4. Nick
4
NICK
W hat the hell is going on?
One moment, we’re flirting…I think…the next I’m getting turned down, despite not having even asked her out. And she did it in a strangely familiar way, as if we know each other. That’s fine, she owes me nothing, but my ego didn’t even have time to feel the bruise when she asked me to be her date. A platonic date, if I’m reading this correctly, where I am quite literally filling a blank space.
Also, she’s looking for matches? I think we have a few matchbooks somewhere.
Behind me, Bernie’s excitement is electric. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up as she practically vibrates. She will have a play-by-play of this entire interaction in the group chat the second she takes her first break. Thankfully, a patron calls for service down the bar and she has to peel herself away from my back.
The bar moves on around us—there’s not much that can stop music and legal stimulants—but I’m desperate for a pause button, to rewind. So, I take the chance to step back and read this woman, read the entire interaction, more thoroughly.
The longer I stand here, the greater my confusion grows, the more her expression cracks. It’s subtle but it’s there, the smile plastered on her face turning more and more rigid.
“You’d like me to be your date to an engagement party?” I ask, mostly to stall for time.
She shifts on the barstool. “Yeah, I… It’s kind of a long story.”
“I’ve got time,” I say, though I really don’t. Underground Karaoke is our busiest non-weekend night. It’s our best night. The atmosphere is fun and vibrant and diverse. Our usual patrons, the young influencer types mingling with a handful of boomer regulars who find this place too obnoxious on the weekends. The audience is always supportive, kind, and generous with their cheers and their tips. By some unspoken agreement, all these people come together once a week to sing and be silly and make Moonbar a shit ton of money. I should be with them, hosting, taking orders, and cheering.
Yet I haven’t been able to look away from her since she walked in, regal and stiff with her hand sanitizer and her vintage wine order.
“It’s my ex’s engagement party,” she says, staring at the collar of my shirt, her face turning pink. “He dumped me last month. And now he’s engaged.”
My stomach bottoms out at the confession. As my niece Tilly loves to say, mess. Big, big mess .
“And you want to, what? Make him jealous or something?”
Cuz yeah, no thanks.
“Definitely not,” she says, shaking her head and waving her hands between us. “Godspeed to whoever has decided to marry that man. It’s just…the way he did it. He dumped me over text message.” There’s real anguish in her voice. “On his birthday, when he knew that I’d made cupcakes for him and that I’d helped plan his party. He told his mom he was breaking up with me before he told me. We work together, by the way. His mom is my boss.”
I close my eyes as I process all of this information. Her storytelling reminds me of Tilly’s. It makes no sense, yet I find myself needing to know what comes next.
“That sounds very cruel,” I say slowly. I want to come around this bar and hug her, not for any reason other than she looks like she needs one. But I don’t actually know this woman, even if her oversharing has made me feel like I do. She hugs herself instead, her arms covering the smooth skin of her midriff.
“Anyway, I don’t want to be with him. I want…” She sighs, her shoulders slumping. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this. We’re practically strangers.”
Practically is a generous assessment, but I let her have it.
“We dated for two years,” she says, her voice shaky, “and then he dumped me in the most casual way possible. Like I was some random hookup and not a person he’d talked about honeymoon destinations with.” Her eyes go glassy, but she blinks the tears away. “I just want to show him and his parents, and everyone we work with, really, that I’m more than that, I’m better. And that he didn’t hurt me,” she adds quietly.
“But he did.”
Her green eyes shine. She shrugs. “Yeah,” she says, finally. “He did.”
One of our regulars, Sam, absolutely butchers the final notes of an 80s ballad, and across from me, Jasmine’s expression morphs from humiliated hurt to sheer horror.
“I told you,” I say. “You’re not supposed to be good .”
She blinks back to me, schooling her expression into one of neutrality. She fidgets with her glass of wine, the coaster, her sleeves. Usually, I’ve got good instincts about people; a quality pretty common for my trade, like how most firefighters are brave and most cops are assholes. But she’s hard to get a read on, encrypted words in an open book. I can’t tell if her fluster is from lingering embarrassment or being caught grimacing at Sam, but either way it makes me want to laugh. Not at her. She doesn’t seem the type. But, fuck, she’s just kind of delightful?
“If you’re not supposed to be good, then what’s the point?” she asks.
I turn toward the stage as the next patron starts an offbeat version of “Uptown Girl.” Also, to avoid having to look her in her big green eyes, at the furrow between her eyebrows, the genuine curiosity on her face that still makes me want to laugh but also bite down hard on my knuckles. An instinctive urge I can’t let her see. One I can’t quite explain.
We get a lot of peculiar people at Moonbar, but she’s my favorite by far. Not because she smells fucking fantastic, like a spice that reminds me of Christmas, sweet like honey, rich both in wealth and abundance, or because she’s pretty.
It’s because she’s intriguing. Not many people can make me want to sit and talk to them for longer than I have time for, and the more she talks the more she comes undone in a way that has nothing to do with the vinegary wine or the music or the flirtatious peek of tummy.
“Yes,” I say, turning back to her.
“The point is yes?” Her frown deepens.
“Yes, I’ll help you out. With your ex’s engagement party.”
She sucks in a sharp breath, her shoulders straightening. “You will?”
“Yeah.” I shrug, nonchalant. But I am chalant. I am very, very chalant.
The smile that lights her face is the first genuine one she’s given me since she walked in, but even that slowly fades. “Why?”
Because you’ve got guts , I almost say. I don’t though, because that feels like revealing too much about me and because of the innate and unknowable instinct inside me that screams she would cringe at the use of the word guts .
I’ll save it for later.
“If I do this, then you’ll owe me a favor, right?”
“What kind of favor?” she asks slowly. She leans away from me like she’s finally realizing the implications of spending time alone with a strange man she met in a bar.
I can’t help but laugh this time. “Not that kind of favor, you pervert,” I say quietly, just to see her blush.
“That’s not what I meant.” Her nose scrunches in annoyance. I think she might even call me a dick under her breath.
“I know.”
She doesn’t hear me. She’s too busy hopping off her barstool and pulling on her coat.
I give her my phone number and don’t bother asking for hers because of the firm look in her eyes when she says she’ll contact me “when she’s ready.”
She’s walking away when the childish part of me, the immature teen boy that exists like the devil on the shoulder of every straight man, pipes up just so she’ll turn around and look at me one more time.
“Cause it makes you happy.”
She spins on her heel. “Pardon me?”
I don’t actually think she means to come off quite so bitchy. But when she stands there in her expensive clothes, with her eyebrow arched and her perfect manicure already tapping away at her phone screen while she frowns at me, she embodies the archetype. She’s Cruella de Vil meeting a puppy, or Miranda Priestly interrupted by an intern.
I should probably interrogate my feelings about villainous heroines from older films at some point.
“You asked what the point of doing karaoke is if you’re not good at it. You should do it because it makes you happy. That’s the point.”
“Oh. Well, okay. Bye?”
A hold up my hand in goodbye, then throw a clean bar towel over my shoulder and turn my back to her. In the grand scheme of first dates and easy letdowns I’ve witnessed in this bar, that was nothing. It was nothing enough that no one even noticed.
“Oh, Nicky,” Bernie singsongs.
I wince. Almost no one noticed. She keeps pouring a beer while she grins at me over her shoulder.
I’m never going to hear the end of this.