Nash
TWO
It was a Thursday night in September and my kid’s teacher was pretending to be drunk and spilling her guts to me.
I had stopped indulging her requests for more vodka two hours ago; she’d been drinking straight orange juice ever since, enough that I was going to have to restock earlier than expected. She’d told me about her shitty ex, how lonely it was in a new town, how much she loved my kid.
And now…Dave down at the end of the bar was heading out, and the couple in the corner booth had taken their makeout session to a bedroom.
I wiped down the bar where Dave had been sitting and didn’t look at her.
“Last call,” I said. To the room. To no one in particular.
Maggie Laine looked up from her orange juice. “Am I keeping you?”
“Bar closes at eleven.”
She glanced at her phone. Something crossed her face — the brief, guilty calculation of a woman who had absolutely clocked what time it was and stayed anyway. “I should go.”
She didn’t move.
I didn’t tell her to.
I finished wiping down the bar and came back to where she was sitting and leaned against the counter, and she looked up at me with those dark eyes and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear and I thought, very clearly, don’t.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
“You’ve been asking me things all night.”
“One more.” She turned her glass in a slow circle. “When I got assigned to kindergarten this year, the other teachers found out I had Nell.” She paused. “They were very...concerned.”
I scoffed. “Nell’s a great kid, I don’t know why they would—”
“Because of this thing they call The Nash Effect,” she said.
I let out a short laugh, then. Of course…of course it wasn’t about my kid.
It was about me.
And…my reputation.
I knew I had one. I’d even been told by a couple friends that women around town called it The Nash Effect, as if it was magic. But…the thing is, I couldn’t help that I had a body count higher than anyone else in town.
Just so happened that I was good at certain things.
“I’ve heard that before,” I said, shaking my head with a smile.
“Is it true?”
“You asking me if I hypnotize women into falling in love with me?”
She laughed. “That’s not what I said.”
“What are you asking then, Maggie?”
Her eyes widened just a touch…eyelashes fluttered. Face flushed.
She was acting drunk. She wasn’t drunk. She’d maybe had three shots of vodka in that orange juice all night.
“I’m asking,” she said carefully, “if you’re as—“ She stopped. Looked down at her glass. Looked back up. “Ms. Petersen was very descriptive.”
“Ms. Petersen should mind her business.”
“She was trying to protect me.”
“From what?”
She held my gaze. “From you.”
I let that sit there between us for a moment. Then I leaned forward, both forearms on the bar, close enough that I watched her breath catch.
“Nobody needs protecting from me.”
“Really?”
I shook my head. “The things I do—”
I paused, not sure how explicit I should get. There was…there was something between us right now, tonight, in this empty bar. We were alone. She’d walked in here needing something and stayed.
I’d noticed her when I was dropping off my kid.
I couldn’t deny that. First day of school, two months ago.
She’d been crouched down to Nell’s level in the classroom doorway, straight dark hair tumbling like water over her one shoulder, saying something that made my daughter feel safe and allowed Nell to turn around and say, I’m okay, dad.
Then Nell had run in…and Maggie Laine had looked up at me and I’d gotten the full picture—blue eyes, wide smile, too fucking young—and I’d thought absolutely not and meant it.
Then she’d turned around and I’d let my eyes slide over her: high-waisted pants that hugged her ass just right, a dip in her shirt at the back showing the barest hint of a tattoo.
Fuck, I wanted to see that tattoo.
“You were saying…?” she murmured.
“It’s not hypnotism,” I finally said. “It’s good old fashioned consent—she asks, I say yes. I ask, she says yes. We do our little song and dance, and I guess I’m just that good.”
Maggie stared at me for a long, long moment.
“That’s it?” she said. “That’s the big secret?”
I laughed. “What were you expecting?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Something more mysterious, I guess. Ms. Petersen made it sound like a thing.”
“That’s because Ms. Petersen and I hooked up about fifteen years ago and she’s never been satisfied with her husband. Not my problem.”
Maggie stared in complete and utter shock.
Okay…maybe I went a bit too far there.
“You and Ms. Petersen—” She stopped. Shook her head. “Ms. Petersen who wears the sweater with the apples on it.”
“It was fifteen years ago.”
“She’s married.”
“She wasn’t then.” I picked up a glass. “She’s been married twelve years. Do the math.”
Maggie did the math. Something crossed her face that she was very unsuccessfully trying to hide.
“So the Nash Effect,” she said carefully, “is just—you’re just very—“
“Good at it,” I said. “Yeah.”
“And Ms. Petersen has been warning your daughter’s teachers about you for—“
“Fifteen years, apparently.” I set down the glass. “Look, I’m not going to apologize for my past. I’ve never lied to anyone, never made promises I didn’t mean. Women in this town know what I am.”
“And what are you?”
I looked at her.
She looked back, and there it was again—that thing she kept doing, dropping her eyes to my mouth and catching herself, pink in her cheeks, sitting very still on that barstool like she was afraid of what she’d do if she moved.
Curious, I thought. She was curious.
That was the most dangerous thing she could possibly be.
“Someone you probably shouldn’t be alone with,” I said. “At midnight on a school night. In an empty bar.”
She swallowed.
“Okay,” she said. And didn’t move an inch.
Damn it…damn it, I was giving her an out. I needed her to take it. Needed her to be sensible.
She wasn’t going to be sensible.
I could see it all over her—the set of her shoulders, the way she was looking at me, the fact that she’d been sitting on that barstool for three hours telling me things she probably hadn’t told anyone since she got to this town.
She hadn’t come in here looking for this.
But she’d found it anyway and she knew it and so did I.
I should have told her to go home.
I thought about her fucking asshole ex. About some man who’d had five years of her and ended it over a phone call. About the way she’d looked when she walked in here—like someone had taken something from her, like she couldn’t remember what she was worth.
I thought about how she’d looked up at me on the first day of school and smiled like it was easy.
I thought about the tattoo.
“Maggie,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“I need you to make a decision.”
She blinked. “What decision?”
“You know what decision.”
The bar was dead quiet. She held my gaze and I watched her think it through—the reasons, the complications, the very long list of things that made this a terrible idea. I watched her get through all of them.
“What if I’m asking?” she said.
Every muscle in my body went taut. “Are you? I need to hear it.”
She bit her lip. “I…I want to know what they’re talking about. The Nash Effect. I want…I want a taste.”
Fucking hell, a goddamn taste. I knew exactly what she’d taste like. Orange juice, sunshine, sex.
I was already getting hard. Fuck me.
I came around the bar…Maggie tracking me the whole way, turning on the barstool to face me, opening her legs like an invitation. I stepped between her knees and looked down at her, and I thought, she’s too young.
But then I leaned forward and boxed her in.
She inhaled a sharp breath.
“Last call,” I said. “You walk out of here…or you stay the night.”
Her breath was ragged, rough. “But—don’t you have to go home to Nell—”
Of course she was thinking about my daughter, worried about her.
I didn’t think she realized how goddamn sexy that was.
“Nell’s having a sleepover with her cousins,” I said. “That means I’m all yours, if you want it.”
I reached up and cupped her cheek, and she shivered all the way through her body, her eyes fluttering shut.
“So,” I went on, “you want it?”
Maggie inhaled…exhaled.
“Yes.”