Seb
Last night aside, I hadn’t set foot in Whiskey Locker in nearly a month.
Between my own life crumbling apart and James’s mess with Hallie, neither of us had managed to drag ourselves back here.
But the second we walked through the door, it was the same as ever—the smell of aged oak and bourbon hanging heavy in the air, undercut with the faint, salty sweetness of those pretzels they baked in the back.
James was half a step ahead of me, his shoulders wound tight, scanning the crowd like a man walking into a poker game holding nothing but a losing hand.
“You think she’ll come?” he asked.
I didn’t answer right away. He already knew the answer. Roxie King was stubborn as hell, and if she swore Hallie would be here, then she’d damn well be here.
“She’ll come,” I said finally, adjusting my jacket as we pushed deeper into the Friday-night crowd. “She cares too much not to.”
James let out a low, nervous breath.
And then I saw her.
Roxie.
She was at the bar, blonde hair loose around her shoulders, silk blouse catching the low light, looking like she could make a man forget his own name with one glance. Hallie sat beside her, nursing a glass of wine. Neither of them had noticed us yet.
James froze. His gaze locked on Hallie like he’d been waiting his whole life for this moment.
“She’s here,” he whispered, more to himself, I think, than to me.
“This is either going to be great,” I muttered, “or an absolute train wreck.”
But James didn’t wait around. He cut through the crowd, past our fellow finance bros twirling their Old Fashioneds. Hallie’s eyes found him instantly, and the look on her face nearly stole the breath from my lungs. Like the world had tilted back into place for the two of them.
I’d grown up watching my father flirt with women that weren’t my mother.
Then I’d watched my mother smile and nod to the same women at the country club as if everything was perfectly fine at home.
Even my own romantic relationships, if you can call them that, were limited to one-night stands and a few that never made it past a few months, mostly because of my idiocy.
But this? This was different. With Hallie and James, the air in the room shifted.
“Hey,” James said.
“Hey,” Hallie breathed, like this moment felt nearly unbelievable and she was trying her best to convince herself it was all real.
Then I saw James’s nerves kick in. There was a moment of hesitation, so I did the one thing I could do best—be James’s wingman and push him toward his future with a simple supportive nudge.
“Can I buy you an Old Fashioned?” he finally asked, clearly trying to break the ice by ordering the drink that had become his namesake in Hallie’s column.
A warm smile broke out across Hallie’s face. “I would love an Old Fashioned,” she said.
James waved down Joey, the bartender, before turning back to his girl.
“It’s really good to see you, Hal,” James said, and they were staring at each other like they’d just stepped into their own little world.
Which left me standing there like the unwanted extra in a wedding photo.
I slid onto the open stool beside Roxie, clearing my throat. “Hi, Hallie.”
Her head turned, surprise flashing in her eyes before she smiled. But Roxie cut in, her voice cool and smooth, like she was deliberately stepping in front of a bullet. “Sebastian.”
“Rox.” Just saying her name hit me like a drink I’d been craving for weeks.
She glanced at Hallie and James, then back to me, like she wasn’t sure if she should be policing the situation or walking away from it entirely. “Thank you for keeping up your end of our agreement.”
“Of course,” I said, leaning an elbow on the bar. “Though, I’m just here for moral support. Let’s be honest.”
“That’s about all you’re good for, isn’t it?” She gave me that infuriating little smirk—the one that somehow punched me straight in the chest. It lingered just long enough to make me wonder if she knew exactly what she was doing to me.
Before I could push back with a half-decent comeback, the bar erupted. Whistles, shouts, the unmistakable sound of glass tapping against wood.
I turned just in time to catch James’s hand cupping Hallie’s jaw, his mouth on hers like they were the only two people in the world.
Hallie melted into him, and for a split second, I almost forgot where I was.
It was one of those rare, raw moments—the kind you’d only see once in your life if you were lucky. Something straight out of the movies.
Roxie’s head tilted, looking at her best friend like she’d been watching a romcom for hours, waiting for this kiss to happen. Her smile softened, and in that light, she didn’t look like the razor-sharp Roxie King I was used to sparring with. She looked warm.
Vulnerable, even.
The moment passed, the noise around us rising again, and Hallie and James disappeared into their own little bubble at the far end of the bar.
“Well,” I said, turning back to Roxie. “There’s that, I suppose.”
Her eyes flicked to mine, still glinting from the afterglow of the moment, but there was something else there now that was far more guarded than it had been before.
“Guess our little matchmaking plan worked,” I said, nodding toward James and Hallie who were already lost in conversation, their drinks forgotten in front of them as they caught up on the last few weeks apart.
Roxie traced the rim of her glass with one finger. “Don’t give yourself too much credit. I did the heavy lifting.”
I leaned a little closer, close enough that her perfume, which would always be embedded in my brain, wrapped around me. “I seem to recall being the one who dragged James here.”
She arched one perfectly shaped brow. “Dragged? More like babysat him long enough to get him through the door and make sure he didn’t chicken out.”
“Semantics.”
Her gaze stayed locked on mine, unflinching.
It was infuriating how easily she could do that—stand her ground without even moving.
I’d faced billion-dollar deals and clients who thought they could eat me alive because I was just the playboy son of the company’s owner, and none of them had shaken me the way Roxie King did with a single look.
“You’re enjoying this,” I said.
“Of course I am,” she replied, the corner of her mouth twitching. “I get to sit here and watch my best friend be happy. You’re the only downside in this equation. Are you going to get a drink, by the way? You’re just sitting there twirling your thumbs.”
