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I was wrong. It doesn’t sound like he had an easy past at all.
And the thought of him suffering for even a day is strangely more painful than my ribs or my wrist combined. Ithurts, and I have that same need to throw my arms around him and pull him into a hug as I did back in his apartment.
“But it’s easier now?” I ask with my eyes on the bandage. “I mean, things—”
“Are good,” he says. “But they could be better.”
I lift my head at the softness in his voice, and then I wish I hadn’t because it’s not just the need to hug him creeping over me now. “How?”
He searches my face. “Why do you want to know?”
Because I want it to be something I can do. And if I could, I think I would.
I shrug. “Just curious.”
He studies me for several seconds, and his lip twitches. “You’re going to have to do better than that.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I lie.
From his slight head shake, he knows I’m not being entirely truthful. But, instead of calling me out on it, he tugs my shirt sleeve back down and buttons it for me. “All done. Give me a second, and I’ll grab a badge for you.”
“A badge?”
“Name badge. All the staff wear them.” He’s strolling away as he speaks, but as he closes his hand around the handle, I clear my throat and he turns.
“It’s Saige. With an I.”
“Saige?” he repeats, his eyes unreadable.
“My name. Not… not Lily, like the cat food.”
His lip twitches and his eyes swim with mirth. “Not Lily like the cat food. Got it.”
“But I think I’d like Lily on the badge. I just wanted you to know that it’s not my real name.”
He nods. “You can trust me with it.”
As he slips out, I wonder why it didn’t cross my mind not to tell him.
* * *
“So this is Sam—Samantha, actually—but never call her that if you want to live.” Aden grins at the beautiful brunette in her early twenties with warm brown eyes and long dark hair in the most perfect French braid I’ve ever seen in my life.
Since the night has barely gotten started, the music playing, slow-beat hip-hop, isn’t so loud that he has to shout to make himself heard.
“Hi, Lily.” Sam smiles.
Aden points to two guys behind the bar. One, a black-haired guy who looks in his late twenties, is mixing drinks so fast that it’s like he’s blurring. “Grady. A mixologist like no other. There is no cocktail known to man that he doesn’t know how to make. And well.”
Between one drink and another, Grady nods his head in my direction but never takes his eyes off the five glasses lined up on the bar in front of him.
Next, Aden points toward the other end of a bar where a blond-haired guy with a practiced grin is about an inch away from knocking a pretty blonde's drink over. Not that he would even notice since he’s so busy flirting. “Killian. He pours drinks too. Occasionally.”
The guy in question, in his early twenties and attractive, shoots Aden a quick grin then waves at me, before going right back to flirting with the blonde.
“You’ll be working with these guys for now. We have more staff starting later, but you likely won’t see them because you’ll be working the tables just in this section of the bar while Killian and Grady pour your drinks. Everyone say hi to Lily.”
I get a smile from everyone, and an even briefer nod from the ever-moving whirlwind that is Grady who, finished with his five drinks, moves them to a black tray, nudges it out of the way, and snags another white slip of paper before he goes right back to mixing.
