2. Wes
WES
The second night is worse.
The first was a blur. A woman walked into my bar at one in the afternoon and I caught a scent that put my bear through the floor and I hired her in under a minute and I spent the rest of her shift trying to behave like a man who owned a bar, rather than a man whose entire life had just reordered itself around a stranger in a blue top.
I got through it. Barely.
Tonight she's back.
It is five-oh-three p.m. and she's behind my bar.
She's wearing jeans and a black shirt and her hair is up and she's smiling at Hal Jenkins, who has had exactly one conversation with a woman in the last three years that wasn't his mother, and Hal is telling her about the condition of his knees like a man who just found religion.
I'm at the other end of the bar pretending to count kegs.
I've counted the kegs twice. The kegs haven't moved.
I'm going to have to count them a third time because when she laughs at something Hal says, I lose the number.
I have been a brown bear shifter for thirty-eight years and I've never once had my bear pull at the inside of my chest like something physical—not until yesterday afternoon when her scent came through the door ahead of her.
Mate.
The word sat there in my skull like it had been waiting.
I stood behind the bar after she left and gripped the edge of it with both hands and breathed through my nose and told the bear no. Slowly. Like he could be reasoned with.
The bear, historically, can't be reasoned with, but he's spent his whole life waiting for a reason to listen to me, and I was going to keep him on a leash until the woman I had just put on the schedule knew my last name.
"Wes." Hal's voice from down the bar. "Wes, this girl wants to know if you've got Angostura."
I look up. She is looking at me. The overhead light is catching the side of her face and I've been in this body my entire life and I've never had this much trouble holding my hands still.
"Behind you. Second shelf. Little red label."
She turns and finds it. Picks it up. Her hair is pulled up off her neck and I can see the knob of her spine where it meets her shoulder, and my mouth goes dry and I have to look at the register.
"Thanks."
"Mm."
She's making an old-fashioned. She's making it right.
She's showing Hal the dash of bitters going in.
Saying something about over-expressing the orange peel.
Hal is nodding the way men nod when they are pretending to have any idea what's being said to them.
She hands him the drink. He takes a sip. His face does the whole thing.
"That's the best old-fashioned I've had since I was in the service," he says.
"Thank you, Hal."
"Where'd you learn that?"
"Bar in Denver. The owner was Italian and aggressive about it."
Hal laughs. Hal isn't a man who laughs. He laughs and I grip the edge of the sink and close my eyes for one full second.
She's fast.
That's the first thing I notice—the second thing, after the smell of her, and the third thing, after her face.
She moves like someone who has done this before.
She doesn't break eye contact with a customer to look at a glass—she's pouring the drink from muscle memory while she's still listening to his story.
She calls back change without looking at the till.
She knows the difference between Bulleit and Buffalo Trace by the color of the cap.
Half an hour in, she's found the rhythm.
An hour in, three of my regulars have told her about their divorces.
Two hours in, Millie Henderson has walked in—Millie who has lived in this town longer than I have and who has, in all my years running this bar, ordered exactly one thing which is a glass of white wine that she doesn't finish—and Lia has taken one look at her, poured her a glass of the dry Riesling we get in for summer, and said on the house tonight, welcome to Friday.
Millie drank the whole glass.
Millie stayed for a second one.
I've been in this business long enough to know when someone is just good at it, and someone is dangerous at it, and this woman is dangerous.
She could own this bar. She could own this town.
She could have twenty more people in here by next weekend just because the word she poured it is going to get around.
I stand at the back and watch her.
My bear paces.
She catches me looking once.
It's maybe nine—the bar is at its fullest, there are people at most of the tables, someone has put Otis Redding on the jukebox—and she turns with a full tray in her hands and catches me.
I don't look away.
Her step hitches, just a beat, and her eyes go wider for a second, and then she recovers and keeps moving. She delivers the tray. She comes back to the bar. She doesn't look at me again for fifteen minutes.
I go count the kegs a fourth time.
By eleven the crowd has thinned.
By midnight it's me, her, the last two regulars at a back table nursing beers, and the low hum of the fridges. Otis has run out. The TV above the bar is showing highlights of a game that was over four hours ago.
I turn the highlights off.
She's wiping down the rail with a clean bar towel. She's humming something. She has rolled up the sleeves of her black shirt past her elbows and her forearms are—her forearms are forearms. I'm thirty-eight years old and I'm standing behind my own bar staring at a woman's forearms.
She catches me.
Again.
This time she doesn't look away.
She sets the towel down. She tilts her head, just a little, just enough to ask a question.
"You okay?" she says.
"Yeah."
"You've been counting kegs for seven hours."
"Inventory."
"Mm-hmm."
She picks the towel back up. She keeps wiping.
The last two regulars finish their beers, pay their tabs, wave at me on the way out. Hal is one of them. He pauses at the door.
"Lia," he says, "welcome to town."
"Thanks, Hal."
"Don't let him work you too hard."
She laughs. "Too late."
He grins and he leaves and the door shuts behind him and I go and I lock it. The click of the deadbolt is loud in the quiet. I turn around and she's still behind the bar with the towel in her hand and her eyes are on me with something I can't quite read.
"So," she says. "I think I can do this job."
"I think you can too."
"The regulars are extremely nice."
"You earned that. Fast."
"Mm."
I come back behind the bar. She is at the middle of it wiping down the rail. I pick up another clean towel from the stack and start at the other end. I'm going to wipe the bar with her. I'm, allegedly, going to do this like a normal employer who hired a normal employee on a normal Friday.
We work toward each other.
We don't talk for a minute.
The quiet isn't uncomfortable. That's the thing that gets me.
