Page 9 of Wrong Number, Right Grumpy Bouncer

The nickname lands differently in front of an actual bar full of actual people than it did over text at one in the morning, and heat climbs up my neck fast enough that Belinda glances over from the taps, eyebrows already halfway up her forehead.

He walks back to the door before I can respond to any of it, which I'm suspecting is the point.

The rush hits around nine, and I discover four tickets is nothing compared to eleven tickets, that my laminated sheet is not built for eleven tickets, that eleven tickets turns a color-coded system into something closer to a hostage situation. I put the wrong garnish on two drinks in a row. I call a whiskey neat a whiskey sour out loud, to the customer's face, with total confidence, and have to talk it back mid-sentence. Somewhere in the chaos I knock a full rack of clean glasses half off the back counter, catch it with my hip in a move that will bruise spectacularly by morning, and don't spill a single one, which feels like it should count for something.

Archer appears at my elbow for as long as it takes to right the rack, no comment, no lecture, hands steady and quick, gone again before I've finished registering he was there at all.

"You don't have to keep doing that," I say to his back.

"Doing what?"

"The ten-second rescue thing. Where you fix something and vanish before I can say thank you."

"Wasn't a rescue." He doesn't turn around. "Was a rack."

"That's not an answer."

"Wasn't meant to be one." And he's back at the door, arms crossed, looking for all the world like a man who hasn't moved in an hour, and I'm left holding a shaker I'm gripping wrong on purpose now, just to see if he notices again.

He notices again. Says nothing. Just watches, that same low, patient amusement, like he's got nowhere better to be than a front-row seat to my slow-motion disaster.

By close, I've broken one glass, mislabeled four drinks, bruised a hip, annotated a laminated cheat sheet into something closer to a legal brief, and somehow, against every metric I would've used a month ago to measure a good day, had the best night I've had in longer than I want to admit out loud.

Lottie catches me on her way out, cane tapping the floor with the confidence of a woman who's been waiting all night for exactly this moment.

"I'm starting a pool," she announces to me, to Ainsley, to the general vicinity of the bar, loud enough that Archer's head turns from the door. "Not on whether you break another glass, though I'll take side bets on that too. On you two." A gesture, cane and all, sweeping between me and the man currently pretending very hard to be interested in the lock on the front door. "Odds are three weeks. Belinda has it at five days, but Belinda's an optimist about the wrong things. Ace is overly optimistic and has it later tonight."

"Lottie." My entire face is on fire. "There is no pool. There is no us."

"Mm-hm." She pats my arm on her way past, unconvinced, entirely delighted. "Three weeks, honey. Write it down somewhere. You like writing things down."

She's out the door before I can argue further, banana bread tin empty on the bar, leaving me standing there with a laminated cheat sheet in one hand and the distinct, mortifying sense that everyone in this building except me has already read the last chapter of a book I haven't started writing yet.

Chapter Six

Archer

Lottie's out the door before the bell above it even finishes ringing, her bag swinging from one hand like she just closed a business deal instead of ambushing a woman on her way out of a bar. I catch Ace's face over at the end of the counter, delighted in the specific way of a man who's about to make this worse for somebody, and I already know who.

"Three weeks," Ace says, loud enough to travel, not loud enough to pretend he wasn't aiming it at me. "Lottie's got good instincts. I'm putting money on tonight."

"You said that last week about a different pool."

"I have range." He toasts me with his beer, entirely pleased with himself. "Congratulations, by the way. On whatever this is."

I don't answer that. There's nothing in me that needs to. Six months on this mountain of a life, at this door, and people have had opinions about me the entire time, wife theories, hermit theories, one memorable rumor that I was in witness protection because I don't talk much and once drove to Fresno for parts nobody could explain. None of it ever landed anywhere near a nerve. Ace can run his pool. Lottie can run three of them. I've got a wall built for exactly this kind of noise, and it holds.

What doesn't hold, apparently, is watching Maya hear it.

She's twenty feet away, restocking napkins that don't need restocking, which used to be my bit before she borrowed it without asking. Her shoulders are up near her ears. She's got that too-careful posture people get right before they drop something, moving like every motion's been pre-approved by a committee that's already regretting the vote.

I clock the difference right away because I’m doing everything possible to be fluent in Maya Reyes. The blush from earlier, when I said her name at the bar and she went pink to her collar, that one had heat in it. This one doesn't. This one's got her jaw tight and her eyes anywhere but the door, and it's easy math to figure out which direction that came from.

Ace, sensing nothing, keeps going. "You two want in on the pool yourselves? Insider trading's usually frowned on, but I could be persuaded."

"Ace."

"Just saying. Man's been standing at that door for six months like it's about to explode, and tonight he can't stop looking over here. That's not nothing."