Chapter Two #3
We drove around for half an hour before landing at Blue Glass Brewery.
Even from the outside, the location wasn’t promising.
Few cars were parked out front, and there were no friendly painted ambassadors to greet us.
But the lights were on, and the door was unlocked. Desperation propelled me forward.
The microbrewery had all the bland hallmarks of modern design: polished concrete, reclaimed wood, chalkboard menu, Edison bulbs.
The potent bleach smell underscoring the aroma of fermentation was the only thing that separated it from any other taproom in the country, not to mention any coffee shop or boutique hotel.
Brittany and I selected a table in the warmest-looking corner.
Remembering his role, Reza took a seat alone on a barstool overlooking the street.
“I’ll get us something to drink,” Brittany said.
Beer excited me even less than cider, but there was no way I could handle doing this sober.
I supposed that was the whole point of meeting people in bars.
Unfortunately, this one was quiet. There were eight other people here, seven of them men.
The most attractive, who wasn’t even my type, was wearing a wedding band.
The second most attractive was the bartender.
I wasn’t positive, but it seemed like bad etiquette to hit on the person who was being paid to serve me.
Another man was on a date. One was old enough to be my father, one was sloppily drunk and monologuing to the table beside him, and the two at that table looked like they might have stormed the Capitol building. My mood grew even bleaker.
I gave the bartender another look. He had a ring on, too.
Brittany returned with two glasses. “We suck at this. You should have been the one to go up there, not me. The bartender… he’s not bad.”
I gestured to my ring finger.
“Oh. Shit. I forgot to look for that.”
“I feel awful. Reza’s over there alone, drinking water.”
“He’s fine. He’s playing a game on his phone.”
“It was nice of him to drive us.”
“He’s the best,” she said simply as she scoped out the rest of the room. Her face slackened with disappointment.
“Yep,” I said miserably.
“So… we wait? For other people to arrive? Is that how this goes?”
“I don’t know. Maybe?” I sipped my beer. It was all wrong, too citrusy and sunny for a night and a place like this. “I guess we should have looked around before ordering.”
“That’s okay. This is how people learn, right? We’re learning.”
“I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do if I see someone I am interested in. Like, am I supposed to just… approach him? And what are we supposed to talk about?”
“I don’t know. Whatever you’d normally talk about, I guess.”
“Books? Somehow, I don’t think talking about books would be considered sexy.”
“For the right person, it would be.”
My heart sank. “Please don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t say his name.”
“Who?”
“Macon.”
It seemed impossible that she wasn’t referring to him, but she looked genuinely confused. “Oh,” she said. “Right.”
I supposed she didn’t know much about him, though. Maybe she’d heard me mention him as a work friend, but she hadn’t heard of him as an object of interest until tonight.
“Maybe”—Brittany sounded hesitant—“you should go flirt with those men?”
She was talking about the insurrection guys. “Oh my God. No.”
“For practice!”
I glared daggers at her.
She shrugged helplessly. “It’s just that I’m still not sure what we’re doing here.”
“Well, I’m not sure either, okay?” I hadn’t meant to snap at her, and I shrank back and into myself. “I’m sorry.”
“Hey. Hey ,” she said, waiting until I looked at her. Her expression was serious, and for a moment, it grounded me. Then it reminded me of Macon again, and my heart cracked back open and bled. “We’ll figure this out,” she said. “Let’s give it some time.”
We drank slowly. The taproom was lackluster and quiet, and even the music was so low that I could barely hear it. I felt awful for dragging my friends into this listless hellhole. I checked my phone and found a message from Kat: How many men have you kissed so far?
None, but a guy my dad’s age keeps leering at Brittany.
“Look at us, hanging out at a bar and checking our phones,” Brittany said, and I wondered if she’d been texting Reza.
I didn’t tell her about the lech sitting behind her, because I didn’t want to make her night even worse.
“This place sucks.” She shoved her drink away.
“Blue Glass Brewery. And yet our glasses are clear.”
I pointed at an industrial pendant light. “They couldn’t even make the fixtures blue.”
“I’m so sick of these places that look like they were designed by one of Zuckerberg’s shitty algorithms.”
I pushed my drink across the table and clinked it against hers in a low-key cheers.
The brewery had a drafty chill. I stood to shrug my coat back on, giving up on looking cute, and noticed Reza still sitting by himself.
I headed over to his barstool. He glanced up from a colorful jeweled puzzle game, and I jerked my head toward our table.
He slipped his phone into his pocket, grabbed his sparkling water with lime, and joined us.
“We were just talking about how awful this place is,” I said, which made Brittany sort of laugh, so I sort of laughed, too. “God. What did I expect would happen?”
“That you would meet some strapping bar hunk who would whisk you back to his place and fuck your brains out?” Reza said.
My laughter grew louder as humility mixed in with my humiliation. But then my emotions turned again, and I started crying and gasping, and nothing was funny at all.
Reza placed a solid hand on my back. “Breathe. Breathe.”
I couldn’t. I couldn’t.
“You don’t have to do any of this tonight,” Brittany said, hastening to my side and whispering the permission I needed. “We can leave right now.”
The moon’s reflection on the fallen snow illuminated the town with an eerie brightness as they drove me home.
It looked like the midnight version of high noon.
In the raucous cider house, phantom women circled Cory.
Maybe he’d already taken one of them back to his place.
Or maybe he was inside one of their apartments, naked and warm and tangled into a new position, something I wasn’t flexible enough to achieve.
I saw Macon stumbling backward against the doors. No. Ingrid. No.
The snow was coming down harder. My cold fingers grasped each other. I held my own hand because no one was there to hold it for me.