27. Two Roads
Two Roads
~CADE~
You learn to read a bar the way other people read weather.
I can tell you, four seconds after a stranger walks through that door, what they're drinking, who they came with, and whether they're here to celebrate something or to forget it.
It's a gift.
It's also a curse, on a night like tonight, when the Driftglass is packed wall to wall with the happiest people in three counties, and I can read every single one of them whether I want to or not.
It's a Thursday.
That's the part making no sense. Thursdays are dead — two regulars nursing the same warm beer, Iris restocking limes, me home by ten with my feet up.
But some cruise ship or off-season festival or minor act of God has emptied a hundred tourists into Honeybell Harbor tonight, and every last one of them has found their way here, to the one good bar on the water.
They are thirsty.
I offered to pick up the shift. For once I'm ahead on the wedding prep — Nolan's people finally signed off on the bar package for the reception, so I've got a rare free evening — and Renzo looked so relieved when I said I'd cover that I didn't have the heart to take it back.
So here I am.
Slinging drinks behind the mahogany. Reading a room I'd give a great deal not to be reading.
Because the room is full of packs.
Established ones, the kind that move like they share a single nervous system — an Alpha's hand finding the small of an Omega's back without either of them so much as glancing down.
New ones, all live-wire nerves and stolen glances, still learning the choreography of belonging to somebody.
A booth in the corner with three Alphas and one Omega who's laughing so hard she's wiping her eyes, the four of them lit up like the whole world got built for that exact table.
Guaranteed things. Chosen things.
Bonds a person walked into on purpose and gets to keep for good.
Then there's whatever it is I've got.
A pack held together with a federal signature and a ten-week fuse. An Omega I have to audition for. A clock ticking down over all of it.
Every soul in this room got to fall in love the ordinary way — the safe way — and here I stand with a contract, a deadline, and a woman who has every reason on God's earth to sit back and watch me burn.
I keep ordering myself to be excited about it.
This is the second chance, isn't it?
The exact thing I'd have sold a kidney for six months ago — a real, sanctioned shot at winning back the love I threw in the dirt.
I should be hurling myself at it with both hands.
Going all out. Instead there's this stubborn, cowardly knot lodged in my chest that won't let me commit — not all the way, not yet — not until I'm certain it's safe.
Not until I know nothing's going to come crawling back out of the woodwork the way it did the first time, put a hand around my throat, and tell me to drop the entire world I've built or watch the people I love pay the bill for it.
Maybe that's selfish.
I build a gin and tonic without looking at my hands.
Maybe I'm not thinking straight.
Maybe a braver man just leaps and trusts the net's there.
But the last time I trusted the net, there wasn't one, and somebody I love damn near lost everything in the fall.
I think about Theo.
My little brother, twenty-two and furious about being twenty-two, sitting across from me at Tide Table last week with his jaw set at the exact angle our mother's gets.
"I don't need you to protect me, Cade," he'd said, quiet and hard. "I never once asked you to torch your own life for my scholarship. You keep acting like I'm some debt you have to pay off. I'm not. That was your call. Don't you dare hang it around my neck."
It gutted me, because the kid's right.
Theo was the reason.
The scholarship, the threat, the whole cold arithmetic five years back — protect Theo, protect Mom, protect the family, and the only cost is your own heart, so pay it and shut up about it.
Now Theo's grown and looking me dead in the eye and telling me he never wanted the price paid in the first place. That I've spent five years carrying a debt nobody handed me, using it as the reason behind every single thing I do.
Then there's my mother.
What she said to me last month, low, drying glasses behind her own bar, not even turning to look at me while she said it.
"You've got your father's feet, baby. Always halfway out the door.
Always running toward the next thing like home is something behind you instead of something you stop and build.
" She'd set the glass down, careful. "He ran because staying scared him worse than leaving ever could.
Don't you dare do that to that girl a second time. "
So which is it?
Am I a grown man of thirty-four, too scared to fight for the only woman I've ever loved because I'm standing here waiting for the universe to sign a form promising me it won't hurt?
Or — and here's the thought that curdles my stomach every time it surfaces — am I doing the precise thing my father did? Dressing cowardice up in a nicer coat and calling it caution.
