to try and see if that helped with her behavior, so she couldn’t ignore her calls. If there was a silver lining to all this, itwas that her thirteen-year-old daughter was across the country and not home to witness the demise of her seven year marriage.
Fuck. How was she going to tell Blake? She’d always been close to her stepdad.
Luckily, Blake would only be grieving the dissolution of the marriage. She never knew her grandmother, so her death wouldn’t affect her at all.
When Jenna saw who was calling, she sent the call to voicemail. A few seconds later, her phone started ringing again. She looked down and silenced it as the bartender set her shot in front of her.
It didn’t surprise her that he’d gone for the whiskey considering she was in an Irish pub in Boston. It wasn’t her favorite, but liquor was liquor at this point. He lifted his drink, and she did as well, they both tipped their heads back and downed them.
She winced as the liquid slid down her throat, and she set the glass down. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a shot of anything much less straight whiskey.
The bartender just looked at her, he didn’t say, “I’m so sorry,” or “That sucks,” or “Your husband’s an asshole.” He just let it stand, didn’t try to decorate the truth or massage it into something more palatable. That, more than anything, made Jenna’s chest tighten.
For a split second, she waited for the usual sensations to descend: the burning shame that came with oversharing, the retroactive embarrassment, and the urge to make a joke or wave it off so the other person wouldn’t have to feel uncomfortable. She braced for the sting of regret, the certainty that she had said the wrong thing and the clock was ticking down to when she would have to make a clumsy exit.
But none of that came. Instead, she just felt… empty. Not hollow, like something was missing, but empty, like a vessel you’ve just drained and that could now be filled with something else. She realized, with a kind of clinical detachment, that she didn’t want to die, or run, or drink until she forgot. All she wanted was to sit there, with the hot bartender, and not be anything for a little while.
2
Deacon St.Claire had never seen such a beautiful woman in his life, but that wasn’t what was going on between them, at least on his end. It wasn’t her beauty that undid him, though she had it in spades, a kind of radiant, untouchable grace that didn’t belong in a dive like O’Grady’s, no offense to his best friend’s bar. No, it was something deeper and stranger, a sense that this woman was orbiting in his own private gravity, the magnetic pull so strong that it forced him to recalibrate the axis of his world.
He’d never had a reaction to a woman like he was having to her. She’d sucked the static out of the air, and all the energy in the room had condensed around her barstool. She was a beacon. Or maybe a warning. There was a familiarity, a responsibility he’d never sensed with anyone before, not even the mother of his child. Deacon felt every wall he’d spent his life building splinter and crack.
Until he saw her, he was walking around with a dark cloud over him thinkinghisday had sucked. He’d buried both of his parents that morning in a double funeral andhad to try to explain to his three-year-old daughter that she would never see her grandparents again. She’d already lost so much in her tiny life. She never knew her mother, who died in childbirth, and now the only other family she had besides him, except for distant great uncles and aunts she’d met today for the first time, were gone.
His head was so filled with his own shit, but the second he walked out from changing the kegs, all of that disappeared. It was just her. All he could see was the ball-kneeing wingless angel. He’d had to make himself look away from her. She was like the sun. Except the sun didn’t cause you to make stupid declarations of love or ask you to marry it, which is why Deacon had to force himself to break eye contact before he said something stupid.
When he looked in her eyes, he’dseenher. And she’d seen him, recognized him, but not as Deacon St. Claire, heir to the St. Claire empire, the way everyone else in his life recognized him. The first thing the college kids did when they walked in was ask if he was Deacon St. Claire, thankfully, he’d convinced them he just got told he looked like St. Claire a lot, and one of them remembered his parents’ funeral was today, which threw them off his scent. Which he was grateful for. If not, they might have made a TikTok or Snapchat announcing him being there, and then their friends would have shown up. He didn’t understand why his parents’ businesses or his money made him famous, but it did. He wished like hell it didn’t, but it did.
But for the first time in…he couldn’t remember, he was sure this woman hadno cluewho he was. When she looked up at him, she sawhim. Just him, and he saw her. That was the only way he knew how to describe it. He knew she’d had a bad day, but he had an overwhelming sense she’d marinated in a lifetime of crap luck and disappointment, yet she rose above it. She wasn’t there todrink, not really. She was there to not be somewhere else. She was there to disappear. He recognized the look in her eye. It was like looking in a mirror.
Deacon understood the urge to vanish. To be invisible in a world of people who put you under a microscope. He’d spent his life wishing the same thing. Maybe now that his parents were gone, he’d get it. Or maybe now it would be a hundred times worse. Only time would tell.
The woman’s phone lit up with another call after she’d just silenced it. Reading it upside down, he saw the name James. She sent it to voicemail as she took in a shaky breath. “Can I get a glass of house red?”
