Chapter 5 #2
So we’ll share the bar. My plans don’t involve staying beyond the summer, as I have no intention of experiencing a Minnesota winter first-hand.
I’ll lay low here for a couple of months, launder what I can, then sell her back the bar.
She might be short on cash, but I’m not—we can work out a payment plan or something.
Ford brushes off Louisa’s question about his daughter in St. Paul, plants an elbow on the bar, and says in a low voice, “Did you find that sonofabitch?”
My ears perk up because he has to mean Travis, and I ease closer, wiping the counter for something to do.
It’s a Wednesday, and apparently without the draw of the meat raffle—whatever the fuck that is—the bar is quiet.
Even with Briar off tonight, I don’t need to be here.
Louisa has everything under control, but I’m not willing to be forced out on the first night of our ‘partnership.’
Louisa huffs a sigh, rage simmering as she grabs a glass and positions it below the tap. She doesn’t need to ask what he’s drinking. It’s probably the same thing he’s been drinking here for the whole of her life.
“No,” she says as low-carb lager fills the glass. “Whatever rock he’s hiding under, I didn’t manage to kick it over.”
“If I find him slinking around, you’ll be the first to know,” Ford promises.
Louisa hands him his beer with a smile. “Thanks, Ford.”
He salutes her and takes his beer over to a table of locals, asking in a loud voice if they’d heard about Mikey. My interest ends there, so I’ll never know what happened to Mikey.
Louisa glances at me, flips her long dark hair over her shoulder, and saunters off into the kitchen, where Mariah is cooking. Of course, Mariah was happy to see her. As was her son, Isaac, who dropped his usual sullen facade to greet her warmly.
The front door opens, and two women enter, arm in arm, laughing. I recognize Gina’s mother, Dawn, but not the woman with her. She looks like a hippy crossed with a forest witch, her long, graying hair cascading over her shoulders. Everything about her is flowy and serene.
The smell of good weed hits me before the women reach the bar.
“Ladies,” I say in greeting.
Dawn flashes me a smile, but all the suggestiveness of last night is gone.
The other woman looks me over slowly. “Your energy is very dark.”
“Matches my blackened heart,” I say flatly.
“Hmm.” The woman says, mirroring my indifference. “It’s a shame that…” her distracted voice trails off when Ford booms “Deirdre!” across the bar. She waves at him, then turns back to me. “I’ll have a vodka tonic with a lime twist. Mariah’s working for you? Good. I’ll have the tuna melt. Dawnie?”
“A glass of white wine and an order of Buffalo wings.”
Deirdre turns a frown on her. “I thought you were vegan.”
“Only on Tuesdays,” Dawn says irritably.
They argue with the ease of old friends while I make Deirdre’s drink and pour Dawn’s wine. Thankfully, they take their drinks over to chat with Ford and the other locals.
I open the kitchen door, pass the food order on to Mariah, then step back to hold the door wide as Louisa sails through with a wing-laden tray.
Louisa calls out a greeting to Dawn and Deirdre as she carries the tray over to a table full of semi-rowdy young men. Baskets are passed around, and when the tray is empty, she holds it flat against her side, leaning on the high back of the booth, smiling and flirting.
I keep an eye on her as I collect the empty glasses from a couple leaving—just in case those guys give her any trouble.
They don’t.
In fact, she props a knee up on the booth and slings an arm around the shoulders of the guy seated at the end. He wraps an arm around her waist.
“Pretty sure they dated a few years ago,” Dawn says in a hushed tone. I jump at her sudden appearance at the bar. She grabs a couple of napkins from the dispenser, winks at me, and goes back to her table.
Havenwood is small—fewer than five hundred people.
Isobel Township has maybe twenty people.
Pine Point boasts a couple of thousand. I don’t have relationships, so I hadn’t considered how hard it must be to date in a place like this.
How far do you have to cast your net to find someone you haven’t known all your life?
How often would you run into exes? Yet another drawback of living in a small place.
Louisa finally walks away, hips swaying while the entire table stares at her ass.
I imagine Louisa has had no trouble with dating.
Good for her. I don’t care.
A couple of Kristen’s friends come in, noticeably sans Kristen. Considering the smiles they give me are politely friendly rather than teasing and secretive, it’s fair to say Kristen didn’t tell them.
“Be with you in a minute,” Louisa says, as if I’m not standing right here with nothing to do. She grabs a handful of Coronas from the fridge and heads back to her table of admirers.
I smile ruefully at the women, but the fire of competition is already burning in my stomach. Louisa might know everyone and their drink order, but I’m a fast learner. “Aperol Spritz and a gin and tonic?” That’s what they ordered last week—the Aperol Spritz for Keri, the gin and tonic for Madison.
