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Then, with one last look at my friends and one last goodbye kiss for my kids—and fine, a little scratch behind Mr. Fuzzles's ears—I bid goodbye to the ladies in my kitchen and head for the waiting taxi. As I slip inside, crammed in the back seat with three others, I can’t help but smile.
It’s been ages since I’ve had a night out like this. Years. In fact, I don’t remember the last time I went out with girlfriends without worrying if Kevin would be okay with the kids—or as he called it, “babysitting,” even though they’re his own children—or without him turning his nose up at such “pedestrian” activities as going for a drink. If it wasn’t a gallery opening or a poetry reading, Kevin would act like it was beneath him.
But this…this is fun. And I’m going to enjoy every minute of it.
And maybe I’ve had too much wine, but when we arrive at the Grove and tumble out of the cab, I can’t help but laugh when Simone struts up to one of the many motorcycles parked outside and poses beside it. Fiona starts snapping photos—much like my mother was doing a few minutes ago—and I finally let go of that little niggle telling me I shouldn’t be doing this.
I’m a grown woman. I’m allowed to have fun. I may be recently divorced, but I’m not dead. I can go meet a sexy man at a bar if that’s what I feel like doing. I can learn to play pool in my forties. I can have nights to myself.
And—after fantasizing about that pottery class for nearly a week—I can say with complete honesty that this is exactly what I feel like doing.
CHAPTER 7
Mac
As I tip a bottle of beer into my mouth to take a sip, my eyes drift to the door for the millionth time tonight.
She’ll show up. I know she will. Her friends wanted to come here, so she has no choice. She’ll be here.
Another sip of beer; another glance at the door.
“You got it bad,” my brother says from behind the bar. He’s taller than me by an inch and has the same thick, dark hair, usually messy from the way he runs his hands through it. Lee sees one of the regulars jerk his chin and is a good enough bartender to know that means the man wants another drink. As he pours the pint, he arches a brow at me. “Dad told me about your woman.”
“She’s not my woman.”
Yet.
Wait. No.
She’s not my woman, ever.
My father claps me on the shoulder. “Help me change a keg, will you?” He jerks his head to the storeroom where we keep the spare barrels.
I nod, slipping off my stool to follow him across the bar. My father has a bounce in his step that I haven’t seen in a long time, and I wonder if it has anything to do with the long phone calls he’s been taking in his office with a certain refined, sophisticated older woman he recently met.
The thought makes a void tear open in my chest. My father is a man of contradictions, but he’s always been predictable. Steady. He owns a bar, but doesn’t drink. He rides a motorcycle, wild as anything, then goes home to spend long hours reading by the window that overlooks his backyard. He flirts with women, charms them within moments, but he doesn’t get attached. Never has.
Not since my mother left him with us boys and never came back.
It was me, Lee, and Dad against the world. I learned early on how easy it is for women to walk away. I felt the pain of those wounds like bloody, ripped blisters on my feet. Constant, throbbing aches that got worse with time, not better, and I learned it by seeing my father drink himself to near-death, then crawl his way back to sobriety.
When he bought the Grove, I thought it was some awful form of torture, some penance for the years he spent drowning in his own pain, but it was just another of his contradictions. Being near alcohol didn’t make him relapse. It’s like he needed the constant reminder of what would happen if he did.
It always made sense to me that Dad was on his own, the same way it made sense that I was on my own. Like the sun rising in the east. It was the only way we could be.
But my father glances over his shoulder, a broad grin on his lips. “Don’t look so worried, son. She’ll show.”
I pretend not to know what he’s talking about. We keep the new kegs near the back of the building, in a room where the delivery truck can easily access the door. My father, wisely choosing to drop the subject of who may or may not show up at the Grove tonight, tells me which beer needs to be changed, so I grab one of the big silver kegs and start rolling it across the floor to get to the keg room behind the bar. From there, I swap an empty for a full one and haul the empty keg over my shoulder to take it back to the storage room.
It’s a trip I’ve made hundreds of times, especially as my father has gotten older and struggled with the weight of the full kegs. I know every step of the journey from the keg room to the storage room by heart. I could walk this path in my sleep.
And it’s when I’m halfway across the bar that I see her.
Trina walks in wearing tight jeans, the hottest fucking knee-high boots I’ve ever seen, and a white top that’s somehow not revealing while leaving nothing to the imagination. Holy fuck. My brain stops sending signals to the rest of my body and everything inside me malfunctions. I trip over a chair, my body pitches forward, and the keg clangs against a table. Beer goes flying everywhere.
Screams, flailing arms, empty kegs rolling away, and then I’m on the floor. There’s a chair on top of me and a table descending toward me, until a hand reaches out and catches it—but not before every bottle and glass on the table comes clattering down around and on top of me. One of them smashes nearby.
Great. Wonderful. I blink, afraid to move in case I cut myself on broken glass. Also, I might be in shock.
