His gaze dropped briefly to the empty chair across from me before returning to my face.
"Is this seat taken?"
I looked at the chair and raised an eyebrow.
"Clearly," I said. "I'm fighting off crowds."
A low laugh escaped him.
The sound settled somewhere beneath my ribs.
"Mind if I sit?"
The question was asked easily, without expectation or pressure. Like he already understood that the answer might be no.
I looked at the stranger standing beside my table. The Christmas lights reflected in the windows behind him. At the half-finished whiskey sour in front of me. At the birthday cake I'd never expected to receive.
An hour ago, I'd almost turned around and gone home. Now, one of the most attractive men I'd ever seen was asking to spend time with me. Life was weird.
"Sure," I said.
His smile deepened as he reached for the chair. "Name's Thane."
For the first time all evening, I found myself genuinely glad I hadn't stayed home.
TWO
THANE
Ah, hell. Why did I use my real first name?
But Thane wasn't exactly common. If the kid sitting across from me followed hockey even a little, there was a decent chance the name would ring a bell.
I waited for surprise recognition. For that familiar shift people got when they connected the face to the headlines.
The guy just smiled. "Kieran."
And then nothing happened. His eyes didn’t go wide. He didn’t do a double-take or fumble for his phone. He just said his name.
Keiran.
The realization settled over me slowly, followed by something dangerously close to relief.
He really didn't know who I was.
For reasons I couldn't quite explain, that mattered.
Maybe it shouldn't have. Maybe I should have finished my beer, paid the tab, and gone back to the hotel to obsess over tomorrow's press conference like a normal person. Instead, I'dcrossed the room and sat down with a stranger whose name I hadn't known ten minutes earlier.
The logical part of my brain still wasn't entirely sure why. He had expressive blue eyes, sun-streaked hair that looked a little too long to be intentional, and a face that somehow managed to look both open and guarded at the same time. Under different circumstances, I probably would have noticed all of that and kept walking.
What had caught my attention wasn't his appearance. It was the fact that he was sitting alone on his birthday and trying very hard to convince himself he didn't mind. I'd watched him laugh at something on his phone, stare into space for a while, and study the cocktail menu like it contained the answers to life's greatest mysteries. There was no performance to it. No attempt to draw sympathy. Just a quiet loneliness that felt painfully familiar.
"Nice to meet you, Kieran."
"You too."
His smile deepened slightly before he glanced down at the cake sitting between us. "Although I should probably warn you that you're interrupting a very serious relationship."