They laugh and nod, commenting on my memory with flirty smiles that I easily return as I get to work making the drinks.
I’m nowhere near as good a bartender as Briar, and it’s been over a decade since I worked behind a bar, but I’m not half-bad, and the customers here have pretty basic preferences—lots of domestic beer and hard seltzers.
Most of the cocktails ordered are classics like Bloody Marys, margaritas, and so on.
Louisa scowls at me when she returns to the bar, but she beams at the two women. As a local, she’ll know they’re Kristen’s friends, but nothing in Louisa’s expression gives away what she walked in on, which might raise her a tiny bit in my esteem.
“Any luck finding Hayden?” Madison asks.
So it wasn’t Travis that Ford was talking about earlier.
Louisa shakes her head as she reaches for a bottle of dark rum. “Nope. Tracked him as far as St. Louis.” She grabs a shot glass and fills it.
Keri winces. “That sucks.”
Louisa brings the shot glass to her deep red lips. “He can’t hide forever,” she murmurs, before tipping it back.
The women give her more sympathy before moving off to a table near the rowdy young men. I lift the bottle of rum from Louisa’s grasp and return it to its place, but instead of lecturing her about drinking on the job, I ask, “Who is Hayden?”
Her lips press together, and for a moment, I think she won’t tell me. None of the locals has mentioned him to me yet, but this place is small enough that sooner or later I’ll find out. “My ex.”
“What did he do?”
She juts out a hip as she leans on the bar. She makes it look natural, rather than what it really is—a pose. “Used my phone to log into my bank account and transferred all my savings to his account. Then he left town.”
“That’s where you’ve been? Chasing after him?”
“Yes,” she smiles sweetly. “And while I was gone, my cousin sold my bar out from under me. So you can see why I’m less than thrilled about”—she waves her hand up and down in my direction—“all this.”
“I’m not responsible for your cousin’s actions. Or your ex’s.”
She pushes off the bar. “You’re here. And from what I’ve seen, you’re not much better than they are.”
I’m worse. But if I had boyfriends or girlfriends, I would never steal from them.
Probably.
There might be circumstances where I would, if they did me dirty first, which makes me curious. “Did you deserve it?”
Her eyes narrow. “I’m not a saint. But nothing I’ve done is bad enough for me to deserve losing everything.” At that, she strides off to the back.
She doesn’t strike me as another Tristan Hunting, but that’s the trick of it. People hide their true selves, showing only what they want you to see while they dig their claws in.
Louisa Gallo has built walls around herself like a fortress. From the hypnotic sway in her walk to the color of her lipstick, she’s playing the part of the Louisa Gallo she created so hard I doubt even she knows what’s underneath.
The rockabilly dive bar owner with an acidic tongue and a heart of gold, no doubt. A cliché I have no interest in digging into. Her claws, I imagine, are long.
We spend the rest of the shift avoiding each other. Easy enough, as it’s not too busy. The last lingering patrons leave just before midnight, and Louisa locks the door early—“Anyone coming in at this time of night is trouble,” she insists.
She’s probably right.
I sweep and mop around the tables while she wreaks untold havoc on the organization of the bar. I’ll move everything back in the morning.
“I need a shower,” she announces, holding her thick hair off her neck.
“You already had one,” I say, pushing the mop side to side and trying not to imagine her pulse fluttering under my lips as I kiss the warm skin of her neck.
She gives me a crooked grin. “I worked up a sweat.”
“I doubt that.”
“I don’t care, I’m still having one.”
And that’s how I end up sitting on my bed for a second time today while she’s wet and naked behind a flimsy door.
She doesn’t take as long, and she comes out wearing one of my white t-shirts and nothing else.
I don’t want to notice how her nipples have pebbled, dark enough to give me a hint of their color.
I don’t want to imagine sucking them through the thin cotton, turning it nearly translucent.
My stubble is rough under my palm as I rub my jaw, and my already exhausted mind can only come up with one question. “How?”
She shrugs, and the hem lifts. The shirt is long on her, so it only reveals her upper thigh, but it might as well flash her pussy for the way my cock, already stirring, jolts to attention.
“I helped myself this morning. Figured you didn’t mind, since we’re sharing everything.”
Oh, sharing everything, are we? Does she think she can chase me off by being a pain in the ass?
I’m a patient man. I play the long game.
My revenge against Tristan didn’t happen overnight.
Months went into developing the skills I needed to beat Tristan at a poker table, many more into pulling together the kind of money I needed to fake my way into his inner circle, and before that, months of learning everything I could about the man.
I can survive a few months with Louisa Gallo.