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“I love you. Thank you for my necklace.” I held it in between my index finger and my thumb.
“You are very welcome.” He touched his lips to mine tenderly, and then he was gone.
I sighed, taking a big gulp of my drink.
Dave poured two shot glasses full of Fireball, taking one in his hand and sliding the other to me. “To all the good guys out there like Chase. May we find them, may we love them, and may they never break our hearts.” He threw the shot back like a natural. “Your turn.”
I slowly raised the shot into the air between us. “To figuring out what the hell I’m going to do with my new life.” I tilted my head back and let the liquid slosh down into my throat. I coughed a few times. “Oh, God! That burns!”
He smiled, his cheeks pushing up so much that his eyes almost closed. “It is called Fireball.”
I took two long swigs of my drink to soothe the burning in my throat. “Okay, Dave. If we’re going to be spending Valentine’s Day night together, I think we need to discuss your broken heart situation.”
He leaned his elbows onto the bar, squaring his eyes with mine. “Fine, but we will have to discuss your situation then, too.”
I held my hand out. “Deal.”
Dave shook my hand firmly. “Let me get these customers settled.” He smiled at each patron, making light conversation as he mixed and poured.
There was a mixture of singles and couples throughout the busy bar. The singles were mostly packs of girls on the hunt. I noticed Donnie sitting at a small table next to the stage with a woman I presumed to be his wife. She was one of the tall blonde clones, sporting a huge diamond ring on her left hand. Though she was smiling, I wondered if she was happy with her life here.
Looking around, I did not see Brooke anywhere. I took out my phone to text her while I waited for Dave to finish making his round of drinks. When I unlocked my phone, I had a text from Shelly. It was a selfie of her and Brody in the car, making silly faces. I smiled, but felt a twinge in my heart. I took three more long swigs of my drink, and tapped out a text to Brooke.
“Okay, so,” Dave began when he returned to my side of the bar. “I’ve got about five minutes before those ladies finish their drinks.”
“You seem to be a hit with the ladies. I’ll bet you do alright after last call.”
He scrunched his face. “They’re not really my type.”
“Which one?”
“Pretty much all of them.”
“I meant ladies in general.”
He looked at me over the top of his glasses. “So did I.”
“Ah, I see. So who’s the guy that broke your heart? Need me to break his face?”
He chuckled. “Calm down, Tony Soprano. He lives in Colorado. That’s where I’m originally from.”
“Is that why you’re not together? Because of the distance?”
“In a nutshell, yes.”
“And out of the nutshell?”
“Out of the nutshell, he keeps putting off moving out here, and I can’t figure out why. He says he wants to, but when I try to make a plan, he beats around the bush. Last month I told him that I couldn’t take the limbo game we were in. He told me we should break up because he doesn’t feel ready to move out here. Honestly, I don’t think he will ever be ready.”
“It’s a scary decision to make, leaving everything you know behind. But when you think about never seeing the person you love, the decision should become clear.”
He shrugged. “You moved across the country for your man. People do it all the time. I just wish he would man up and tell me the truth about why he really doesn’t want to come.”
“Yeah, that’s really frustrating. How long were you together?”
“Four years. We were friends for a long time before that. It took him a long time to come out to his family. I thought we had made so much progress, but I guess it wasn’t enough.”
“Maybe he just takes a long time with these kinds of things. It sounds like he might come around after some time.”
