Chapter Five
Irving
I stepped into the Steel Rose at nine o’clock exactly, but it was still looking pretty empty. There was a woman with green hair and a lip ring behind the bar, flipping through a magazine, and a man who looked pissed off at the counter, hunched over his drink. From the back, I could hear the jangly noise of a band warming up, but there didn’t seem to be anyone waiting for the show.
I sighed, reminding myself what Karis had told me over the phone.No one goes to see a punk band right at starting time.
Looks like Karis was only partially right because Irving here showed up at nine on the dot.
I thought about turning around and leaving. I had torn myself away from my computer after spending the afternoon lost in a big mess of code I was trying to untangle for a client. Working the freelance jobs that I did earned me a good chunk of change, although the work wasn’t nearly as much fun as I used to have with computers, back when I was a teenager roaming around in the dark web and pretending to be a hacker. I never had the guts to actually do anything, although I did get lost in the fantasy of it, pretending I was taking down evil corporations and exposing corrupt politicians.
It was how I got into punk music in the first place. I spent half of my teenage years with the shades drawn and the Ramones blasting, downing my third energy drink of the night to crack through some code. Typing away at the computer allowed me to get lost from the rest of the world for a while, and it kept my parents off my back, too.
Not that they were ever particularly invested in me, anyway. Growing up in Montana, my father had been the stereotypical distant, harsh man, spending all of his time at the office for the oil company and rarely paying me any attention. My mother was wrapped up in her women’s group and devoted to maintaining proper appearances in their strict social world. The tiniest slight or faux pas could lead to weeks of chaos, and no matter how much I wished things were different, nothing mattered to my parents as much as climbing the social and corporate ladders.
For a while, we reached a truce—I hid in my room with my computer and sometimes Karis’s company, and my parents tried to ignore the fact that their child was gay, gloomy, and deeply unpopular. That worked well enough, but when I decided to come out of the closet before moving away to college, the illusion came crashing down. My father handed off a sizable chunk of money to get me started on my journey, and they made it clear that I shouldn’t come home unless I de-gayed first. The money would have been generous, if it weren’t for the fact that it was guilt money. Fast track six years to Seattle, and I had my life set up, my career in order, and a comfortable distance from their judgment and disapproval.
I was proud of all I had accomplished, anyway. I never touched the money they gave me, keeping it in my savings and earning enough with my clients to keep a one-bedroom apartment in the city. Proving that I didn’t need my parents any longer gave me some comfort, even if I still felt a lot of pain at losing those relationships.
I placed my hand on the wall of the Steel Rose and considered again running back to the comfort of my bedroom and my computer. Who could say how much longer the band would take to get set up? By the time they were playing their first song, I would probably be ready for bed. Not to mention there wasn’t anyone to meet at the bar anyway, just a few scattered barflies who clearly weren’t looking for company.
But then I remembered Karis, and the promise I had made her, and the real worry in her voice when she talked about me never leaving the apartment again.
Shaking my shoulders in an attempt to loosen up, I headed over to the bar, taking a stool a few seats down from the pissed-off man.
“What can I get you, sweetheart?” the bartender asked, barely glancing my way.
I was pretty sure no one else in the place was getting called sweetheart, but I tried not to sweat it. “Hi! Ummm, I guess I’ll have a martini. With an olive.”
The woman looked up, her tongue pushing at her lip ring as she stared at me. When I realized she wasn’t going to say anything, I cleared my throat nervously.
What do people order at bars like this? Beer? Do you just order a beer?
I gestured to the pissed-off man. “Whatever he’s having is fine.”
“Cheap whiskey it is,” the bartender said, grabbing a bottle and pouring a splash into a glass. She slid it down the bar my way, and when I caught it, I saw that there were smudges all over the rim.
Karis was definitely going to hear every detail of the evening.
I took a sip of the whiskey, feeling the burn land against my tongue and the back of my throat, then forcing myself to keep a straight face while I swallowed it down. I heard a few stray drumbeats from the back, but the band quickly fell silent again. When I recovered from the sting in my throat, I turned to glance at the pissed-off man and caught him glancing my way, too.
I turned away quickly, flinching at his stare, but when I turned back, he was still staring at me, unmoved from earlier. I licked my lips self-consciously while he watched, his face shadowed in the dim light of the flickering bulbs. He had one arm leaned up against the bar and a boot casually hooked through the rungs in the stool. His hair was somewhere between red and brown, a color that was hard to pin down, and the sides of his head were buzzed beneath the messy strands of it. I kept peeking out of the corner of my eye as he stared, his broad chest rising and falling and a gray shirt stretched tight against his pecs.
I took another sip of my drink, painfully aware that the man was watching my every motion. My throat tickled, but I held back the cough.
“You here for the band?”
His voice cut through the space between us, and I nearly startled off the stool. I knew I should smile. I wanted to make myself turn to him and smile, to show him that I was confident. But when I looked up, I finally caught his eyes, and my face did that thing it always did.
Because his eyes? They were like sea glass. They were liquid emeralds, somehow bright and clear even in the dim, dingy bar.
It was like they saw my heart.
Men like him usually terrified me. No matter how much I wanted to feel his hands gripping my hair, or taste him on my lips, the fear of what he would actually do to me was too much. I wasn’t even truly over my last boyfriend yet. There was no way my tender heart was ready for a guy like this guy.
But those eyes…
Could a man with eyes that achingly gorgeous and honest actually hurt me?
