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“I’m comfortable being thorough.”
“Terrible experience with sports or just grown men?”
Her mouth opens before she catches the trap, and the look she gives me makes the bourbon taste better than it has all evening.
“That was cheap.”
“You walked into it.”
She shakes her head, but she’s facing me fully again, one knee angled toward mine beneath the bar. “I’m beginning to understand why you’re drinking alone.”
“Correction. I was drinking alone.”
Her fingers pause against the side of her glass, and she looks at me as though she’s waiting for me to laugh it off, but I hold her gaze.
“This is still terrible,” she groans, lifting her glass to take another sip.
“But you’re still here.”
A smile threatens the corner of her mouth before she hides it behind another sip of vodka, wincing as soon as it touches her tongue.
“I don’t know what’s more insulting,” she says after she swallows. “That this still tastes awful, or that I’m getting used to it.”
I study her over the rim of my bourbon. “You don’t strike me as someone who settles.”
The easy rhythm we’ve been trading back and forth all evening falters, and I know before she says another word that we’re no longer talking about vodka.
“What makes you think I settled?”
I almost tell her it’s because she’s still drinking bad vodka. The joke reaches the back of my throat before I swallow it with another sip of bourbon.
“Because you keep talking about finishing things instead of enjoying them.”
Someone at the other end of the bar laughs loudly enough to draw the bartender’s attention, but she doesn’t look away from me. She searches my face in silence, and I can almost see her weighing the danger of trusting a stranger against the exhaustion of keeping everything to herself.
“My mom used to tell me that quitting and failing weren’t the same thing.” Her thumb traces the edge of the napkin beneath her drink. “I believed her when I was little.”
“And now?”
She lets out a quiet breath that sounds too tired to belong to someone our age. “Now, I think there are days when they feel exactly the same.”
She lets the admission hang between us, and I open my mouth before I know what I'm going to say.
Charlotte wants you, Jubal.
Coach Quinn’s voice is so steady I can almost hear it over the noise of the bar. A few hours ago, he asked me to believe I still had something left to give, and I wanted to. God, I wanted to. Then I turned on the television and watched a panel of analysts spend ten minutes debating whether I was washed up enough to survive another season. Every comforting word I’ve heard today crashes into the same wall. None of it has made the trade hurt less or made me believe tomorrow will be any different.
I look back at the woman beside me. She isn’t waiting for reassurance either. Whatever brought her into this bar, it left the same tiredness in her eyes that’s been sitting in my chest since Graham called this afternoon. Instead of offering hope I don’t believe myself, I lift my glass toward hers.
“I hope tomorrow proves both of us wrong.”
She looks at my bourbon before lifting her vodka the few inches needed to meet it.
“So that’s what this is? Two strangers betting against a bad day?”
“I think we’re losing if this is all we’ve had for dinner.”
Her laugh escapes before she can stop it, carrying none of the restraint of the ones she gave me earlier, and the pressure inside my chest eases with it. The bartender appears beside us almost on cue, drying another glass with the towel thrown over his shoulder.
