Chapter 10
TEN
ADAM
Adam had a long to-do list, and none of the items on that list were pine after a hockey player. The biggest one was trying to keep his business alive, and while he was a proud man, he was never too proud to take advice from a real business person.
Grace’s stepdad, Alan, met him at the local Bean Machine on his lunch.
He had a bit of gray at the temples, and he whipped his reading glasses out of his breast pocket the second they sat down over twin iced Americanos.
In a strange fit of desperation and vulnerability, Adam had sent over his financial documents from the last several months.
Alan had been in Grace’s life since she was two, and Adam had always liked him. He was kind to Heath, was a great cook, and had been running his own sporting goods store in town for fifteen years. Successfully.
“You’re doing great with record keeping, so keep doing what you’re doing there. As far as your finances look…you can either figure out ways to cut costs or you can start charging more.”
“Honestly, I was hoping you were going to tell me something more high level or technical I could be doing.” Adam sighed, sinking his hands in his hair as he slumped onto the table.
“It doesn’t look great, I’ll be honest.”
“No, it doesn’t. I can’t figure out how to cut any more costs without letting someone go, and I can’t do that.
We’d be too understaffed to be open.” He didn’t even have a food supplier anymore—he went and bought lemons and limes from the discount grocery store twice a week and napkins and frozen pizzas at Costco.
He’d had to tell Willa he couldn’t keep giving her any extra hours. He hated letting his employees down.
“Folks will understand a price raise. If they’ll still go to McDonald’s at the prices they’re charging now, they’ll still come pay a buck more for a beer.”
“When you have such a small customer base, it feels so personal.”
“You need to think about your survival. You can’t keep going down this path and expect things to magically turn around. Don’t take out a business loan when your issue is your profit margin.”
Adam always felt like a kid around Alan. He was so put together and living a life of purpose, not just one of circumstance.
“You’re right.”
“I can help you calculate your price increases if you’d like.”
“I’d like,” Adam said, taking his pride and burying it out back.
“Another thing to consider is why you’re doing this. What is special about the bar that makes you keep working so hard? And don’t say Grace.”
Adam was about to say Grace. He had to think about it, and Alan let him mull it over.
“I like the community aspects. The regulars. Doing food drives and coat drives. I like sponsoring kids’ sports teams. I want to be able to keep doing that.”
“Keep the mission in your head when you try the price increase. Those are your stakes. Share your mission with your customers if you need. It sounds like it’s a good group of people. They’ll understand.”
After a business meeting that felt like getting hit by a truck, Adam knew he’d want to go climb, so he’d packed his gym bag.
His favorite thing about the climbing gym, aside from the more casual atmosphere than a traditional gym, was the regulars.
Adam wasn’t big on chitchat, but there were a few folks who were usually there on Monday afternoons, and he’d made connections over the past couple of years.
Sometimes he even saw them show up at his bar on the weekends.
It felt like the relationships you had with classmates—friendly from repeated exposure, but not overly familiar.
Usually not over familiar. Somehow he’d forgotten that he’d brought Skylar the last time he came, and of course he had folks hounding him about Skylar immediately. Hounding? Politely asking? Same thing.
“You’re alone today,” Christa observed as they went through some warm-up stretches together.
“I’m usually alone.”
“Sure. But you know I have to ask about that cutie from last time.” She had a long brown braid falling over one shoulder, a teal tank top, and a pair of climbing pants that had been mended over and over again. He liked Christa. She was good people.
“Skylar got called up to the NHL,” he said, deflecting from the dirt he knew she was looking for.
“Oh, wow. Tell him his climbing gym buddies are proud of him. Are you two an item now, or…?”
“We’re just friends.”
“Okay, okay. Jensen and I were also just friends for a long time.” He’d learned a few months before—when the two had gone on an anniversary climbing trip to Tennessee—that they had been married for ten years.
Adam raised an eyebrow at her.
Jensen finished getting his shoes on and popped into their conversation, never taking his eyes off the bouldering wall as part of his brain worked through the new problem the route setters had put up.
“You know I’m not a risk taker,” he said. The number of times Adam had heard this man refer to the movie Free Solo did not support this claim. “But life is short, and you have to take every adventure.”
Adam didn’t remember the last time he’d been on anything he’d refer to as an adventure.
Unless it was the sort of adventure you’d take to the grocery store at eleven p.m. to get refrigerated cookie dough.
The only “vacations” he took were up to the cities to visit his parents and the sparse handful of friends he’d maintained from his childhood and early twenties.
Adventure.
He could easily picture Skylar on an adventure. Hanging from a zip line. Sleeping in a hostel. Portaging a canoe.
Grace was capable enough to run the bar without Adam—that hadn’t been the issue for him for years.
His issue was that he couldn’t imagine himself next to Skylar.
It didn’t make sense that Skylar was into him.
Into him enough to text him half a dozen times a day.
Into him enough to hang around his bar and make friends.
Into him enough to show up at his doorstep to cry in his arms.
Skylar was cool, and Adam was just some guy. He had worked hard enough to not call himself a loser anymore, but the people hockey players dated were model hot. Skylar was antsy and bored and admittedly had a hard time being alone.
And Adam was just…there.
His worries jittered through him until he got on the wall. Then his brain turned off, and all he could focus on was where his hands were going next and what holds he could get a toe on. His muscles strained, and at the end of an hour of climbing, he felt better, like he always did.
Adam’s phone rang on the way home from the gym. Usually he turned on a podcast to kill the time, but he was happy to see Skylar’s name pop up.
“Just heard tonight’s my last game. I have to be back in Iowa tomorrow to catch the bus to Texas,” Skylar said without much preamble. There was no formality there. It was comfortable.
“So I’m going to miss you again,” Adam said, not thinking about his words. He chewed on a hangnail on his thumb as he drove one-handed, Skylar’s voice coming out of his speakers via Bluetooth.
“You missed me?” Skylar’s voice was bright and hopeful. Adam knew he couldn’t be happy about getting sent back down to Iowa, but he didn’t sound stormy.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Adam claimed.
“Yes, you did. You missed me,” Skylar teased. “I missed you too. It’s been so good up here, though. I’ve been imagining my life in Minnesota, and I like it. I told you I’m staying with Jackson and Ryan, right?”
“The gay ones.”
“Yeah, they’re great. They have the cutest life. They’re married, they have a dog, they have a beautiful house. Jackson is the captain of the team. Ryan is working on getting an LGBTQ+ charity off the ground.”
“Is that what you want?”
“To run a charity?”
“No, to be married, have the house in the suburbs, settle down, all that.”
“Yeah,” Skylar said plainly. “Of course I do. I love hockey, but I know it won’t be forever. I’m going to get myself set up financially and take care of my partner.”
Adam was quiet while he thought about that. It was ridiculous to imagine himself in Skylar’s kitchen, installing a reverse osmosis water filter for him just because he wanted one or tossing up another magnet from their adventures together on the fridge.
“You don’t want that?”
“I…haven’t thought about what I want.” His own desires were not just backburnered—they were off the stove entirely.
“Okay. That’s your assignment. When I come home from this roadie, you’ll tell me what your life dreams are.”
Adam couldn’t help but laugh. Skylar made it sound so easy.