The Rival (Steamy Shorts #35)

Chapter 1

TOM

Ever since that woman arrived, I’ve not had one good night's sleep.

Two weeks, and I still haven't worked out how to make myself stop listening for her laugh, which is its own specific humiliation.

It's not like I'm doing it on purpose. It just …

happens. She laughs, and whatever part of my brain is supposedly dedicated to running a bar goes briefly offline.

My hand forgets it's holding a glass, and I stand there with a clean rag and a bar top I've cleaned twice already.

Nothing to show for the last ten minutes except an awareness of the exact pitch and rhythm of a woman I have actively decided not to think about.

The bar top is sticky despite my best efforts. Decades of spilled beer ground into the grain, something I accepted five years ago when I inherited this place. I keep trying to fix it anyway, like I'm new here and don't know better.

Our regular, Eddie, sits at the end of the bar with his usual sandwich reduced to crumbs and his eyes on the TV showing a game I haven't kept score of all afternoon. The Ramones are playing low on the jukebox—"I Wanna Be Sedated"—which I put on myself and am now finding too on-the-nose to enjoy.

Through the front window, past the grimy glass and the Budweiser neon sign cutting a red stripe across my view, her door is propped open again.

I catch myself watching and redirect my attention to the glass in my hand, which is so clean at this point it could go straight into a surgery, so I wipe the bar top … again.

"If you wipe that spot any harder, you're going to sand through to the subflooring."

I don't look up. Jason's been watching me not-watch the window, and I know exactly what expression he's wearing without needing visual confirmation. "Don't you have limes to cut? I don't pay you to watch me."

"Cut them already." We've known each other for so long, I just know he's in the mood to push. He doesn't even care that I could fire him right this instant. "While you were polishing that glass into a higher dimension."

"It's a busy day."

"Right. Super busy. That's why Eddie's been nursing the same beer for an hour, and you've served exactly no one else." Jason picks up a lime wedge and examines it. "She asked about you yesterday."

My hand stills on the glass, but I force it to keep moving. "Yeah, I don't really care."

"She asked if you were always this warm and approachable or if she caught you on an off day.

When she waved, you apparently ignored it and walked the other way.

" He quarters the lime with one clean cut, not looking at me.

"Apparently, mind. Not definitely. So, I told her you're an acquired taste.” Some juice squirts up to his eye, and he scrunches it closed.

“ Like something that grows on people slowly and takes a while to appreciate. "

"What the fuck does that even mean?"

"Mold, mostly. I was thinking mold."

I set down the glass hard enough that Eddie glances over, mildly interested in whether there's going to be entertainment. There's not. I'm not giving Jason the satisfaction.

"Tate is nice, you know. Pretty funny and friendly. You just need to get to know her, Tom."

Friendly. That's the word everyone uses, and it's accurate in the way that calling a hurricane "breezy" is accurate.

The thing about Jason is that he's chatty, but he's not an open book. It took him eight months to mention his dad had retired, and two years before I met his wife, Sarah.

Meanwhile, Tate got his mother's teaching credentials, the lake house they use for Thanksgiving, Sarah's current pregnancy status, and the entire shortlist of baby names they're considering in under twenty minutes. Twenty!

Jason came back from that introduction smiling like she'd given him something instead of extracted everything, and he told me all of it without me asking, with the slightly dazed expression of someone who's just been very pleasantly robbed.

Tate apparently has this quality where people feel heard.

Genuinely listened to. Jason described it that way, trying to pin down what had just happened to him, and I nodded and made a mental note to avoid whatever the hell that was.

She would be so useful to the FBI, for sure.

Since Tate moved next door, I’ve arrived at one conclusion. She's a menace. A friendly, blue-eyed menace who knows my best friend's family vacation schedule better than I do.

The evidence extends beyond Jason, too. Sixty-year-old Beth from the bakery two doors down. For years, I've bought bread from her every Sunday morning, and in that time, I have received, in total, approximately forty nods of acknowledgment and zero words.

Last week, I watched through this same window as Beth appeared at Tate's door with a tray of fresh bread. It took me a few seconds to reconcile the smiling woman with the one who always seemed pissed off that I dared to buy croissants from her.

