I decide to head to Boulevard Tavern, the bar around the corner from my place. It’s just a local dive bar where I can get a burger and a beer, and I used to head there a few times a week. I became friends with many members of the staff, and I usually found someone to bring home with me for the night…but I’ve stayed away, mostly because of a waitress I may or may not have gotten tangled up with a few times.
When I walk in, I spot someone I recognize…decidedlynotsomeone I’ll take home.
I march up to her table. She’s sitting at one of the rounded booths by the bar, smack in the middle of the circle.
“Penny?” I say to the woman who’s typing something furiously on her phone, and as she glances up in surprise, I can’t help but notice how different she is from the women I tend to take home from here. She’s more…mature. Settled in her career. Smart, but sexy all the same. It prompts the question, “What are you doing here?”
She’s my older sister’s best friend, a mom of two young kids, and she’s currently going through a divorce. A glass of wine sits half empty in front of her, and a to-go cup of coffee sits beside it.
“Liam!” she says, and she scoots out of her booth to get up and give me a hug. It’s one of those warm, tight hugs from an old friend, and as she pulls back, she asks, “How have you been? Oh my gosh, come sit with me. Let’s catch up.” She slides into the booth and signals one of the waitresses, and I slide in beside her. The booth is smaller than it looks, and I’m a tall guy at six-three, so my knee bumps into Penny’s, and there’s nowhere else for it to go.
“Are you meeting someone here?” she asks.
I shake my head. “I just came down to grab dinner and a drink.”
“Same. I was working a little late, and the kids are with my mom, so I came to unwind before I head home.”
“You work over here?”
She shakes her head. “I met with a client whose office is this way, and it’s on my way home. You live around here, right?”
I nod. “Just around the corner, actually.”
Our waitress happens to be Izzy, the one who I’ve been avoiding. She’s a girl in her early twenties who works here at night and attends college during the day, and the last time I saw her was probably six months ago. She looks…different. She’s usually dressed in shorts that show off her ass and a shirt that shows off her stomach and sometimes the underside of her tits, but today she’s in joggers and a sweatshirt under the bar apron that holds her order pad and a few pens.
“What can I get you?” she asks. She won’t look at me, and I think it’s because we never exchanged numbers, and I haven’t been around in a few months.
In my defense, I was with her in between fielding calls from my siblings about my mother’s illness a few months back. Life got hectic.
“I’ll take a Goose Island IPA and the sliders.”
She purses her lips at me before she looks at Penny, and she sort of narrows her eyes at her since she’s here with me. “Can I get you anything else?”
“I’ll take an order of the sliders, too, please.”
Izzy nods, and when she walks away, Penny leans in toward me. “She was much nicer to me before you showed up. What’s the story there?”
I chuckle. “No story. She came home with me a couple of times. I fell off the radar.” I shrug.
She flattens her lips and rolls her eyes. “Liam Bradley,” she scolds.
“What?” I hold both hands up. “It was mid-season, I was running back and forth between Pittsburgh and Chicago, trying to keep everyone updated on my mom. Nobody cared that I wasn’t actuallybasedin Chicago. Then she died, the funeral, my dad was indicted…blah blah blah. You know the story.”
She raises a brow. “Okay, fine. Forgiven. But did you tellherallthat?”
“Izzy?”
“The waitress,” she clarifies.
“Izzy,” I confirm. “No. It wasn’t going to become anything, anyway.”
“She thought it would,” she points out based on the way she just treated me.
“I’m not in that place. I don’t even know where I might land next,” I admit.
“I heard about Pittsburgh. I’m so sorry, Liam.” She reaches over and covers my hand with hers. “So you don’t know where you’ll play?”
“Between you and me, I was just invited for a visit in San Diego. It’s the first team that’s reached out.”
