“I told you… I said… I told you things… and…and you’re not…you’renot…a bartender.”
He watched, helpless, as she focused on her breathing, in through the nose, out through the mouth, like she’d done this many times before, like her body was conditioned to crisis. Her gaze darted around the bar, as if she needed to orient herself in the space or verify that she was still on planet Earth and not being filmed for some psychological experiment.
He shook his head, confused. “Does it really matter?”
The expression on her face clearly communicated,yes, it did in fact matter.
“Why does it matter?” He tried for gentle, but even tohis own ears, it came out sounding much more like a challenge.
Which, it turned out, may have been a good thing, because the panic disappeared from her eyes, and in its place was a fiery spark that was…well, hot, and turned her panic attack into focused energy. Negative energy directed at him, but he could take it.
“Whydoes it matter?” she repeated, sitting up straighter and squaring her shoulders. “Everyoneknows talking to a bartender or hairdresser is basically the same as talking to a therapist, lawyer, doctor, or priest, they are all legally and ethically bound by client privilege confidentiality and the sacramental seal of confessional gossip.”
He didn’t get surprised often when it came to people, at least not in a good way, the depths people would sink to in the acts of greed and self-service never ceased to amaze him. But this woman was all paradox and curve and enigma. She was the kind of person who disclosed she bought lingerie and a sex swing for her husband to a stranger and, with full conviction, argued client privilege statutes for bartenders, when she discovered Deacon’s non-bartender status. She was a woman who spent a year visiting her dying mother, who she hadn’t been in contact with for almost two decades, and sat with her as she died and kept it all to herself to protect the people she loved. She was intensely alive, even when she looked like she wanted to crawl out of her own skin.
“Everyoneknows?” he asked, his brow raising, hating himself for thinking she looked so adorable riled up, and not being able to help himself by poking the bear a little.
“Yes. Everyone,” she stated succinctly, in challenge.
“Well, don’t worry. Your confession is safe with me.”
“That’snotthe point!” She raised her voice slightlybefore immediately regaining her composure, which he also found sexy. “It was given underfalsepretense.”
Her phone lit up again, and he saw her entire countenance shift as her petite frame deflated in defeat. Seeing it made him want to kill whoever had caused her shoulders to slump and her lips, which had been in a straight line, to curve downward in a frown. He had a pretty good idea of the culprit, and his name started with a J and rhymed with “blames.”
Then, in the quickest Wonder Woman rally he’d ever seen, she slow-blinked, and when her eyelids opened, her shoulders rolled back, her jaw set, and he was staring at a fighter ready to get in the ring. Her baby blues had a coldness in them, a detachment that, if he were being honest, turned him on. She looked like she was going to war. She was ready for battle.
She downed her second glass of wine, pulled out two twenties from her purse, and threw them on the bar. Then turned and walked away.
“No, it was on the house.” He pushed them back towards her. “It’s the least I can do.”
“I don’t accept drinks fromstrangers,” she said as she pushed the door open and sunlight spilled in.
He’d barely registered her words before she was gone. It wasn’t just her empty glass on the bar, she’d vacuumed out all the oxygen in the room as well, leaving him with a ringing silence where the pulse of their conversation had been. Deacon barely had time to process the way she threw the twenties down, the way she lifted her chin in fierce self-protection, before she made her exit. He’d noticed the tiniest tremor in her hands. He’d noticed the way her shoulders sank after she checked her phone, as if a message had come in like shrapnel, and she’d put armorover her wounds instead of bleeding out in front of a stranger.
He watched the door swing shut behind her, the spring-loaded hinge groaning as if it too resented her leaving. For a moment he just stood there, hands flat on the wood, feeling every jagged, unpolished edge of himself. The emotion that rose up inside him was nearly unrecognizable, a jumble of regret, confusion, and a profound sense of missed opportunity. They were feelings he associated with old photographs and late-night drinking, with all the things he’d never learned to say. Not the kind of feelings he thought about in the light of day, and certainly not ones he expected from a woman whose name he still didn’t know.
“You want a drink before you go?” Cillian was already resetting the front of the bar, clinking together the abandoned margarita glasses from the spicy marg couple. The old man at the end was nursing his Guinness, still engrossed in whatever he was watching on his phone, oblivious to the small dramas playing out all around him. “Mom said Tabby and the girls are all settled in for the night, they’re gonna watch Nemo so you can grab her tomorrow morning before you head back.”
Cillian’s mom Susie offered to watch Tabby with Cillian’s girls so Deacon could hold down the fort at O’Grady’s. Tabby loved staying at Mam and Dai O’Grady’s house, especially with the closest thing she had to cousins, Cillian’s girls Ashlyn and Amelia. Deacon wanted Tabby to spend as much time with Cillian’s girls as she could before they flew home to Seattle.
Deacon grew up an only child. Kristin, Tabby’s mom had an older brother, but he didn’t have children and never had much interest in Tabby after his sister passed. It was almost as if he blamed Tabby for her death.
Cillian wiped down the bar and said, “Come on, man. If there’s one night to take off?—”
Deacon shook his head. “Nah, I’m out. Got work.” It wasn’t even a lie. His inbox was a burning house, and he’d left it smoldering. His phone had been vibrating all night with the slow boil of West Coast emails, notifications were stacked like cordwood.
“Just one drink,” Cillian bargained.
“Work helps,” he said, but Cillian’s look said he didn’t believe him.
Cillian always saw through him, he was a bloodhound for bullshit and had been since they were six, and he figured out which ten-year-olds had been trying to extort money from him. Deacon tried to handle it himself, like he did everything else. He ended up with a broken nose, collarbone, bruised ribs, internal injuries and three stitches over his left eye. He told his parents, teachers, and even Cillian that he fell off the top of the metal jungle gym and hit his face on bars on the way down.
Cillian played detective, followed Deacon, and then, once he realized what was happening, beat the shit out of all four fifth graders with an aluminum baseball bat. He put three of them in the hospital. One had a broken jaw, arm and leg, and two had broken ribs. The doctors said they were lucky they didn’t have brain bleeds or brain damage. He got suspended, and nowadays would probably have gotten in a lot worse trouble, but to this day he says he’d do it again. He was literally the friend inGood Will Huntingwhen Robin Williams’ character is defending Will’s relationship with his friends to Stellan Skarsgård’s character, and he says the reason why he hangs out with them is because any one of them would take a bat to his head if he asked them to. Or inThe Townwhen Ben Affleck’s character asks Jeremy Renner’s character forhelp and he says he can never ask him about it later and they are gonna hurt some people, and Jeremy Renner just asks what car they are taking. That was who Cillian O’Grady was to Deacon. Literally.
So Deacon wished he could sit and have a beer with his friend and explain what was going in his life, he wished he had the kind of language for vulnerability that other people seemed to learn as kids. But in the St. Claire house, nobody had ever been taught to talk about pain. He’d tried,once, to tell his father about his bad dreams. He still remembered the look of disgust on Abraham St. Claire’s face as he told himneverto bother him aboutmake-believe sissy shitagain.
Cillian’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Is somethingelsegoing on? I mean, I know it’s a lot—the accident and losing them so suddenly and the companies and all that shit…but I don’t know, it just… it feels like there’s more.”
