Chapter Fourteen
Teague
I’m restocking the top shelf when the door slams open hard enough to hit the wall.
Saturday afternoon. The bar’s been open for an hour.
I’ve got three customers, all regulars, all quiet.
Paperback guy in his booth. A woman named Diane who comes in every Saturday at four and drinks two glasses of red wine while doing crossword puzzles.
And a kid named Seth who buses tables for me on weekends.
The door slams and Zoe Kimball is standing in it.
She’s glowing. There’s no other word for it.
Her whole body is vibrating at a frequency I can feel from across the room, and her face is doing the thing where every emotion she’s ever had is happening simultaneously and she can’t contain any of them.
She’s been crying. Her eyes are red and wet and she’s grinning so wide it looks like it hurts.
“I got in,” she says.
She says it to the whole bar. To the bottles and the neon and the pool table and Paperback guy, who actually looks up from his book for the first time in recorded history.
“I got in. Station 11. Probationary. Three months. I start Monday.”
She’s crossing the room before I can respond, moving fast, that full-speed Zoe momentum that doesn’t have brakes, and she reaches the bar and she puts both hands flat on the wood and she looks at me and she’s crying and laughing and her face is the most alive thing I’ve ever seen.
“She said yes. Cap said yes. Iris was there, she's Cap's girlfriend, and she gave her this look and Cap just—she said yes.”
“Zoe.”
“I’m on Station 11. I’m on the crew. Hayes is my training officer. I start Monday at six and I’m going to be early, I’m going to be so early, I’m going to be there at five, no, five-thirty, no, five because—”
“Zoe.”
She stops. Breathing hard. Hands on the bar. Looking at me.
I pour a Moscow mule. Set it in front of her. She stares at it.
“Congratulations,” I say. “You earned it.”
Her face crumbles. Not sad-crumbles. The other kind, the kind where you’ve been holding everything together for three weeks and someone finally says the right thing and your body just lets go. She picks up the mug and drinks and sets it down and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand.
“I told you first,” she says. “Before my parents. Before Keely. You were the first person I told. I need to celebrate.” She looks at the speaker above the bar. “Can I pick the music?”
“No.”
“Please.”
I sigh, knowing I'm going to do this for her. “What do you want to hear?”
“The Interrupters.”
I put on the Interrupters.
“She’s Kerosene” comes through the speakers, fast and bright and furious, and Zoe slides off her stool and stands in the middle of Anthem and starts singing.
She can’t sing. I want to be clear about this.
Zoe Kimball cannot carry a tune. She’s off-key and too loud and she doesn’t know all the words so she’s filling in the gaps with sounds that are approximately words, and she’s bouncing on her toes and pumping her fist. Her hair is flying around her face and she’s the most ridiculous person who has ever stood in this bar, and I’ve had actual bands play here.
Diane looks up from her crossword. Seth stops wiping tables. Paperback guy watches over the top of his book with an expression that might, if you squinted, be amusement.
I lean on the bar and watch her.
She’s wearing jeans and sneakers and a t-shirt that’s too big, and her hair is pulled back and her eyes are still red from crying and she’s singing punk karaoke at four-thirty on a Saturday afternoon in a half-empty bar, and she’s happy.
She’s the happiest person in the city right now.
She’s the happiest person I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot of people in this bar celebrate a lot of things, and none of them looked like this.
None of them looked at me the way she’s looking at me right now, singing the chorus with her eyes on mine, not performing, not showing off, just singing in my direction because I’m the person she wants to sing to.
The song ends. Another one starts. “Take Back the Power.” Zoe keeps going. She’s dancing now, if you can call it dancing, full-body movement that has no choreography and no shame, and Seth is grinning and Diane is tapping her pen on the bar and even paperback guy hasn’t gone back to his book.
She does three songs. Three Interrupters tracks, back to back, while I stand behind the bar and watch and don’t look away, not once, because looking away from Zoe Kimball while she’s burning this bright would be like turning your back on the sun and pretending you don’t need the warmth.
She finishes. Out of breath. Sweating. She falls onto her stool and picks up the Moscow mule and drains it.
“Sorry,” she says. “I got carried away.”
“You always get carried away. It’s your whole thing.”
