Chapter 1 #2
“They looked infected.”
I roll my eyes. “You ate two.”
“I was testing whether they were safe for the public,” he retorts as he picks up another glass.
The player grins. “They were so good.”
I turn to Oliver with a triumphant smile. “See? The Vipers appreciate me.”
“The Vipers think beer is a food group.”
“Protein,” I say.
“That’s not how protein works.”
I slap my hand against the bar. “You wouldn’t know. You hate sports.”
“I know beer isn’t protein.”
“And I’m not hearing denial that you hate sports, Oliver.”
He gives me the kind of look that says he’s known me for far too long and regrets every second of it.
I smile wider. Annoying him is the closest thing I’ve ever come to a vitamin regimen.
My phone buzzes inside of the cup. A loud, ringing noise against the glass.
I lunge for it, but Oliver moves faster.
An insulting realization, considering I try to lift weights a few times a week when my body isn’t staging a full-scale rebellion.
I consider myself reasonably quick. But Oliver has bartender reflexes and the moral certainty of a man preventing public disaster.
He snatches my phone out of the glass a split second before I can reach it. “Absolutely not.”
“It could be Marley.”
He checks it. “It is Marley.”
“Then give it to me,” I demand, my hand outstretched.
He squints at the screen. “She says, and I quote, ‘If you cry again, I’m coming over with a shovel.’”
I press my hand to my chest. “For Grant?”
“She didn’t specify, and I respect the ambiguity.”
“Did she say anything else?”
His mouth twitches. “She says, ‘tell her I love her, and if she texts him, I’ll shave off one of her eyebrows in her sleep.’”
I gasp. “Not my brows!” I ignore the fact that my other best friend knows Oliver would have taken my phone from me.
“She knows just where to hit,” Oliver all but smiles.
“My brows are innocent in this.”
He points to my hands. “Your thumbs are not.” He puts the phone on the shelf behind him, next to the top-shelf bourbon I know he’s pretended customers didn’t deserve.
I let my arm fall across the bar dramatically. “Everyone is so mean to me.”
“Yes, that’s why we rescued you from a gas station parking lot seven days ago.”
I lift my head just enough to glare at him. “We said we aren’t talking about that.”
“You tried to drive to Florida without checking your gas.”
“My car lies!” I cry.
“Your car has a gauge.”
“Correction: my car has a decorative gauge.”
He stops. “Halston.”
I put my hands up. “It has never once told me the truth in its life. If my car were a man, you would hate him.”
“I hate your car already,” he mumbles.
“That’s because it has personality.”
“It has a check-engine light that’s been on since Easter.”
I shrug. “Exactly. Personality.”
Oliver looks toward the ceiling like God may personally intervene.
God did not.
God had abandoned this conversation around Suzy Homemaker.
The memory of my little issue on the side of the road makes my throat tight, so I drink more betrayal bubbles.
Oliver notices. He notices everything except when people flirt with him, which is astonishing because people flirt constantly. He treats attraction like a clerical error.
“Eat the fries,” he says.
“I don’t want them.”
“You ordered them.”
“Past Halston made choices current Halston cannot support.”
“Current Halston is drunk.”
“Current Halston has clarity.”
“Current Halston asked about Suzy Homemaker’s hypothetical infidelity.”
I pick up a fry, biting it aggressively. “There. Happy?”
“Rarely,” he adds more ice to the well.
“You should work on that.”
“I own a bar. Happiness would ruin my brand.”
The Vipers player calls again. “Oliver, if you won’t put on the highlights, can we at least get another round?”
Oliver stares at him.
“Please?”
He mutters something that sounds an awful lot like, “Athletes with manners. The end has to be near,” and goes to pour their drinks.
I watch him move down the bar, all long-suffering competence and rolled-up sleeves.
Oliver is the kind of man who makes loneliness look like a management style.
He’s built Saints & Sinners into something people need, then acts annoyed when they need it.
Every regular has a story. Every player has a preferred drink he pretends not to remember.
Every grieving woman at the bar got fries, water, and their phone restricted.
He would rather eat glass than admit he loves anyone. Unfortunately for him, we know.
He returns with three beers balanced between his fingers, a few other regulars coming up to take them, before sliding the mixed drinks over the bar to the Vipers. His expression is of a man serving a sentence. One Viper tries to tip him with a signed baseball.
Oliver stares at it.
“It’ll be worth something one day,” the player smiles.
“It’s worth something now,” Oliver says smoothly.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. One less conversation.”
He comes back to me without looking back at the table of giggling baseball players.
I point to him. “You like them.”
“I like pest control too. Doesn’t mean I invite bugs to dinner with me.”
