Sassy was talking non-stop, something about the ranch followed by something about school followed by something… else. But every few minutes her eyes tracked right. Down the bar. Just for a second. And this last time, just long enough.
The man at the far end caught her doing it and smiled into his drink.
He didn't wait long. Homeboy picked up his drink and made his way toward us, unhurried, stopping just past me like I was part of the furniture. "Can I get you another?" he asked Sassy.
Rhett had gone still beside me. A kind of density settled into him, like the temperature dropping before a storm. I felt it in the six inches between us more than I saw it.
Up close, the guy was better looking than I'd noticed from across the bar. Sassy clearly agreed, because whatever she'd been performing all night quietly gave way to something that didn't need any work at all. She smiled up at him—a real one—and said, "Sure."
She asked his name. He told her. I didn't catch it, so I was sticking with Homeboy.
To my left, Rhett's hand closed around his beer bottle the way you grip something when you're reminding yourself not to do anything else with your hands.
Sassy and Homeboy talked in the easy way of two people letting the night decide things for them while Rhett and I sat quietly. She laughed, loud and unguarded, then leaned in to hear something Homeboy said, close enough that her hair swung forward. When he tipped his head toward the dance floor, she glanced back our way quickly then off she went.
I watched Rhett not watch them. Which was its own kind of watching. He stared straight ahead at the bottles behind the bar, shoulders bunched, radiating the energy of a man doing a very poor impression of someone who was fine.
I ordered two shots from Hank. Slid one to Rhett. He looked at it for a second.
Then he looked at the dance floor.
I peeked over my shoulder just in time to see Sassy rise up on her toes and press her mouth to the stranger's. Easy. Unhesitating. Deliberate in the way things are when you're performing them for an audience you're pretending you don't have.
Rhett picked up the shot glass and threw it back.
"Bottoms up," I said before following suit.
Sassy came back to the bar a little while later, flushed and loose in the shoulders, Homeboy hanging back at a respectful distance. She grabbed her purse off the hook under the bar, tucked it under her arm. Then she turned to me, and something in her eyes flickered—quick and honest—before she pulled me into a hug.
I wasn't a hugger. But I hugged her back.
She held on a beat longer than called for.
"Be careful," I said into her hair.
"Always." She pulled back, gave me a sad smile this time. "Night, Calvin."
"Night, Tink."
She didn't say anything to Rhett.
I didn't look at him until she was out the door.
When I did, he was staring at the bar top, both hands wrapped around a beer that had gone warm, the muscle in his jaw working slow and steady.
The bar noise filled in around us. Someone laughing too loud. The jukebox bleeding into something new. The distant crack of pool balls from the back.
I swiveled on my stool to face him. He still hadn't moved. Hadn't touched his beer. Wasn't even sure if he'd blinked.
"You just gonna sit there and let that happen?"
He didn't look up. "Yep."
I studied the side of his face. The set of his jaw. The stillness of his body. Like he was holding himself together with both hands and didn't want anyone to notice.
"Well that seems real fuckin' dumb."
That got me a look. Slow. Flat. The kind that was meant to end conversations. "Drop it, Calvin."