Calling it protecting everyone when the truth is I'm protecting me, keeping one boot out the door so that if there's a leaving, the leaving belongs to me.
The thought lands like an open-handed slap.
My hand jerks.
I pour a triple shot of orange liqueur straight into a margarita that did not order one.
"Shit."
I dump it down the drain and start fresh, glancing up to see whether anyone caught the great Cade Mercer coming apart behind his own bar. Nobody did.
The place is too loud, too full, too busy chasing its own good time to notice mine slipping. Small mercies. I build the drink again, clean this time, four seconds of easy charm sliding back over my face like a coat I've worn so long it fits me better than my own skin.
The tips, at least, are obscene.
That's the one clean gift of a night like this. Drunk tourists tip like they're trying to bribe their way into heaven.
The next pack rolls up to my station — four Alphas and one Omega, matching sunburns, obviously a bonded unit blowing through town on vacation.
I read them in my four seconds flat: loud, loose, loaded, celebrating something they haven't told me yet.
I take the Alphas' orders, a round of the local IPA and a bourbon neat, then turn to the Omega.
"And for you?"
"Could I just get a Shirley Temple?" she asks, a touch sheepish. "No alcohol. Extra cherries, if you're feeling generous?"
"You got it." I reach for the grenadine — and that is the exact moment her whole pack loses its collective mind.
"A Shirley Temple?" The biggest of the four presses a hand flat to his chest like she's run him through. "Baby. I have not watched you order a Shirley Temple since…what, the fifth grade?"
"Back when we were all little bullying assholes," another one puts in, grinning ear to ear, "with no earthly clue you'd grow up to be ours."
"Boys."
The Omega lifts one hand, and there's a smile tucked into the corner of her mouth that I catch a full beat before any of them do, because reading faces is the whole job.
"Do the math."
They blink at her. All four.
Blank as fresh snowfall.
"Why," she says, slow, savoring every second of it, "would an Omega not be drinking tonight?"
The silence that follows is a beautiful thing.
I count it out — one, two, three, four, five entire seconds of grown Alphas standing at my bar with their gears grinding visibly, audibly — and then the big one makes a noise like a kettle hitting a hard boil.
"No." He grabs the edge of the mahogany with both hands. "No fucking way."
The Omega squeals, bouncing on her toes, and the big one's already trying to climb over my bar to get at her. But here's the part that snags me clean: only two of the four have caught up.
The other two are whipping their heads back and forth between everybody, going, "What? What is it? What'd we miss?" — the dumbest, most beloved men in the building.
An Omega two stools down, gathering her coat to leave, takes pity on them.
"She's pregnant, you gorgeous fools," she says, patting one of the confused ones on the cheek as she sweeps past. "Go on. Rejoice."
I brace for it.
Old habit, that bracing. Some part of me — the part raised watching one particular man treat his own family like a weight chained to his ankle — waits for one of these four to flinch.
To do the quiet, ugly math on money and freedom and everything a kid costs a man, and let it flicker across his face for even half a second.
Not one of them does.
The two slow ones catch up all at once, and the Driftglass erupts.
They're on her — all four now — hauling her up off her stool, one of them actually lifting her clean off her feet and spinning her, careful even out of his mind with joy, the rest crowding in with their hands on her shoulders, her face, each other's necks, whooping loud enough to turn every head in the room.
She's laughing. She's crying.
She's radiant right there in the middle of them, the sun the four of them just decided, all at once, to spend the rest of their lives orbiting.
"Shirley Temples!" one of them bellows to the entire bar. "Shirley Temples for the house! We're having a baby!"
The whole place roars back.
Somebody down the bar starts a chant.
A bachelorette party in matching sashes joins in without knowing what they're cheering for. A man I've never met in my life claps me on the shoulder like we served in a war together and orders "whatever the baby's having, but make mine a double."
This is the job — for eight hours a night you get to be a bit player in a hundred strangers' best moments. Usually I love it. Usually.
I finish her drink — six cherries, because I read the room — knowing with grim certainty I'll be muddling forty more of these before the hour's out.
I slide it across to the nearest of her Alphas, a big weepy thing who's got tears standing openly in his eyes and could not care less who sees them.
"On the house," I tell him. "Congratulations."