2. Brynn
brYNN
The Hideout smelled like spilled beer and old wood and something fried in the kitchen, which meant it smelled like home.
I had picked up four shifts this week, which was one more than usual, and if my best friend Dani asked I was going to tell her it was because Marco needed the coverage.
That was true. It was also true that being behind this bar was the only time my brain reliably shut up, and this week my brain had been particularly loud.
I grabbed a glass off the rack and started filling an order. Dark brew, local tap, poured at an angle the way Dad always said a dark should be poured. Mom was the one who had actually taught me that. But the memory was his.
I had been thinking about him a lot lately.
Not in a spiral way. Just in the way you thought about someone when you kept watching someone else refuse to stop grieving them.
Mom had been at the arena until eight the night before.
I knew because Moose had forgotten his water bottle and texted me about the lights still being on in the office hallway when he went back for it.
I had not replied to that text because there was nothing to say that I hadn’t already said to her directly and gotten exactly nowhere with.
She was not going to stop sitting at his desk. She was not going to stop using his computer. She was not going to stop coming to that arena at seven in the morning and staying until the cleaning crew gave her pointed looks on their way out at night.
I knew this. I had known this for fourteen months, which was how long I had been back in Las Vegas telling myself I would leave again once she was okay.
The problem was defining okay.
“Bry.” Moose materialized at the end of the bar like a six-foot-four storm in practice gear. “Please tell me there is food left.”
“Kitchen closes in ten minutes.”
He planted both hands on the bar. “Bry.”
“Go.” I jerked my chin toward the kitchen window. “Tell Sal I sent you.”
He was already moving. I watched him lumber off and shook my head and turned back to the bar.
The truth was I loved it here. That was the part that made everything complicated.
I loved the smell of this place and the weight of the glasses in my hand and the specific rhythm of a busy Friday night where your body just knew what to do without your brain having to be involved.
I loved these guys, even when they smelled like a locker room and ordered seven things at once.
I loved my mother, even when she made me want to scream into a pillow.
I had moved back from Portland with two suitcases and a manuscript I had been working on for six years and a master’s program I had put on hold for a semester that had quietly become fourteen months.
The manuscript was still on my laptop. Still unfinished.
Still something I was going to get back to once things settled down.
Things had not settled down.
I was still paying sixty dollars a month on a storage unit in Portland that held the rest of my life.
“She all right?” Moose reappeared at the bar with a plate of fries and the particular expression he got when he was about to say something I didn’t want to hear.
“She’s fine.”
“Moose told me she was there until eight again,” Rhett said as he appeared beside him, dropping onto a stool. He hadn’t even been there two seconds ago. I had no idea how a man that size moved that quietly.
I set a tonic water in front of him without being asked. “I know.”
“She needs a reason to go home,” he said.
“She has reasons. She just doesn’t use them.”
Rhett looked at me over his glass. “We need a coach, Bry.”
“I know that too.”
“Not a placeholder. Someone real. Someone who walks in and these guys actually listen to.” He set his drink down. “Jett hit the boards so hard tonight I genuinely considered calling an ambulance.”
“Is he okay?”
“He’s fine. Drama queen.” Rhett rubbed his face. “Your mom working on it?”
“You know she is.”
“Good.” He picked his drink back up. “Because I love these idiots but another season of almost isn’t going to do it for me.”
I leaned on the bar and looked at him. Rhett was one of the best players I had ever watched, and I had grown up in those stands. He deserved someone who knew what to do with him. They all did.
“She’ll figure it out,” I said. “She always does.”
He nodded. Didn’t look totally convinced, but he let it go.
The bar filled up the way it always did on practice nights, guys drifting over from the arena, loud and loose and ready to decompress.
I worked the length of it and took orders and made drinks and felt completely in my element and tried not to think about the manuscript, the storage unit, the master’s advisor I had emailed twice in the last month and still hadn’t heard back from.
Outside, Las Vegas was doing what it always did. Blazing. Humming. Refusing to go quiet.
Dad used to say this city kept its promises. That if you stayed, it gave you something worth staying for.
I was still waiting to find out if that was true.