I laughed it off, touched two fingers to his chest, and mouthed, “Bathroom,” like that explained everything.
The line inside was four women deep and not moving, so I slipped past it, pushed through the side door, and stepped into the cooler dark. Outside, the alley smelled like wet pavement, cigarette ash, and rain that hadn’t quite arrived. I set my beer on an upturned crate, closed my eyes, and lifted the heavy fall of my hair off the back of my neck.
Sweat slicked my skin there, warm beneath the pads of my fingers, and for one stupid second I let myself breathe like I wasn’t standing in a dive bar alley trying to prove she hadn’t been gutted by a man who had no right to still make her pulse trip.
Then I smelled him before I opened my eyes—expensive whiskey, cedar, smoke, the kind of cologne that belonged in penthouses and bad memories.
Everett.
I turned slowly, still holding my hair up, and found him standing a few feet away, green eyes fixed on me like he’d stepped up to the plate and forgotten the crowd.
“I thought you dropped off the face of the earth,” I said.
His gaze dragged over me, hungry enough to bruise, and I lifted one finger between us.
“Don’t look at me like that. Like you’ve discovered all my secrets, seen me completely naked, and tasted every square inch of my body. You have, you absolute slut of a man, but there’s a woman in there with a ring on her finger that signifies engagement. Your fiancée, Everett.”
Guilt flickered across his face. His eyes cut toward the door.
“I just need you to?—”
“What? Give you closure so you can sleep better?” I let my hair fall, shook it back over my shoulders, and smiled like I hadn’t just felt the old voltage snap alive between us. “Because I don’t need it. I feel just fine.”
Then I brushed past him on purpose, close enough for my arm to graze his shirt, close enough to feel the spark leap and bite and remind me that chemistry was not the same thing as permission.
By two, I was back in my apartment peeling off jeans that smelled like cigarettes, beer, and bad decisions I had thankfully not made. The gray cat sat outside again, as if he’d been waiting up. He hissed as I walked passed, no handout this time.
“Judgmental little gargoyle,” I muttered. “I’ll go get you something.”
He blinked.
I opened the can of tuna I’d been saving and split it with him on a paper plate, because apparently my survival instincts had a loophole for scrappy animals with bad attitudes. He purred like I’d handed him prime rib and a retirement account, then settled on the fire escape with the smug satisfaction of someone who had successfully manipulated a scientist.
I dropped onto the couch and stared at the ceiling stain. The bar replayed in ugly fragments: Everett’s face, the ring, the blonde’s smile, the careful way he kept looking without making it obvious. Under that, heavier and meaner, came everything else. The cubicle. The reports. The apartment with its damp ceilingand thin walls. Thirty-eight dollars. A freezer coffee can. A stray cat as my most stable emotional connection.
Marcy’s voice came back with brutal clarity.
One day you’re gonna wake up thirty-five with stress wrinkles and no stories.
At five o’clock, it had sounded like a joke. At two-thirty in the morning, in an apartment that smelled like tuna and radiator heat, it sounded like prophecy. I could see it too clearly: myself ten years from now, still sitting under defective lights, still formatting charts for men who said things like “circle back,” still telling my mother everything was good while my life got smaller and smaller around me.
No.
The word came through me clean and hard enough to cut.
I sat up and grabbed my laptop from under a stack of unpaid bills. The machine groaned awake on my coffee table while the cat cleaned tuna from his paw like a tiny criminal king. I opened my résumé and stared at the document I hadn’t touched in over a year. It looked timid. Worse, it looked grateful. Like I was asking permission to be useful.
Absolutely not.
I started cutting, rewriting, sharpening. Certifications. Field sampling. Hydrology modeling. Soil and water analysis. Published research. Grant participation. ArcGIS. Remote monitoring. Everything I had done. Everything I had earned. Everything I had let become background noise because my current job preferred me small, agreeable, and available for Friday revisions.
My fingers flew. By three in the morning, I had three job boards open, two cups of instant coffee in me, and a spreadsheet of listings that looked less like employment prospects and more like escape routes. Government contracts. Private firms. Field science. Water systems. Conservation groups. Anywhere withsky. Anywhere with dirt under my boots. Anywhere that paid enough for me to breathe without checking my bank app first.
Then one listing stopped me cold.
Santa Fe, New Mexico. Environmental Field Analyst. Water Contamination and Land Impact Division. Travel required. Field sampling. Independent reporting. Relocation assistance possible.
I read it once, then again, slower. New Mexico. Dry heat. Open land. A thousand miles from Everett, Dennis, Marcy’s prophecy, and every stained ceiling I’d ever stared at while wondering if wanting more made me ungrateful. The job description mentioned watershed assessments, industrial runoff tracking, field documentation, and county contracts. My brain began sorting requirements automatically, matching skills to bullets, calculating probability. My body, less logical and therefore occasionally wiser, had already decided.
