Baby for the Bartender (Single Dads of Juniper Falls #1)

Maggie

ONE

Juniper Falls in late September was pretty.

It was aggressively, almost rudely pretty—the kind of pretty that felt very personal when you were having a bad night, like the town was showing off on purpose.

I walked with no destination in mind, which was a new experience for me. I was a person who had destinations. I had a planner. I had highlighters and sparkly pens. I color-coded things.

I had a five-year plan that had, as of approximately forty-five minutes ago, become completely worthless.

Bryce wasn’t coming.

five years. We’d been together five years—since the first week of freshman year at Amherst, since before I knew anything about anything—and forty-five minutes ago he’d called and said he wasn’t coming, and that was it.

That was all of it. five years and a second bedroom I’d picked out on purpose and a future I’d been so sure about I’d moved to a town in Vermont I’d never seen before just to start building it.

Gone.

I curled my hands into fists and kept walking.

I should have gone home. I really, really should have gone home.

Instead, I turned right, off the main drag.

And that was how I ended up in Juniper Falls’s only dive bar: Rick’s.

I did not drink. Bad things happened when I drank. Usually, I would just have a single, fruity drink that made me feel floaty and happy and that tasted like sunshine. I hadn’t actually been in a divebar since college.

And now I was here. Wearing sweatpants and a baggy t-shirt.

At a dive bar alone.

It was pitiful.

Very unbecoming for the local kindergarten teacher.

The bar was dim and mostly empty, which was the first thing that went right all night.

A couple in the back corner too busy inhaling each other’s tongues to notice me.

An older man at the far end of the bar staring at a hockey game on the TV mounted in the corner.

No one I recognized. No one who would report back to Principal Daniels that Miss Laine had been spotted alone at Rick’s in her pajamas on a Thursday night.

I slid onto a barstool and let out a breath.

The bartender had his back to me, doing something with bottles on the shelf.

Tall. Broad shoulders. Dark hair going a little gray at the edges.

I had approximately three seconds of thinking ooh, maybe he’s cute, oh my god, Margot Laine, you just got dumped, what is wrong with you before he turned around.

I stared at him.

He stared at me.

It was like…seeing a teacher at the grocery store. I mean, it was kind of like that—different, I guess, since I was the teacher in this case. But…he was in a place he wasn’t supposed to be—or I was, I wasn’t sure—and for a truly humiliating moment neither of us said anything.

Garrison Nash. Nell’s dad. Standing behind the bar at Rick’s like he worked here.

He…wait.

He definitely worked here.

Or—owned it?

Why did he own a place named Rick’s?

“Mr. Nash,” I blurted out.

He raised an eyebrow. Just barely.

“Miss Laine.”

I opened my mouth. Closed it. The thing was—and this was not helpful even in the slightest—Garrison Nash was extremely good-looking.

I’d noticed it before, I guess, but only in the way you notice an expensive car driving by.

Like…a thing that exists and is objectively nice and has nothing to do with you.

But I’d only ever seen him at school dropoff and pickup, in daylight, usually while I was wrangling five-year-olds and he was wrangling Nell and there was a very appropriate amount of distance. Sometimes I got a wave. Usually not.

Now I was face to face with him, and he looked very, very good.

He was wearing a black henley that made it very clear he worked out; pushed up to the elbows, which made it even more clear he worked out. His salt-and-pepper hair was messy, but in this way that seemed intentional.

And he was watching me with hazel eyes that felt like they were staring directly into my soul.

“I want a shot,” came out of my mouth, even though I was trying to say, nice to see you, I should go.

Mr. Nash narrowed his eyes…just slightly.

He did that, I guess. Little faces that said a lot and were extremely devastating.

“What kind of shot?”

I looked up at the bar, skimmed it…

“Whiskey,” I said.

He snorted and shook his head. “Nah.”

“Excuse me?”

“Girl like you doesn’t want a shot of whiskey,” he said. “What do you actually want?”

I didn’t like the way he said that. Or maybe I liked it too much, I couldn’t tell.

I bit my lip. “I like…sunshine in a glass,” I said. “And honestly, I need it tonight.”

He nodded. “Comin’ right up.”

He turned around, made me my drink, then set a glass in front of me. It looked like orange juice.

I frowned.

“This…is orange juice.”

“It’s a screwdriver,” he corrected with a short laugh. “You said sunshine in a glass. What’s better than a little Vitamin D?”

I picked it up and took a sip. It tasted like orange juice. “I promise I’m allowed to drink,” I said.

“Well, we don’t really ID here, so I wasn’t going to ask,” he said, “but now I feel like I should.”

I fumbled for my ID anyway, because apparently I was going to do everything embarrassing tonight and I might as well commit. He waved it off before I got it out of my wallet.

“I’m twenty-three,” I said.

