Chapter 3
Kevin
I looked up.
Tommy had twisted halfway back toward the room, Dennings already steering him outside.
“Must be nice,” Tommy said, loud enough for everyone left to hear. “Pretty girl, can’t drive, needs somewhere to stay. Hell of a setup.”
Everything in me locked down.
“You need to leave,” I said.
His grin widened. “What? Worried people might get the wrong idea?”
The room already got it. Or enough of it to do damage.
Dennings shoved him out. “Move.”
Tommy let himself get pushed through the door, laughing.
I stayed crouched beside Lauren with my hand still braced against the side of her head, and all at once the contact felt visible in a way it hadn’t a second before.
Not just to them. To me. Tommy had named the ugliest version of it and left it hanging there, and the worst part was that I wanted her badly enough for the accusation to find purchase.
I was helping her because she was hurt. I was also a man with his hand on a woman he’d wanted ten minutes earlier.
Both things were true, and neither one canceled the other out.
I took my hand back first.
“Don’t let him get to you,” Jackson said quietly.
I didn’t answer.
“Kevin.”
Lauren’s voice brought me back.
She was on a barstool now, one hand braced on the table, dried blood at her temple, ankle swelling under the thin strap of her sandal. She looked furious. Embarrassed. Hurt.
She looked like somebody I wanted to protect with a degree of care that no longer felt neutral.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“You are very obviously not fine.”
That pulled the edge of a smile from her, then it was gone.
Jackson locked the front door after the patrol car pulled away and turned the sign dark. The room changed with it. Same bar, different status. Less like closing time. More like the scene after impact.
Mrs. Henderson rose at last and made her way toward us.
She paused near Lauren, lips pursed in polite concern. “Well,” she said, “I saw her myself. Falling-down drunk. Poor thing needed help, I suppose.”
Not a shred of kindness in it. Just varnish.
Lauren’s head came up. “I wasn’t falling-down drunk,” she snapped. “And you can save the poor thing.”
Mrs. Henderson only gave a small nod, the kind that made disagreement sound like confirmation, then walked out into the night with her purse tucked neatly under her arm.
Jackson watched the door shut behind her. “By breakfast, half the county’s gonna have a version of this.”
“Great,” Lauren muttered. “Love a strong local rollout.”
Between the two of us, we got her settled more squarely on the stool. She tried to put weight on the ankle and sucked in a breath so sharp it cut the air, then caught herself on the table.
“I cannot believe I drove here like this,” she said, quieter now. The anger had cracked, and something rawer showed through. “That was stupid.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It was.”
She looked up like she hadn’t decided whether she wanted comfort or punishment.
“But you didn’t hurt anybody,” I said. “And you do not get to do it again.”
Her expression changed, I could see she was listening more.
“No,” she said after a second. “I don’t.”
She touched the gauze at her temple and winced. “How bad do I look?”
“Honest answer?”
“Those are expensive.”
“You look like you lost a fight with a barstool.”
She laughed once, then squeezed her eyes shut. “Hot.”
I should’ve let it go.
“Still,” I said.
Her attention snapped back to me.
Heat crept up the back of my neck, but I didn’t take it back. It was the truth. Blood dried at her temple, hair crooked where I’d pushed it away, mouth gone soft from pain instead of flirtation, and I still had to think about what I was going to say before letting it out.
Jackson looked between us and, very deliberately, busied himself collecting broken glass that didn’t need collecting yet.
Lauren picked at the label on her water bottle. “You’re confusing, you know that?”
“So I’ve heard.”
“No, specifically.” She glanced up at me, then away. “You turn me down like a gentleman in a depressing novel, then say things like that.”
“I turned you down because you’d been drinking.”
“Mm-hm.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.” She worried the label harder until it tore. “That’s part of the problem.”
Any honest answer would’ve made the room worse.
So I stuck to what I could assess.
“Can you get hold of your grandmother?”
“My phone’s at six percent, and she goes to sleep with it on silent.” Lauren rubbed the heel of her hand under one eye, then looked annoyed with herself for doing it. “Even if she answered, she’s forty minutes out.”
“And you can’t drive,” I said.
She let out a humorless breath. “Astute.”
I looked at Jackson. “What about here?”
He shook his head. “No good.” Then, because he knew I meant more than one thing, he added, “No room upstairs. The two spare beds are full with hunters from out of town, the office couch has a busted spring in it, and after tonight, I can’t leave her downstairs in the bar with an incident report open and the place half trashed. ”
Lauren laughed once without humor. “Of course it’s hunting weekend.”
Jackson dragged a hand over his mouth, then disappeared through the back for a minute anyway. I heard a door open, another shut, his boots on the stairs. When he came back, he was carrying nothing.
“Tried the storage room too,” he said. “Still smells like bleach and fryer grease, and the lock sticks from the inside.” His mouth flattened. “It’s not a real option.”
That was the practical failure. He’d checked because he didn’t want the next thing to be mine.
Lauren looked between us, and for the first time, the fear in her wasn’t masked as irritation or a joke. “So what are my options?”
Silence settled hard.
Jackson met my eyes.
There was a lot in that look. Liability. Town talk. Tommy. Mrs. Henderson. The fact that if I put Lauren in my truck tonight, Fairview would not call it a favor. The fact that leaving her here anyway would make me somebody I didn’t much want to recognize.
Jackson broke eye contact first. “If you take her,” he said quietly, “they’ll make it mean something.”
He wasn’t warning me off. Just naming the cost plain.
Lauren went still. “I can sleep in my car.”
“No,” I said.
She bristled on instinct. “Kevin—”
“On that ankle? After you’ve been drinking? No.”
“I am not asking you to rescue me.”
“I know.”
Her mouth tightened. “Then don’t act like I’m a stray you found behind the dumpster.”
The words hit harder than they should have. Maybe because they lined up too neatly with everything ugly Tommy just made public.
I kept my voice level. “I’m acting like you have a head wound, a bad ankle, no keys, and nowhere safe to go at twelve-thirty in the morning.”
She looked away. “You forgot my sparkling personality.”
I waited.
A beat passed. Then another.
When she spoke again, the fight went thinner. “I don’t want to owe you.”
There it was.
The true answer was messier. Any help I gave her from here on out would cost both of us something, even if I never touched her again.
I looked at the dark front windows. Mrs. Henderson already halfway home with her version.
Tommy drinking his into the pavement. Dennings filing paperwork with my name in it because I’d treated her on the floor.
By morning, the town would have us arranged into a story shape whether I participated or not.
I looked back at Lauren.
There was blood in her hairline. Her fingers were white around the edge of the stool. She was trying very hard not to look scared. That, more than anything, was what decided it.
I cleared my throat.
Jackson looked at me.
I looked at him.
The bar went so quiet I could hear Lauren breathing two stools down, like she was barely keeping herself together.
Nobody moved.
I grabbed my keys. “We’ll try the motel first. If that doesn’t work, we’ll figure something else out.”
Lauren opened her mouth, probably to argue, but Jackson and I got her upright before she could. By the time I pulled out of the lot, it was pushing one.