Beth never gave me anything free, not even a crumb, but she gave Tate an entire loaf. I stood with my coffee going cold and witnessed what I can only describe as a wildlife sighting of something that shouldn't exist in this ecosystem.

Then there's the cat. The black stray that lives in the alley and has made it extremely clear through hissing that we are enemies.

I tried to make friends with that cat exactly once, which I will not be elaborating on, and it scratched me, stole half a pastrami sandwich from my back step, and hissed at me every single time I went out for deliveries for a month.

That same cat now waits outside Tate's door and lets her scratch under its chin. I've seen it. The cat even has the audacity to purr.

What the actual fuck is going on in this neighborhood?

For the record, I'm not avoiding Tate because she's too friendly.

I'm avoiding her because I know exactly what will happen if I go over there.

She'll ask questions the way she asks everyone questions, and I'll answer them the way everyone answers her questions, and she'll know about my uncle and the bar and the last five years and probably my personal life by the time I've caught myself doing it.

I don't talk about any of that. The safest thing, the smart thing, is to stay on my side and let her be someone else's problem.

Movement through the window again pulls my attention before I can stop it.

Tate's coming back from the parking lot carrying a cardboard box, and I register legs first because of the angle, because of the way the window frames the view, because of the shorts.

To call it shorts is inaccurate. It's nothing more than a piece of fabric that leaves little to the imagination.

Denim cutoffs with a frayed hem and an inseam that qualifies as a choice.

My brain takes a second to catch up to what my eyes have already inventoried: white tank top, thin cotton, no bra—I clock this and immediately wish I hadn't—Doc Martens boots unlaced and slightly too big, bright neon yellow headband on her wavy, shoulder-length hair.

The box is awkward to carry, and she's got it balanced on her hip, one arm underneath, her whole body angled to compensate for the weight.

The shorts are … yeah. That's really a lot of leg. An aggressive amount of leg, confidently displayed, and my body immediately goes rogue, which means there's a brief window where I've gone warm and tight and stupid before I've had time to object to any of it.

My jeans are uncomfortable. I shift my weight and grip the bar hard enough that the wood edge bites into my palm. None of this helps because she's still out there, adjusting the box on her hip, and when it tips, she catches it one-handed and laughs at herself.

I watch all of this. I watch all of it. I'm thirty-five years old with a bar to run and a liquor order I still need to place, and at least three things that needed doing an hour ago.

Tate disappears through her door while I'm still standing in the same spot, hand on the bar, glass forgotten.

This is annoying and so fucking inconvenient. My brain has developed a fault, and I find this unacceptable. But the worst part is getting a random boner just by watching her.

The fuck?

Then, two contractors angle something large through her door. The Rolling Stones iconic tongue logo, vintage print, professional frame. I stare at it for a long moment, then go back to wiping the bar.

I like The Stones. Lots of people like The Stones. This means absolutely nothing.

A Black Sabbath poster follows ten minutes later. Still explainable. Lots of people like classic rock. Could be decorative. I'm not making assumptions based on wall art.

Then three framed Led Zeppelin album covers get carried through in succession, and the explanation is getting thinner, but I'm managing it. She could just have good taste in music. This doesn't necessarily mean anything specific. Right?

The vintage Fender Telecaster makes it harder. That's not decoration, that's a statement piece, the kind of thing you hang in a—no. Not going there. Could be a coffee shop. Plenty of coffee shops have guitars on the wall. Maybe a rock and roll-themed coffee shop.

No big deal.

The neon beer signs arrive next. Pabst Blue Ribbon and Schlitz. Not the Target replicas, but the real ones that cost three hundred dollars each, because I priced them last spring and put them back.

Next is a dartboard. Then, six bar stools, metal, industrial, worn-copper finish. The exact ones Jason showed me last year that I said were too expensive for what we needed.

Lastly, a Marshall … Super Bass? Seriously?

My jaw aches from clenching it, pulse pounding in my temple. "Jason."

"Yeah?"

"What's she opening?"

He looks up, eyebrows almost reaching his hairline. "You didn't ask?"

"I'm asking now."

"You've been avoiding asking for fourteen days." He smirks, and I want to wipe it off his face. "Actively not asking, like asking would mean you were curious, which you absolutely were not."

"Jason, I asked one fucking question."