“Hey, Alex.”
I turned to see Sheridan coming up to me from the side of the bar. I tipped my almost empty beer toward her in acknowledgement before I went back to the misery I’d been dealing with the past couple of hours, since I’d left Orla naked and in bed.
“Am I meant to only call you Bear now?” she asked me, earning her a smile.
“Not many call me Alex,” I admitted. “I don’t remember when I became more Bear than Alex.”
“You’ll always be Alex to me,” she told me, taking a seat. “What’s going on? Why are you here getting drunk right now?”
“It’s a bar,” he shrugged. “That’s what people do at bars.”
“What’s going on?” she asked me. “The only time I see you this miserable is when it has to do with Orla.”
“Hit the nail on the head with that one.”
“Locking her up in your house didn’t help?”
I smirked at her. “She told ya, huh?”
“No, Cooper did, but I know why you did it. Does she?”
“Yeah, I told her.”
“Is she okay?”
“Would you be?”
“I don’t know why he was so obsessed with her,” Sheridan admitted. “I thought he would target me because of who I was.”
“He made her feel bad for her tattoos,” I told her, angry that he had made my Orla feel bad about herself.
Not yours.
“She told you?”
“She didn’t have to,” I told her. “She was acting differently, covering herself up.”
Sheridan moved behind the bar and started to make herself a drink. She moved with confidence and ease, like this was her bar. Technically, she would become the head of the women here. She could run the bar if she wanted to, and any other business dealings that came along with it. It was good to see her take to it like a duck to water.
Ace deserved that.
“So what really brings you in here and away from her?” Sheridan asked, sipping on her drink and leaning back against the bar, facing me.
“She told me about her…situation when I left.”
Sheridan’s eyes cast down, almost guiltily. “Oh. You’re mad about it.”
“I wouldn’t say mad,” I said. “It’s no secret that I never wanted kids. I’d only imagined she would have mine because it was expected of us, it was expected of anyone really, but the fact she was homeless, and never reached out to me? She almost died from it because no one supported her.”
“Alex, she loved you fiercely, just as I did Cooper. At that age, it’s fucking scary to feel those things, you almost feel like it’s not real. Orla didn’t want to end up like her mother, stuck to someone who didn’t love her, and treated their kids like shit. She decided to end it with you and pretend to be into Brad Shepley. It worked, didn’t it?”
“She and he never?”
Sheridan shook her head. “She couldn’t stand the prissy no-gooder, but he did what she paid him to do. He acted like he was into her to piss you off.”
“She paid him?”
She laughed. “Yeah.”
