Page 23 of Taken With You

If she did, I would have to come clean as well. And I worried she wouldn’t forgive me.

“How did you start working for the Connollys?” she asked later as we were both sipping our whiskeys and waiting for our meals.

“I showed up one day. Saw a Help Wanted sign in the window and got the job.”

“That’s it?”

I shrugged, playing with the condensation on my glass. “Yeah. Just like that. I needed a job. They needed a bartender. And I’m the best.”

“Ego.”

I tilted my head, smirking at her a bit. “You like it.”

She paused and smiled. “Maybe.”

There. That was the spark. She didn’t always hide, there was a lick of fire within her that called to me. One that showed the girl she had been. I knew neither of us was the person we had been before. And that was fine. We didn’t need to be. But that fire, that spark, that told me she was better than she was before. That she was okay.

And that’s all I needed to know. All I wanted.

“How did you start out in your job?”

“My job’s boring.”

“Not really.”

She raised a brow. “Sure. Whatever you say.”

“Okay, so I would suck at it, but you do it. And you look like you have fun doing it. Why call it boring?”

“Most people think it is. I know it’s not that boring. Or at least it’s not to me. I got started in it because it was my favorite subject in school. Science. All of the sciences. And when I was in community college and working full-time, one of my professors needed help with something, so I got another job helping him. It didn’t pay much, but it was fun to learn all the ins and outs of writing a textbook. One thing led to another, and suddenly, it was a career. It’s not huge, and I’m not a multimillionaire or anything, but I do okay.”

“Yeah, you do.”

She smiled then, and it reached her eyes. I felt like I was on top of the world. Like I had finally done something right.

We ate our dinners—steak and baked potatoes and crisp green beans for me, chicken in her case. It was nice to simply be and enjoy the music and the ambiance. It wasn’t something I did often.

This place was far removed from my life before. There were no screaming people in the corner, no drugs, no one practically having sex on the bar. There were no dangerous moves or the idea that you could die if you took the wrong step. Not that we were always that dramatic, but sometimes, it felt like that.

There was no stepping on one another to make sure you were the best.

This was a place to…be.

And I liked who I was with.

When I took Meadow home, and we talked about nothing except for our friends and our jobs, I figured this was possibly the best first date I’d ever been on. The only real first date.

“This was nice,” she said, grinning. “Really nice.”

“You sound surprised,” I said, grinning a bit as we stood on her porch.

“Maybe. I didn’t know what this would be.”

“And what is this?” I asked, the words out of my mouth before I’d even fully thought them.

“I don’t know exactly.”

She went up on her tiptoes and kissed me square on the mouth.