Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Ben
The bar is quiet in a way that only happens after a loud night. I sent everybody home right after closing and said I’d clean up. No one argued. Everyone’s beat. Fridays have been a grind lately—good for revenue, hell on my head.
I move through the tables with a damp rag and the bottle of sanitizer, muscle memory doing the work while my brain drifts. Chairs up on the patio first, then the high-tops, then the booths.
Wipe down, collect the errant coasters. Fans buzzing overhead, dishwasher rumbling in the kitchen over the final load of dishes. I like it like this. The place is relieved, and so am I.
Except tonight.
Tonight, I’m annoyed, but not at anything I can point to.
The irritation tingles under the skin like a low-grade fever.
I tell myself it’s the day—that customer who wanted to sample six IPAs and bought one half-pint, the coil that jammed in the walk-in, the shipment that showed up with one box short.
But I know better.
The real reason is twenty steps away behind the brick wall to my left, in a kitchen I can picture too well, with ovens that now heat like a dream because we put the damn infrastructure in right.
Paige.
I’ve seen her less in the last week than I did when she first got the keys. She’s been in there—I know she has. I follow the rhythms of the block without meaning to; the bakery’s lights tell their own schedule.
This week they’ve been on late, flicking off around the time I lock up. But we haven’t crossed paths. Not once. Either I’m a master at missing her, or she’s better at avoiding me than I am at not looking.
Jason told me a few days ago that everything’s installed and the place is “shiny enough to blind you.”
He said it in that proud-brother voice he gets without noticing he’s doing it. “She made us scrub baseboards,” he added, like it was a war story. “Paid us in cinnamon rolls. And yes, they were amazing.” He laughed. I did too.
I didn’t ask the thing I wanted to ask: How was she? Was she tired? Happy? Has she eaten? Is she sleeping? Does she smell like lemon and vanilla, or is that just how my head fills the air when she walks into a room?
I cap the sanitizer and slide it beneath the bar.
The rag goes over the divider to dry, neat and square because I can’t stand it any other way.
The register drawer pops with a click. I count down, bills in short stacks, quarters by tens.
The steady clack of coin on wood steadies me more than it should.
A man can build a life on repetition. He can hide in it, too.
Jason would ask what’s crawled up my ass and died if he saw me now. He has asked versions of that for weeks. I told him I was fine. I told him I was tired. I told him we were short-staffed. Not technically a lie, but not the whole truth either.
He’d smell something if I asked about Paige more than once, so I don’t ask. I let the questions burn in my gut as I go crazy, wondering.
I glance toward the front windows. The bakery is dark from here— no way to see into her kitchen without walking outside, rounding the building, peering down the narrow run where the delivery truck backs in. I’ve done that on nights I’m not proud of.
Not stalking.
Just… checking. The way I stand on my back deck and listen to the river at 3:00 a.m. when sleep won’t stick. The way I walk through my house with the lights off to remind myself it’s mine.
I flip off the row of overheads above the bar. Half-light. Wood glows. Bottles throw tiny crowns on the mirror. There’s a comfort in closing up that feels a little like prayer: wipe, stack, click, lock, breathe. I wish it were enough.
It’s stupid how much I miss her. It’s worse because I don’t have the right to say it, not to anybody, and certainly not to myself, if we’re playing by the rules I set.
I told her I’d change what I do. I have. I don’t step into her space unless it’s about a door stop or a hinge. I don’t linger when I see her on the sidewalk. I say hello, like a neighbor, like a decent man, and keep moving. I keep my hands in my pockets. I keep my mouth shut.
Jason is the closest thing to family I’ve ever had. The idea of lying to him sat wrong from the first second the thought entered my head, and I did it anyway when he asked if everything was cool.
“Yeah, man,” I said, crisp as a well-poured lager. “All good.”
I said it because telling him the truth would have been the same as pulling a pin on a grenade and dropping it between us.
You don’t come back from sleeping with your best friend’s sister easily.
Maybe at all. You definitely don’t come back from doing it and then hurting her with your words like I did.
I lean both palms on the bar and let my head hang for a beat. The wood smells like oil and cleaner and ten thousand nights of conversation. I keep thinking that if I breathe enough of it in, I’ll choke on the guilt and get it over with. It doesn’t work like that, though.
I’m just not that lucky.
