24. Darcy
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
darcy
There’s no sign outside. Just a narrow black door with a fading gold number beside it and warm amber light spilling across the wet sidewalk.
Mack pushes it open, and the smell hits me first—old wood, whiskey, and brick that’s been holding this building together longer than most of the people drinking inside it have been alive.
My eyes adjust a second later. Exposed brick climbs the walls behind the bar, shelves of liquor stretching almost to the ceiling, and the leather stools look like they’ve spent decades collecting elbows, spilled drinks, and terrible decisions.
Somewhere in the back, somebody lines up a shot at one of the pool tables while Springsteen hums softly through the speakers. A faded sheet of printer paper taped beside the register reads “CASH ONLY,” looking like it’s been there since around 2009.
I love it immediately.
Mack moves through the place like he’s been coming here long enough that the room stopped noticing him years ago.
One nod to the bartender, one in return, and that’s apparently all the social effort required.
I trail after him to the bar, struck by the fact that nobody here looks like they’re trying to be seen.
Everyone here just exists in the room comfortably, half-finished conversations curling through the air alongside the smell of bourbon and the storm that just started outside.
I slide onto the stool beside him and glance around again, choosing to blame the warm feeling spreading through my chest entirely on the lighting.
“Is this your version of therapy?” I ask.
“Something like that.”
“And what’s your success rate so far?”
“Usually works for me.”
“And for everyone else?”
“I don’t take anyone here,” he says simply.
“Oh? So I'm the only fuck buddy you've ever taken to your secret whisky bar?”
Mack glances sideways at me.
“You’re the only anything I’ve ever brought here. And that’s not—” He cuts himself off and reaches for the drink menu instead.
I just stare at him. I’m almost positive that’s the first time I’ve watched Mack MacAllister voluntarily end a conversation before he won it. I let him have it, though, mostly because I’m also trying very hard not to examine why I suddenly want the answer so badly in the first place.
“What do you want?” he asks, eyes still on the menu.
“Whatever you’re having.”
“Bourbon.”
“Perfect.”
Two glasses appear a minute later. Mack’s fingers brush mine as he slides one across the bar, and I decide that’s another thing I’m not going to think too hard about tonight.
For a while, neither of us says much. The bartender dries glasses at one end of the bar while someone near the pool table laughs loud enough to earn a half-hearted shush from his friend.
Classic rock drifts through the speakers, glasses clink somewhere behind us, and the bourbon burns all the way down.
Somewhere between the first sip and the second, my mother’s voice finally starts to loosen its grip inside my head.
Mack spins his glass slowly against the bar top.
“My parents think I made a mistake,” I say eventually.
“About?”
“Everything.” I let out a humorless laugh. “The breakup, the move…my apparently catastrophic decision to become a person with free will.”
His mouth twitches faintly against the rim of his glass.
“They think I walked away from something people spend their whole lives looking for.”
“And what’s that?”
“Someone who was stable. Kind. Had a good job. Wanted the same things I was supposed to want.”
“But you didn’t want those things?”
“I thought I did.”
He studies me over the rim of his glass.
“No,” he says quietly. “You thought you were supposed to.”
The words land like a bruise I didn’t know I had until someone pressed on it.
“There’s a difference.”
I look at him for a second.
“You sound like you know.”
He takes a sip.
“I’ve met a lot of people who spend their lives convincing themselves they don’t want something.” He sets his glass back on the bar. “Usually because it’s easier than admitting they do.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because it beats wanting it and not getting it.”
“And what about you?”
His eyes flick to mine.
“Never mind what I want.” One corner of his mouth threatens a smile. “We’re talking about you.”
I sigh.
“The problem is, even with all of that…” I stare into my glass. “I still felt empty.”
The words come easier after that.
“I think what I want is someone who lets me be exactly who I am and loves me anyway. Someone who cares what I think. What I want. Someone I don’t have to shrink for.”
I finish the bourbon in one swallow.
“And, maybe more than anything…” I laugh quietly. “I want everyone to stop looking at my life like I accidentally wandered into traffic. I made the decision that felt right to me. I just wish they trusted that I know my own heart better than they do.”
Mack doesn’t answer right away.
“People are allowed to disagree with you.”
I look over.