“I know.” He looked at me for a moment. “You look—”

“Like shit,” I said. And then immediately wanted to dissolve directly into the barstool. “Oh my god. I’m so sorry. That was — I teach your daughter. I don’t know why I said that.”

The corner of his mouth moved. “I was going to say you look different than usual.”

I blinked. “Different.”

“Less put together.” His eyes moved over my face, just briefly, just enough. “You’re usually very put together, Miss Laine.”

There was something in the way he said it that made it very clear put together was not the actual word he’d considered and discarded.

And I was twenty-three and had just been dumped and was two sips into a screwdriver on an empty stomach, so I felt that observation in places I had absolutely no business feeling it.

“I came straight from my couch,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting—“ I gestured at him, at the bar, at all of it.

“No,” he agreed. Like that was obvious. His eyes flicked down to the glass. “Slow down, Miss Laine. Don’t wanna have to cut you off after one orange juice.”

I opened my mouth to once again accuse him of not giving me any alcohol.

He pre-empted me with a wink.

“So…” he said. “Not as put together, asking for sunshine in a glass on a Thursday night ‘because you need it.’ You need to talk?”

I shook my head. “No, gosh, I mean…I shouldn’t—”

“You’re sitting at my bar and listening is my job,” he said. He was at the sink now, wiping down glasses. “I’m actually the cheapest therapist in town.”

“I have a real therapist.”

“Okay.”

I took another sip of my extremely mild screwdriver and stared at the bar top for a moment.

“My boyfriend broke up with me,” I said. “My boyfriend of five years. Who promised he was going to move here.”

Mr. Nash kept wiping down glasses. Didn’t look up, just listened…which was actually nice.

“We met freshman year,” I said. “At Amherst. And it was just—it was always just Bryce. For five years, and I got this job and I thought, okay…this is it, this is where we start the actual life part, and I found this apartment and it has a second bedroom and—” I stopped.

Mr. Nash set down the glass he was holding, then leaned on the bar with both hands.

My god, his forearms.

“And?” he said.

I shook my head. “And he called me tonight and said he just didn’t think he was coming.” I turned my glass in a slow circle on the bar. “And that…he didn’t want to ‘drag this out’ anymore. That it was over.”

Mr. Nash took a deep breath and peered down at the bar.

“Bryce is a douchy name,” he said.

I snorted orange juice through my nose. It burned. “And ‘Garrison’ isn’t?”

Again, I felt like I wanted to melt directly through the floor.

But it made him laugh, so I felt better. “‘Garrison’ is douchy as hell, which is why everyone around here just calls me Nash.”

“Nash,” I repeated. “Okay. Um…is it okay if I call you that?”

He nodded. “Of course. But only if it’s okay for me to call you Margot.”

He knew my first name. Again, that made me feel things.

“I actually go by Maggie,” I said. “With my friends.”

He smiled. “Are we friends?”

I shrugged. “Guess so.”

“Guess so,” he agreed.

He took my glass—which I hadn’t realized was empty—and refilled it.

I swear it was mostly orange juice.

“So Bryce,” he said. “Five years. And he waited until you’d already moved here to tell you he wasn’t coming.”

“To be fair,” I said, because apparently some part of me was still defending Bryce even now, “we’d done long distance before. I thought he just needed time to—“ I stopped. “I don’t know. Wrap things up. In Boston.”

“For two months.”

“When you say it like that—”

“How would you like me to say it?”

I looked at him. He looked back, one eyebrow slightly raised, and I had the sudden uncomfortable feeling that Nash had very little patience for men who wasted women’s time and absolutely no interest in pretending otherwise.

“He also told me something else,” I said. “We broke up once. Just for like four days, sophomore year. And tonight he told me that during those four days he—” I picked up my glass. Put it down. “He was with someone else.”

Nash grunted.

No other response.

“He said it wasn’t cheating because we weren’t technically together at the time.” I laughed, short and hollow. “Which is true. Technically.”

“That’s not the point.”

“No,” I agreed quietly. “It’s not.”

The bar was very quiet for a moment. The hockey game murmured. The couple in the back corner finally came up for air long enough to ask for their check.

“He told you that tonight,” Nash said. “When he was ending it.”

“Yeah.”

“Why.”

I turned my glass in a slow circle. “I think he wanted me to feel like it was my fault. Like I’d pushed him to it.” I laughed again. “The stupid thing is it almost worked. I’m sitting here in sweatpants at a dive bar going through every single thing I did wrong.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No,” he said. “But I know the kind of man who drops that on someone on his way out the door. And it’s got nothing to do with you.”

I stared at him.

He held my gaze and didn’t look away, and something in my chest that had been wound tight since the phone call—since before the phone call, probably—loosened just slightly.

“Thank you,” I said.

He nodded. Didn’t make it weird. Just refilled my glass and went back to wiping down the bar, and I sat there in my sweatpants feeling, inexplicably, slightly less like my life was over.