What would I even say to him? Hey, I broke the first rule neither of us ever said out loud. Hey, I touched the part of your life I should have kept my hands off, and then I said something I’d give weeks off my life to take back.
Hey, I think about her when I’m slicing limes, when I’m scrubbing the floor, when I’m lying in my bed staring at the crack in the ceiling plaster I never seem to get around to patching.
Hey, I want to be the guy who shows up for her—not to fix it all, just to stand in a kitchen and zest lemons without cutting into the pith because she asked me, please, carefully.
I exhale and straighten.
I’m tired of this space I built between us.
I’m the one who hammered it in. It needed to be there.
It still needs to be, or at least that’s what I tell myself on nights like this.
But God, I am exhausted. By pretending my avoidance is noble.
By the way my stupid, obsessed brain writes lists and lists of things that I don’t yet know.
I don’t know what music she likes to listen to. I don’t know how she takes her coffee when she’s on hour eleven on her feet. I don’t know whether she likes to curl up in bed with a good book, or if she passes out the moment she hits the pillow.
I don’t know if she wakes up at night thinking of me the way I do with her.
Sweet Confessions is opening soon. Two weeks, give or take. I should send flowers. No, not flowers—everyone sends flowers, and they die in two days and leave a glass vase she has to wash.
Something better.
A credit at the restaurant supply store? Impersonal.
A hand-lettered sandwich board for the sidewalk? Is that too personal?
The thought stalls out, stuck somewhere between a chalkboard sign with her shop’s name curling across it and the idea of her rolling her eyes at me for overstepping.
I drag a hand down my face and reach for the switch above the bar. Last lights. Then I can lock up and go home and lie awake, continuing to think about her. Like every night.
That’s when I hear two sharp raps against the front door glass.
I freeze, hand hovering over the switch. We’re closed. The street’s dead quiet—no late diners drifting by, no cabs idling at the corner. Who the hell’s at the door now? At this hour?
My shoulders tense, the old instincts stirring—the ones that tell me to check, to be ready, just in case. A bar, even a nice one, can draw all kinds, and trouble doesn’t always look like trouble from the outside.
Slowly, I step out from behind the bar. Boots cautious against the tile as I move toward the front, every muscle tight. My eyes flick across the windows first, scanning the sidewalk. Empty. A moth flutters against the neon hops cone in the corner, wings ticking at the glass.
I edge closer until I can see the silhouette on the other side of the door.
Not a stranger. Not some drunk late for last call.
It’s Paige.
My heart jolts, too fast, too hard. For a second, I think I imagined her, that I wanted it so badly my brain conjured her shape out of the shadows.
But no—she’s really there. The glow from the streetlamp paints her in a pale halo, hair loose, arms crossed tight over her chest like she’s bracing against the night. Her eyes find mine through the glass, even with the glare from the neon sign.
What the hell is she doing here?
And so late.
I’m already moving before I can think better of it. My hand closes around the deadbolt as I twist, heavy metal cool against my palm.
The door creaks as it opens, and the cool night air pushes into the warm, beer-scented bar. My throat feels dry, words caught somewhere between my chest and my mouth.
“Paige,” I manage, low, rough. “What are you doing here? It’s so late. Come in.”
She looks up at me from the threshold, eyes sharp but tired, mouth pressed into a thin line.
For half a second, neither of us moves, and all I can think is that I dreamed this exact moment a hundred times.
“Come in,” I repeat. I step back and pull the door wider.
She hesitates half a beat, then slips past me. Cool night air follows her, then the door settles and the bar’s warmth closes in again. I flip the deadbolt.
“It’s late,” I repeat, because my mouth insists on filling the quiet with literally anything. “Is everything okay? What’s wrong?”
She shrugs, arms still folded. “Not really tired.”
“Yeah.” I drag a hand over the back of my neck. “I know that one.”
Awkward lands between us. I gesture toward the bar. “You want to sit?”
She nods and takes the end stool closest to the door, like she’s leaving herself an exit. I stay behind the counter because if I stand next to her, I’m going to forget every line we drew and set them all on fire.
“What can I get you? Water? Tea? Beer…” I trail off. Her face is a shade paler than usual, and there are stress lines around her mouth. “I’ve got ginger ale. Or coffee.”
“Ginger ale,” she says, too fast, then her voice softens. “Please.”