“Doesn’t mean they’re right.”
The certainty in his voice makes me face him fully. He reaches for his glass, tipping it lightly toward mine.
“To not living the life people expect of you.”
I smile before I can stop myself and lift my glass to meet his.
“To not being afraid to want the things you do.”
Our glasses clink softly between us. I don’t know if it’s the bourbon or the rain or the fact that he showed up and got me out of my own head before I could drown in my own thoughts, but for the first time all day it feels like I can breathe again.
The pool table in the back is free by the time we finish the second round. Mack finishes the last of his bourbon, sets the glass on the bar, and jerks his head toward it. I follow without thinking because that’s apparently just how this works now.
“You play?” he asks, already handing me a cue.
“Not well.”
“Good.” He nods toward the triangle. “Rack ’em.”
“Excuse me?”
He looks at me expectantly before I finally realize he’s serious and I begin to rack.
I’m objectively not a good pool player. I am, however, extremely competitive and completely insufferable about it.
I’m also somehow winning by some combination of beginner’s luck and the unreasonable amount of concentration I bring to every shot.
I take my time, lower lip caught between my teeth, pretending not to notice Mack on the other side of the table while sinking just enough balls to irritate him in a way I can tell he’ll never admit.
Every time I move, I feel him watching me, sending heat up my spine.
I miss twice in a row and blame it on the lighting and not at all on the fact that he’s looking at me like I’m the only person in the room.
I sink the next shot and immediately straighten, pointing at the table.
“That,” I say, “was intentional.”
Mack looks at the table, then back at me.
“That was lucky.”
“That was skill!”
“It wasn’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I was watching.”
“Don’t diminish my natural talent,” I say, already circling the table like I absolutely have a strategy.
I lean over to line up the next shot and immediately feel it.
I glance up, which, in hindsight, is a mistake, because he isn’t just watching me anymore.
His gaze lingers a beat too long, patient in a way that makes my stomach flip before my brain catches up, and suddenly my grip shifts on the cue as heat curls low in my stomach, every coherent thought dissolving into the deeply inconvenient realization that I’d much rather be holding his stick and getting poked by his cue instead.
I take the shot anyway, missing my intended target completely and scratching the ball instead.
“See,” Mack says. “Luck.”
“That’s not fair,” I protest. “I was distracted.”
“Mm.”
He steps in behind me easily, like the space beside me has always belonged to him.
“You’re gripping it too tight,” he says.
We both let the innuendo sit for a moment.
“I’m not—”
His hand glides over mine anyway, adjusting my grip like we’re doing something significantly more personal than playing pool.
“You are,” his deep voice rumbles against the shell of my ear.
He steps in closer and his chest brushes my back, warm and solid against me, close enough that my entire train of thought quietly leaves the station without me.
His other hand settles at my hip to steady me, and every remaining thought files out right behind it until all that’s left is the awareness of him.
His chest against my back. His arm brushing mine every time I breathe.
His mouth is close enough to my ear that I become embarrassingly aware of the fact that I’m supposed to be playing pool and have absolutely no recollection of how to accomplish that.
Somewhere in front of me there’s technically still a pool table. There’s probably even a shot I’m supposed to be taking.
That feels optimistic.
“Relax,” he says quietly.
Which is an insane thing to say to someone while standing this close to them.
I try anyway…I really do.
Then his thumb shifts once against my hip, barely a movement at all, and whatever fragile thread of concentration I’d managed to hold onto simply snaps.
I lower the cue onto the table with as much dignity as I can salvage.
Mack’s hand lingers for another second before he steps back, and the cool air slipping into the space between us feels entirely too personal.
“Another round?”
The Buick isn’t the only thing running hot on the way home, my body immediately starts offering up information I did not request.
The warmth still sitting low in my stomach, the lingering awareness of my own legs—the heat that has nothing to do with the bourbon and everything to do with the way I could feel his hard length through his jeans when he had me bent over the pool table like he didn’t care if the whole bar watched our foreplay.
I press my thighs together instinctively, then uncross them a second later because the motion suddenly feels like a confession.
When I glance at him, it’s supposed to be subtle. Just enough to look without really looking.
A completely useless strategy, apparently.
“Something wrong?”
I look over just in time to catch his mouth threatening a smile.