It wasa Thursday night in September and my kid’s teacher was pretending to be drunk and spilling her guts to me.
I had stopped indulging her requests for more vodka two hours ago; she’d been drinking straight orange juice ever since, enough that I was going to have to restock earlier than expected. She’d told me about her shitty ex, how lonely it was in a new town, how much she loved my kid.
And now…Dave down at the end of the bar was heading out, and the couple in the corner booth had taken their makeout session to a bedroom.
I wiped down the bar where Dave had been sitting and didn’t look at her.
“Last call,” I said. To the room. To no one in particular.
Maggie Laine looked up from her orange juice. “Am I keeping you?”
“Bar closes at eleven.”
She glanced at her phone. Something crossed her face — the brief, guilty calculation of a woman who had absolutely clocked what time it was and stayed anyway. “I should go.”
She didn’t move.
I didn’t tell her to.
I finished wiping down the bar and came back to where she was sitting and leaned against the counter, and she looked up at me with those dark eyes and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear and I thought, very clearly, don’t.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
“You’ve been asking me things all night.”
“One more.” She turned her glass in a slow circle. “When I got assigned to kindergarten this year, the other teachers found out I had Nell.” She paused. “They were very...concerned.”
I scoffed. “Nell’s a great kid, I don’t know why they would?—”
“Because of this thing they callThe Nash Effect,” she said.
I let out a short laugh, then. Of course…of course it wasn’t about my kid.
It was about me.
And…my reputation.
I knew I had one. I’d even been told by a couple friends that women around town called itThe Nash Effect, as if it was magic. But…the thing is, I couldn’t help that I had a body count higher than anyone else in town.
Just so happened that I was good at certain things.
“I’ve heard that before,” I said, shaking my head with a smile.
“Is it true?”
“You asking me if I hypnotize women into falling in love with me?”
She laughed. “That’s not what I said.”
“What are you asking then, Maggie?”
Her eyes widened just a touch…eyelashes fluttered. Face flushed.
She was acting drunk. She wasn’t drunk. She’d maybe had three shots of vodka in that orange juice all night.
“I’m asking,” she said carefully, “if you’re as—“ She stopped. Looked down at her glass. Looked back up. “Ms. Petersen was very descriptive.”
“Ms. Petersen should mind her business.”
