"You're behind the bar tonight."
“Yeah, everyone’s out tonight."
"So you're the bartender."
“More like I'm the VP who can pour a beer."
She gave me the smallest smile, still guarded and held in check, as if she'd decided that smiling too much would give too much away. She was wearing jeans, a leather jacket, her dark blonde hair loose tonight, falling past her shoulders. I noticed the line of her throat and then caught myself noticing but still didn't look away. It wasn't subtle.
I poured her a beer without asking. Set it on the bar and the six inches of wooden bar top between her hand and mine burned like heat off a stove.
"You really shouldn't be here," I said. Same words as Friday. They meant something entirely different now and we both knew it.
"I know."
"This time you don't have a friend to blame it on."
Her eyes held mine. Dark, steady, the eyes of a woman who'd driven an hour to sit on an enemy barstool for the second time in a week, alone, and was looking at me with a directness that made my hands unsteady. "I know that too."
Silence. The jukebox played something slow. The sounds of the few people in the bar tonight were muffled into mere background noise. The world went on being ordinary while the air between us pulled tighter with every second she sat there.
"Why did you come back?" I asked.
She looked at me. Through the bar, through the quiet, through twenty years of walls I'd built so carefully I'd forgotten there was anything behind them.
"Because you let me stay the other night."
I should have sent her home. That was the moment. With her beer sitting on the bar and her gaze taking me apart with a patience I'd never seen turned on me, that was when a smarter man would have said go home, Lola, and don't come back. I knew it and she knew it.
Neither of us moved toward the door.
The bar emptied slowly as closing time came. Truckers left. Razor finished his game, glanced at us, shook his head and said nothing. He disappeared through the back corridor. I heard his boots, then silence.
We were alone.
I came around the bar. I didn't decide to do it. My body made the decision my brain had refused for five days. I came around the end of the bar and stood in front of her, close, closer than I'd been to anyone in longer than I wanted to think about. Close enough to see the shift in her breathing when I entered her space.
She didn't move back. She turned on the stool to face me, her knees brushing my thighs, and looked up at me. Half challenge, half surrender.
The age between us was visible up close. Fourteen years. The lines carved into my face that she didn't have, the years and miles written into my skin, the scarring on my knuckles. She was twenty-seven and looking at me with a want she wasn't trying to disguise. I was forty-one and I hadn't felt want like this in so long that the force of it now, standing between her knees with her face tilted up to mine, made my hands shake.
"This shouldn’t happen," I said. My voice came out rough, scraped raw.
"I know."
"If your father finds out..."
"I know that too."
She reached up and put her hand on my jaw and moved her fingers slowly downwards.
Her palm was warm. Her fingers curved against my cheek, her thumb on my cheekbone, holding my face with a steadiness that said she knew exactly what she was doing and had chosen to do it anyway. The touch was the first deliberate human contact I'd felt in longer than I wanted to calculate. It landed like a kicked door. A room I'd kept locked for two decades.
I kissed her.
Not gently and not carefully. I put my mouth on hers and the nothing I’d been living inside caught fire. Her lips parted and I took what she was offering, my hands finding her waist, pulling her off the stool and against me. She came hard against my body, her fists knotting in the front of my shirt, and the sound she made against my mouth was raw, unguarded, the sound of a woman who'd spent five days holding herself in check and had run out of reasons. I knew that feeling only too well.
I walked her backward through the STAFF ONLY door. Down the corridor between the bar and the lodge, dim, narrow, empty. Her back found the wall and I pressed into her, one hand in her hair, the other gripping her hip, and I kissed her with a desperation that should have scared us both.