“Is that bad?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
She smiles. Smaller now. Tired. The adrenaline is fading and underneath it she’s just a girl who got the thing she wanted and doesn’t know what to do with the quiet that comes after the wanting stops. "Okay if I sit here again?"
“Stay,” I say. “Hang out. I’m working but you can sit.”
“Yeah?”
“You’re a paying customer. Sit wherever you want.”
She sits. She stays all night. She texts her parents, texts Keely, takes calls from friends.
Her mom calls and I can hear the screaming through the phone from behind the bar, high-pitched and joyful, and Zoe holds the phone away from her ear and grins at me and mouths told you.
Her dad calls separately, and that one’s quieter, and Zoe takes it outside and comes back with red eyes again and says “he cried” and nothing else.
The Saturday crowd fills in around her. Her stool becomes her command center.
Keely shows up at eight with Jordan and Raquelle and they take over the corner table and there are Aperol spritzes and toasts and at one point Keely stands on a chair and announces to the entire bar that her best friend is a firefighter at Station 11, and three strangers raise their glasses.
I work. I pour and I mix and I manage the room.
But every time I pass Zoe’s end of the bar I catch her looking at me, and every time she catches me looking back, and we don’t say anything because the bar is loud and I’m working and she’s celebrating and there’s no space for the conversation we’re about to have.
But we both know it’s coming. It's obvious every time I catch her eye and she gives me that little smile. That smile that says she can't wait to get me alone again. To get me to herself. I'm with her there. I want to have her to myself again too.
Last call at 1:45. The crowd thins. Keely and the girls leave at midnight in a cloud of hugs and promises and someone yelling “six AM Monday don’t be late!” Diane left hours ago. Paperback guy is long gone. Seth finished his shift and went home.
By two o’clock it’s me and Zoe.
I turn off the overheads. The neon stays on. Blue and pink and the flickering yellow of the Anthem sign. The bar goes quiet and soft and the room shrinks to the space between us.
I wash the last glasses. Wipe the bar. She watches me from her stool, arms folded on the bar top, chin resting on her hands. She’s tired. The kind of tired that comes from feeling everything all day.
“You should go home,” I say.
“I know.”
“Your parents are probably waiting up.”
“Probably.” She doesn’t move. “Teague?”
“Yeah.”
“You sent me a song at three in the morning.”
“I did.”
“It’s about not being able to wait anymore.” She lifts her head from her hands. “What can’t you wait for?”
I set the rag down. My hands are damp. The bar is clean and the glasses are racked and the bottles are faced and everything is in its place, everything is where it should be, and Zoe Kimball is sitting in my bar asking me a question I’ve been trying not to answer for weeks.
I walk around the bar. Not behind it. Around it. To her side. I’ve never done this. The bar is my territory, my boundary, the thing between me and everyone else. I don’t leave it during hours. I don’t leave it after hours. I stand behind it and I pour and the distance stays fixed.
I walk around the bar and I stand next to Zoe’s stool and she turns to face me and her knees are between us and her eyes are dark and wide and she licks her lips, that nervous thing, and I’ve been watching her do that for three weeks and I’m done watching.
I kiss her.
It’s not soft. It’s not tentative. I put my hand on her jaw and I kiss her like I’ve been thinking about it, because I have, every night for weeks, behind the bar, on the walk home, in bed at three in the morning, and the real thing is nothing like the thinking because her mouth is warm and she makes a sound, a small surprised sound that turns into something else, and her hands come up and grab the front of my shirt and pull me closer.
She tastes like ginger beer and lime. She kisses me back like she’s been waiting for this since the Shirley Temple, which she probably has, because Zoe doesn’t do slow, Zoe runs at everything, and when I pull back she’s breathing hard and her eyes are bright and her hands are still fisted in my shirt.
“That,” she says. “That’s what you can’t wait for.”
“Shut up.”
“Make me.”
I kiss her again. And again. And the neon flickers blue-pink-blue and the bar is closed and the street is empty and somewhere in this neighborhood a siren starts and fades and Zoe doesn't pull away because maybe for the first time in her life she’s not listening for Station 11.
She’s here. She’s right here. And I’m done pretending this is just me being mildly interested in a regular.