“You know their drink orders,” I insist.
“I know many tragic facts against my will.”
“You know that one’s batting average.”
“I only know it because he yelled it during a toast last week.”
“You smiled when he hit that one home run.” The TV had only been on sports because one of the mean old ladies stole the remote, he had said.
He shakes his head. “I had gas.”
“You’ve never smiled when you’ve had gas.”
“I’m versatile.”
I laugh, and immediately hate how close I come to crying. Like laughing sounds wrong to my ears. The guilt creeps in.
Oliver’s face softens by half a millimeter, which to his standards is basically a hug. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Do what?”
“Turn everything into a bit.”
I look down at my hands. My nails are painted a pale pink, but the polish has chipped on my pinky finger and thumb.
I had been meaning to redo them before the tasting appointment for the wedding cake I was no longer ordering.
I had a whole plan. Pink nails. White dress.
Maybe a little bow in my hair because Grant used to say it made me look sweet.
Sweet. God. I hate that word now.
“I don’t know how not to be funny about it,” I say. “If I’m not funny, I’m just…”
Oliver waits.
I shrug, and the word comes out small. “Sad.”
He leans against the bar. For once, he doesn’t have a joke, and I think that makes it worse.
I blink hard and look away, gazing into the mirror behind him.
My reflection looks like a woman assembled from pretty scraps.
My blonde hair is falling out of its clip.
Green eyes too bright from tears, with mascara smudged at the outer corner.
Gold hoops hang from my ears, and my soft blue cardigan is buttoned wrong over a white tank.
I look young and tired and exactly like someone who had learned a week ago that being chosen is not the same thing as being loved.
“Maybe I was too much,” I say again, softer. “Maybe that’s what happens. Men like me at first because I’m fun, and then eventually I’m just inconvenient.”
Oliver’s expression goes hard. “Grant cheated because Grant is a coward.”
I swallow.
“He cheated,” he continues, “because he wanted to. Because he liked being adored and admired and obeyed, and when real life asked him to be a partner instead of a main character in a cologne commercial, he found someone easier to impress.”
I chuckle sadly. “That was very specific.”
“I’ve had a week to refine it.”
I pause. “He said I was emotional.”
“You are emotional.”
I look at him, wounded, but he rolls his eyes. “That wasn’t an insult.”
“It sounded like one.”
“Only because you’re letting him narrate.”
The words land harder than I expect.
You’re letting him narrate.
I look down again.
Grant’s voice has been in my head all week. Him saying I was making a scene. Him saying everyone made mistakes. Him saying we had built too much to throw away. Him saying I was being dramatic when I left. Him saying, “Halston, please,” like I was embarrassing him by bleeding where people could see.
Grant said my name like it belonged to him.
I rub at the pale line on my finger where my engagement ring used to sit. “I wanted to be enough,” I admit.
Oliver’s mouth flattens. “You were.”
“Clearly not,” I say, my eyes burning.
“No, you were plenty. He was greedy,” he argues.
I close my eyes. For a second, the bar blurs into sound. Laughter, ice, low music, the Vipers yelling, Oliver breathing through his nose like he’s trying not to commit a felony for friendship.
Then a basket shifts against my elbow, and I open one eye. Mozzarella sticks.
I stare at them.
“When did you make those?”
“I anticipated a second wave of despair.” He crosses his arms over his chest and leans against the counter.
“Did you?”
“I own a bar. I can smell escalation.” He tosses his rag over his shoulder.
“You deep-fried cheese for my heartbreak?”
“I deep-fried cheese because you are a menace when underfed,” he corrects.
I pick one up, stretching it between my fingers in one long, glorious ribbon. It nearly makes me cry again. “This is the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me.”
“Raise your standards,” he says as he hands a patron a beer.
“I tried. He slept with his secretary.”
Oliver’s eyes narrow, and I wave a mozzarella stick. “Sorry. Dark joke.”
“I liked it,” he says, which is basically a smile.
“You looked murderous.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“Suzy Homemaker never had mozzarella sticks at midnight.”
“Suzy Homemaker was a prison.”
“Suzy Homemaker would have had a casserole.”
Oliver’s face twists with disgust. “Casseroles are just lasagnas that gave up.”
I point a cheese stick at him. “That is offensive to Midwestern women everywhere.”
“We’re in Baltimore.”
“I’m from Ellicott City. I’m allowed to defend theoretical casseroles.”
“It’s important for me to know that you understand Ellicott City is still Maryland. Twenty minutes from here is still Maryland. You know that, right?”
I look back down at the basket. “Maybe I’m not wife material.”