“I’m not drinking anymore,” I told her, accepting the glass of water that Joey set down in front of me. James must have ordered it for me.
Roxie’s brows lifted slightly, like she was trying to decide if that was a joke or a confession. “Since when?”
“Since a few weeks ago,” I said, rolling the glass between my palms. “It’s complicated.”
She turned her head to face me fully, her hair spilling forward over one shoulder. “Everything with you is complicated.”
“Not everything,” I murmured, my eyes dragging down her face to her mouth before I could stop myself.
Her lips parted the tiniest bit—whether in surprise or something else, I couldn’t tell—but she didn’t look away.
I took a sip of water, partly because I was thirsty, mostly because I needed something to do other than lean in and kiss her in front of the entire bar.
But that was just impossible, wishful thinking.
The two of us had barely said more than a handful of sentences to each other since the Hamptons. And none of them had been good.
The Hamptons. Where I’d finally gotten a taste of what it was like to have her.
And by the look on her face, she knew I’d been starving for her ever since.
Roxie’s eyes narrowed. “You’re staring,” she said, her tone light, but her fingers tightened on her glass.
“Am I?”
“Yes.” She took another sip of her drink, not breaking eye contact.
“Do you want me to stop?” I said, leaning in until the faintest trace of her perfume threaded through the smell of bourbon and fried food.
Her lips curved, slow and deliberate. “You’d be surprised.”
I almost asked her what she meant, but then Joey slid another round down the bar, the clink of glass snapping the tension just enough for her to look away. The spell broke, but only barely.
“Can I ask you a question?” she asked finally.
“Absolutely,” I said without hesitation.
“The Hamptons.” Her gaze cut back to me, sharp now.
“Do you believe that I didn’t mean to hurt you by leaving?”
My throat went dry. Not from the lack of alcohol, this was something else entirely.
Her voice was low enough that only I could hear.
“I think I do,” she said, and the words came out rough, unpolished. “But that doesn’t change the fact that it hurt me. It doesn’t take away how I felt waking up and thinking you’d run out like it was nothing more than a one-night stand.”
I didn’t know what to say. I’d been measuring every day since the Hamptons against the night I had with her, and everything else had come up short.
Her eyes stayed locked on mine, like she was daring me to speak.
“It was a mistake,” I lied. The words tasted like ash in my mouth. I regretted them almost immediately.
“Funny,” she said softly, “you didn’t look like a man making a mistake when we were on that sofa together.”
I let out a slow breath of relief. She was playing with me, even though I’d hurt her. Slowly, very subtly, but surely, she was giving me a way back in. “Rox—”
But I didn’t get to finish.
Someone clapped me hard on the shoulder, jolting me back into the noise of the bar.
“Bastian, man, are you in here hiding?” It was Nate DeMarco, an old college friend, who had also majored in business to make his family happy before he took over the business.
He was grinning, smelling faintly of cigars and trouble.
There weren’t many people who would take things further than me, except Nate DeMarco.
I barely had time to process Nate’s question before he pivoted to Roxie, his grin widening.
“Hi, there. I’m Nate,” he said, stepping closer, that easy, overconfident grin plastered on his face. “I don’t think we’ve met before.”
Roxie raised an eyebrow, clearly taken aback by how charming Nate was. “Roxie,” she said. “How do you know Sebastian?”
“College. We were in the same classes. You know how it is,” he said, smiling like he owned the entire room.
Roxie tilted her head slightly, her lips curving into a teasing half-smile. “College, huh? I should’ve guessed. You two look like you would’ve gotten in a lot of trouble together.”
Nate chuckled, clearly liking the banter. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“You should,” she said, leaning in just a fraction, enough to make the air between them feel charged.
My chest tightened as I watched her smile at Nate in a way that she hadn’t done to me since the Hamptons. Heat rose in my cheeks, and my jaw clenched instinctively. I could see the way Nate was grinning at her, like he was the luckiest man in the world.
“And what do you do?” Roxie asked, her voice softening, a playful sparkle in her eyes.
“I’m in commercial real estate. Family business that I’m working on taking over.”
My fist clenched around my glass. The cool water did nothing to dampen the heat crawling up my neck. Roxie’s laugh, soft and musical, slid through the bar like smoke, wrapping around Nate instead of me.
“Oh, so you’re the heir type too?” she teased lightly, letting the words hang in the air.
Every word she spoke to Nate felt like a punch in the gut. I tried to reason with myself.
It’s nothing. She’s just being polite. Just having fun.
But I knew the truth. She was letting herself enjoy this attention, but really, she was just doing it to get to me. To hurt me. She knew it would make me jealous. I guess I deserved a taste of my own medicine. She’d always enjoyed winding me up. Just like she was now.
“I … uh,” I muttered, standing abruptly. “Excuse me.”
Before Roxie or Nate could react, I pushed past the nearest couple of barstools and headed to the bathroom in the back of the bar, slamming the door behind me.
I leaned against the cool tiles, heart hammering, trying to slow my breathing.
The muffled laughter and clinking glasses from the bar pressed against the door, a reminder that Roxie and Nate were still out there.
I ran a hand through my hair, jaw tight, every nerve screaming at me to storm back out and stake my claim.
But I didn’t. Not yet. Not like this.
Instead, I closed my eyes and let the silence of the bathroom swallow me, forcing myself to remember one thing: Roxie King deserved better than I had been in the past.
And this was my opportunity to show her who I was now.