I was already sitting up. Already looking for my shirt.
“You don’t have to—“ he started.
“No, I absolutely do.” I found Bryce’s t-shirt on the floor and pulled it over my head, which—I was burning this shirt the second I got home. “Go get your daughter. I’ll let myself out.”
“Maggie.”
I looked at him. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, phone in hand, hair mussed, looking at me with those dark eyes in thelow light. He looked like—he looked like something I was going to have to work very hard not to think about tomorrow morning at school dropoff.
…which was in approximately six hours.
“Take your time,” he said. “No rush.”
“I’m rushing,” I said. “I’m rushing extremely fast.”
I found my sweatpants. My shoes were downstairs. I had to walk through the living room with the train track and the Barbie and the dinosaurs and I had to do it right now before a five year old came home and found her kindergarten teacher doing a walk of shame through the living room.
He stood and started getting dressed too, but he didn’t seem even remotely concerned about all this. That did a number on me—because I realized that while this was very, very strange for me, it was all ordinary for him. He probably did this all the time. He’d had a condom in his pocket, like he’d planned for this situation.
Which maybe he had.
Which maybe I should have thought about before I spent three hours at his bar drinking orange juice and telling him my whole life story and letting him take me apart on a barstool.
The Nash Effect.
I’d walked right into it. Eyes open, full information, sound of mind, and I had walked directly in.
“Hey.”
I was pulling on my second shoe and I looked up at him. He was dressed now—jeans, a different henley, hair pushed back. He looked annoyingly good for two in the morning. He looked like a man who had done this many, many times and had a whole system for it.
I looked like a woman who had not.
“We good?” he asked.
“Oh, yeah,” I said, trying not to cry like an idiot. “We’resogood. I just um…I need to get ready for school tomorrow?—”
“Of course,” he said.
He walked me to the side door—not the bar door, the side door that let out onto the quiet street, away from Main, away from anyone who might be up at two in the morning and feel like reporting back to Principal Daniels.
Small mercies.
He opened it for me and I stepped out into the night air, cool and sharp and smelling like autumn, and I turned around to say something—something normal, something cool something professional, something that would restore approximately fifteen percent of my dignity?—
Nash leaned down and kissed me.
And I was in the midst of the Nash Effect all over again.
I leaned into him just enough…rested my hands on his chest. He kissed me once, twice, and I could still taste myself on him.
He pulled back.
“‘Night, Miss Laine,” he said.
I blinked up at him. “Uh…bye.”
He just chuckled and went the other direction, to the truck parked in the alley.