I have been a quiet man my entire life—I've been a man who didn't mind standing in his own bar alone for twelve years, counting bottles, balancing books—and I've never had the experience of standing across from another person and having the silence between us feel full.
"Can I ask you something?" she says.
"Yeah."
"Why'd you hire me in thirty seconds?"
I keep wiping.
"Maya asked me that."
"I'm sure Maya did."
"I told her you were probably tired of interviewing."
"I wasn't interviewing."
"I know."
Her towel moves. Mine moves. We are about four feet apart now.
"So?" she says.
"You've bartended before. You knew well drinks. You were in my doorway and the sign was still up." I shrug one shoulder. "Didn't need a lot of thought."
"That's your story."
"That's my story."
"Mm."
Three feet. Two.
We meet in the middle.
She stops wiping. I stop wiping. We are standing across a bar that's four feet wide.
I can smell her—soap, her hair, the heat of her.
My hands are on the wood. Her hand is on the wood.
The knuckles of our thumbs are maybe two inches apart.
I've never been this aware of the distance between two hands.
"Lia," I say. Low.
"Yeah."
I don't know what I was going to say next.
She beats me to it.
"Can I tell you something?" she says.
"Yeah."
"Not about the bar."
"Okay."
"I had a boyfriend until Thursday morning."
I already knew this. Maya had said it to someone at the hardware store yesterday afternoon and I had overheard it without trying. I didn't let my face move.
"Yeah."
"He was not a great boyfriend. I think I knew he was not a great boyfriend for a long time and I just—decided not to know it.
Because I was thirty-one and I was tired and I had an apartment with him and a system.
" She is looking down at the bar. Her thumb is tracing a grain in the wood.
"He cheated. So I know now. And I packed my car and I drove to Harlow and I ended up here, and it's very—I don't know why I'm telling you this. "
"It's okay."
"It's just." She takes a breath. "I'm done wasting time."
I stand very still.
"With what," I say.
"With. You know. Men who show up half the time and you spend the other half explaining to yourself why that's fine.
Or relationships where you know the shape of something is not right and you just sort of—sit inside it until it falls over.
Or." She laughs once, short. "Someday. The whole someday thing.
I think someday has gotten away from me.
I want kids. I want a—a person who actually wants the thing.
I don't want to be thirty-three and still explaining to someone why I'd like, for example, to be proposed to. "
I don't move.
She looks up. She sees whatever is on my face and her own face changes.
"Sorry. That was—I just dumped that on you, I'm sorry."
"No."
"I have had like two beers and you asked what I was thinking and?—"
"I didn't ask."
"Still."
"I wasn't asking. I was standing here." My voice has gone rough. I can hear it. I try to bring it back. "I'm glad you told me."
"You're doing the stillness thing again."
"What stillness thing?"
"You did it yesterday. When I walked in. Your whole face goes, like, completely—" She waves her hand in front of her own face. "Like a computer turning off. I notice it."
"I noticed you noticing."
She laughs. It's small. She is still looking at me with a question in her eyes that I don't have words to answer yet.
"Are you okay?" she says. "Really. Because I—I know I just—that was a lot. I was talking about my ex and I think I accidentally told you I want to be proposed to and I am?—"
"Lia."
"Yeah."
She reaches past me.
I don't see it coming. She reaches for a glass on the back shelf—I don't even know which glass, she doesn't need the glass—and her body brushes mine. Her arm against my chest. Her breath at my collarbone. The warmth of her, all of her, for one half-second pressed along the line of my body.
The scent hits.
Her heat scent. Not arousal yet—deeper than that. The underneath of her. What she smells like under the soap and the shampoo and the four hours of pouring other men's drinks. Sweet and warm and hers and my bear goes straight up the inside of my throat and I grip the bar with both hands.
She freezes.
She's half-turned. Her hand is on the shelf. She is a breath away from my mouth and she has gone absolutely still, and I can see it on her face—she doesn't know what just happened to her body but something did and she's trying to work out what it was.
"Wes," she says.
"Yeah."
"I just—my heart just?—"
"I know."
"What does that?—?"
I turn.
My body does it before I do. I turn and I bring my hands up to the bar on either side of her, one on each side, shoulders locking her in without touching her. She doesn't move. I don't close the distance. I just stand there, eight inches away from her mouth, and look at her.
She looks up at me.
"Lia."
"Yeah."
"Tell me to stop."
"I'm not going to do that."
"Tell me to stop and I will. Right now. I'll go take the garbage out and we can pretend this didn't?—"
"Wes."
"Yeah."
"Kiss me."
I kiss her.
It's slow. I don't know how I kiss her slow.
My whole body is straining toward her and my bear is roaring through my chest and I still kiss her slow—one hand coming up to the side of her neck, my thumb at her jaw—and she opens for me on the second beat.
Her hands come up to my shirt. Her mouth is warm.
She tastes like lime and she tastes like every single thing I've ever been waiting for.
I press her into the bar and she makes a small helpless sound into my mouth and my control fractures around the edges.
I pull back.
Barely. An inch. My forehead against hers.
She is breathing fast.
"Wes."
"Yeah."
"I am," she says, very carefully, "going to need you to kiss me again. And then I am going to need some questions answered. Because something is happening to my body that is not—normal—and I can tell by your face that you know what it is. And."
"Yes."
"Yes what."
"Yes to all of it."
"Good."
"Lia."
"Yeah."
"I'm going to kiss you again."
"Please."
I kiss her again.
She is pressed against the bar and I'm pressed against her and the door is locked and the town of Harlow is asleep outside and I don't, for the entire length of that kiss, remember a single thing about counting kegs.
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