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And that was, you know, the plan.
How the night started, too.
It was all a blur of finding my rhythm again, of making excuses to the townsfolk for why I’d been gone since I didn’t want to tell anyone that I’d been attacked. Sure, I might have gotten pity tips, but I just didn’t want everyone in on my business like that.
“I wish you had trained me,” Ren declared a few hours later.
“Chet’s a good bartender too. And I trained him.”
“I think something gets lost with each time knowledge gets passed down, though. You make it all look so effortless.”
“Honey, I have been making drinks since I was in elementary school. Don’t compare yourself to me. Count yourself lucky that you didn’t have a fucked up child…” I trailed off as I saw someone moving outside of the bar, making a memory start to niggle at me. “Hold things down for just… five minutes,” I demanded, rushing out from behind the bar, then out the front door of The Bog.
“Hey!” I called at the retreating figure, making him turn to look at me.
And as he did, I was just… even more sure.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” I snapped, feeling safe since I was three feet from the front door of my work where a bunch of members of the Irish mafia would protect me if they needed to. “It was you.”
It was.
I knew it.
The man who snuck up on me when I’d been trying to get rid of those first four blocks of heroin. The good-looking guy with bad news written all over him.
“Depends on what you’re talking about,” he said, shrugging. “Your face?” he asked. “I don’t put my hands on women.”
I didn’t know the man from Adam.
But, somehow, I believed him.
There was something about the firmness in his voice mixed with the disgust in his eyes at the very idea of him hurting a woman that I instantly believed.
“But if we’re talking about the drugs in the flower pots? Yeah, darling, that was me.”
With that, he turned and walked off into the night. Like it was no big deal. Like what he’d done hadn’t turned my life upside down.
“Jesus,” I hissed, reaching for my phone, starting to write a text to Slash. “The new guy at my apartment building was the one who took the… packages.”
I was just about to type a second text, saying that I was reasonably sure he wasn’t the same guy who’d attacked me when I felt someone shove into me, knocking my phone to the ground, flying into the edge of the street with a loud thwack.
It would be a miracle if my screen wasn’t shattered.
“Watch it, assh—“ I started as I turned to look.
And saw a familiar face, making some of the anger fall away immediately.
For all of ten seconds.
A few heartbeats.
Because in the span of them, I stopped seeing someone I knew, someone I kind of cared about, someone I thought that I could trust. Instead, I saw someone I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen before.
The cold eyes with nothing behind them.
I knew.
God, I knew.
