Except I'd restocked everything last week except the G string.
I knew it the second my fingers found the empty slot in the little string envelope. I knew it the way you knew a thing you'd been meaning to fix and hadn't yet.
My stomach dropped.
"Hey, sweetheart."
The voice came from a table to my left. Two men, late forties, one of them with a glass of white wine that was clearly not his first of the day, even at this hour. He had the loose, unguarded look of a man whose afternoon had started early and was going well.
"You gonna play or just sit there looking pretty?"
The other man at the table said something low to him. He waved it off.
"I'm just saying. We're eating." He gestured broadly at the room, ambassador of a constituency that had not elected him. "Whole place is waiting."
My face stayed where I'd put it. Neutral. Polite. The face I'd worn through a thousand bad tables and thoughtlesscomments and men who thought waitresses existed for their entertainment. I knew this face. I could hold it, indefinitely.
But my hands had gone still on the guitar, and the room was quiet in the way rooms got quiet when something uncomfortable was happening and nobody wanted to be the first to name it. I felt the old thing rise in my chest—the one Clayton had planted there years ago—who do you think you are, standing up there like anybody came to see you?—
"I can help with that."
The voice came from my right.
I turned.
He was already on his way over from a table near the window—unfolding from his chair with easy, unhurried movement. He was tall. As if height were simply one of several things he’d been issued and hadn't thought much about since.
He was?—
I registered the rest of him in pieces, the way you registered something that was too much to take in all at once.
Dark blonde hair, close-cropped, the kind that held its shape without effort. A jaw that looked like it had been decided on by someone with strong opinions about jaws. Eyes that were some color between green and something else, catching the light from the window as he crossed the room, and he was looking directly at me with an expression that was warm and certain.
He was broad through the shoulders in a way that his shirt made obvious without trying to. He moved like a man who was comfortable in his body in the way that came from using it for real things—not a gym body, though he clearly wasn't a stranger to one—but the kind of physical ease that came from a life that demanded something of you and you'd met the demand.
He stopped in front of me. Up close he was?—
He was very handsome. The word felt insufficient.
"What gauge?" he asked.
I blinked. "What?"
"Your G string." He nodded at the guitar. "What gauge do you run?"
"Thirteen," I said, and my voice came out normal, which was a small miracle. "Medium."
He reached into the front pocket of his jeans and produced a small, flat packet.
"You carry—" I started.
"Guitarist," he said simply, and held it out.
I looked at the string packet. Looked at him.
"Those are my gauge," I said.
He smiled. It was the kind of smile that probably caused problems on a regular basis—slow and genuine, reaching all the way up, with a quality to it like he found the world privately hilarious and was inviting you to be in on the joke.
