She smiles. Smaller now. Tired. The adrenaline is fading and underneath it she’s just a girl who got the thing she wanted and doesn’t know what to do with the quiet that comes after the wanting stops. "Okay if I sit here again?"
“Stay,” I say. “Hang out. I’m working but you can sit.”
“Yeah?”
“You’re a paying customer. Sit wherever you want.”
She sits. She stays all night. She texts her parents, texts Keely, takes calls from friends. Her mom calls and I can hear the screaming through the phone from behind the bar, high-pitched and joyful, and Zoe holds the phone away from her ear and grins at me and mouthstold you. Her dad calls separately, and that one’s quieter, and Zoe takes it outside and comes back with red eyes again and says “he cried” and nothing else.
The Saturday crowd fills in around her. Her stool becomes her command center. Keely shows up at eight with Jordan and Raquelle and they take over the corner table and there are Aperol spritzes and toasts and at one point Keely stands on a chair and announces to the entire bar that her best friend is a firefighter at Station 11, and three strangers raise their glasses.
I work. I pour and I mix and I manage the room. But every time I pass Zoe’s end of the bar I catch her looking at me, and every time she catches me looking back, and we don’t say anything because the bar is loud and I’m working and she’s celebrating and there’s no space for the conversation we’re about to have.
But we both know it’s coming. It's obvious every time I catch her eye and she gives me that little smile. That smile that says she can't wait to get me alone again. To get me to herself. I'm with her there. I want to have her to myself again too.
Last call at 1:45. The crowd thins. Keely and the girls leave at midnight in a cloud of hugs and promises and someone yelling “six AM Monday don’t be late!” Diane left hours ago. Paperback guy is long gone. Seth finished his shift and went home.
By two o’clock it’s me and Zoe.
I turn off the overheads. The neon stays on. Blue and pink and the flickering yellow of the Anthem sign. The bar goes quiet and soft and the room shrinks to the space between us.
I wash the last glasses. Wipe the bar. She watches me from her stool, arms folded on the bar top, chin resting on her hands. She’s tired. The kind of tired that comes from feeling everything all day.
“You should go home,” I say.
“I know.”
“Your parents are probably waiting up.”
“Probably.” She doesn’t move. “Teague?”
“Yeah.”
“You sent me a song at three in the morning.”
“I did.”
“It’s about not being able to wait anymore.” She lifts her head from her hands. “What can’t you wait for?”
I set the rag down. My hands are damp. The bar is clean and the glasses are racked and the bottles are faced and everything is in its place, everything is where it should be, and Zoe Kimball is sitting in my bar asking me a question I’ve been trying not to answer for weeks.
I walk around the bar. Not behind it. Around it. To her side. I’ve never done this. The bar is my territory, my boundary, the thing between me and everyone else. I don’t leave it during hours. I don’t leave it after hours. I stand behind it and I pour and the distance stays fixed.
I walk around the bar and I stand next to Zoe’s stool and she turns to face me and her knees are between us and her eyesare dark and wide and she licks her lips, that nervous thing, and I’ve been watching her do that for three weeks and I’m done watching.
I kiss her.
It’s not soft. It’s not tentative. I put my hand on her jaw and I kiss her like I’ve been thinking about it, because I have, every night for weeks, behind the bar, on the walk home, in bed at three in the morning, and the real thing is nothing like the thinking because her mouth is warm and she makes a sound, a small surprised sound that turns into something else, and her hands come up and grab the front of my shirt and pull me closer.
She tastes like ginger beer and lime. She kisses me back like she’s been waiting for this since the Shirley Temple, which she probably has, because Zoe doesn’t do slow, Zoe runs at everything, and when I pull back she’s breathing hard and her eyes are bright and her hands are still fisted in my shirt.
“That,” she says. “That’s what you can’t wait for.”
“Shut up.”
“Make me.”
I kiss her again. And again. And the neon flickers blue-pink-blue and the bar is closed and the street is empty and somewhere in this neighborhood a siren starts and fades and Zoe doesn't pull away because maybe for the first time in her life she’s not listening for Station 11.
