by Ace Gray
Heat rises in my cheeks and goes blotchy across my chest as I remember that day. The small flip book of memories that made me believe we really were friends once. That small flip book that I try and keep hidden away.
“Meen is just a nickname. It was a joke once upon a time,” I say softly.
“So, you guys were close in this once upon a time?” Aspen asks.
“Yes.” The admission hurts.
“But you’re not now?” Jonas clarifies.
“Nope.” I reach for my warming beer and take a sip.
“That leads me to believe he’s not worth my time,” Jonas says simply. “I’ve never known you to be a poor judge of character, Mina.”
This is a whole different punch to the gut than the ones James himself delivers. I’m hurt and heartbroken over him, but I don’t want to return the favor. Whatever I feel for him today, I loved him once. A type of love that was so bone-breaking that I would have bled out for him. And that makes this version of me, dealing with his return, wounded not malicious.
“There’s literally no one better, Jonas. He’s the hardest worker I’ve ever met. He’s dedicated and dependable and fantastically brilliant.” The words are jagged little pieces of glass in my throat. Not because they’re lies, but because they’re truths. “He knows everything about beer and can explain it to anyone. What he doesn’t know, he learns. Voraciously. His whole world revolves around it.” A montage of beer dates all blur together. The things he told me, the things he showed me, how he had a way of teaching me that made life a little more exciting. “He’s focused and hardworking enough that he can run a system by himself but he’s friendly and fascinating enough that he gets along with everyone.” The words leave my chest tight, my throat dry, and my heart more than a little raw.
“If he’s practically perfect in every way, why aren’t you friends?” Jonas sits up, studying me as he waits for my answer.
“Only Mary Poppins is practically perfect in every way.” I manage a small smile.
“From the way you just described him, from an employer’s standpoint, so is James Larrabee.” He shoots me a look.
The smile that tugs on my lips is heavy, weighted with the bittersweet sadness of the truth. “He is, Jonas. Just don’t go and fall in love with him.”
My hand goes back and forth on my beautiful wooden bar, constructed like most of the building in 1863 when Pyramid Peak was a gold town with real gunslingers. White bar towel in hand, doing what hundreds of bartenders and proprietors before me have, I wipe as I’m lost to the sway of my thoughts. Both back and forth, back and forth.
Something cracked open inside me yesterday when I was talking to Aspen and Jonas about James. Something that remembered all the good about him rather than just the all-consuming pain. Sure, the memories, the words, hurt, but they also helped me remind myself I am human and any human with half a brain would have had some level of affection for the James Larrabee I got to see.
The fact that I was one of the very few allowed the privilege made it that much more intoxicating.
Can I forgive him? Can I forget everything that happened? The questions repeat in time with my back and forth on the bar. Yes. No. So do the answers. And the justification for each. He hurt me. I brought it on myself. He didn’t know what he was doing. I fell too hard, too fast.
The argument sprints inside my head but I’m not getting anywhere. With James I never do. Even with the best intentions I never can. The doubt he developed in me, the walls I built to keep another such debacle out—those are scars that haven’t gone away yet. They may never really go.
That’s what his every word reminds me. That I wasn’t strong enough. Smart enough. To live through him.
I keep cleaning the bar, trying to clear the thoughts away. This much introspection is exhausting. For just a few hours, can I be free? From the back and forth? From the tumult? From the insecurity? I start to polish stainless steel with the hope that busy work will give me a small reprieve.
“What did you do?” James’ voice is ominous thunder. Lighting shoots through my veins. Any small peace I had is washed away with the rain of his oncoming storm.
When I gather the strength to look up, tension has his shoulders up by his ears and his forearms rigid. I try very hard not to notice that it makes each muscle defined beneath his shoved-up sleeves. He’s menacing but something is different about today. I can’t figure out what. I mean, I probably could but that requires reaching back deep into our friendship. Into the good times. And doing that once this week has already put me too off-kilter. I suck in a deep breath as I prepare for whatever might hit and hurt next.
“What did you say?” He steps closer and puts clenched fists on the edge of the bar.
I shrink back, eternally grateful that the ancient thick wood bar is between us.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I wring the bar towel between my hands.
“You said something to Jonas. I know you did.”
My eyes go wide, and I almost swallow my own tongue. I carefully pick my words from yesterday apart, one by one, looking for anything that could light him up like he is now. There’s nothing. I didn’t tell them how he broke me, how he can’t communicate like a normal human—his words not mine—how he hurts people both with what he says and doesn’t say.
“I didn’t,” I squeak.
“You did.” His voice softens. “He gave me the job.”
I blow out a deep breath as the knot in my chest unwinds, replaced by a new and different one. One that remembers I used to be the person he shared his joys and fears with. “Congratulations.” I swallow then give him a hesitant, small smile.
“And whatever you said got me a raise.” His hands open as he splays them on the bar, his body relaxes a moment after that. “I just wanted to know what you said. And to come say thank you. For a moment, I thought I’d lost it because…”
“Because of me.”
He doesn’t refute it and the sharp sting lashes on my heart. My eyes fall from him, intent on the woodgrain again.
“I came here to say thank you, Mina, not fight with you.”
“You’re welcome.” It’s all I can think to say.
We sit in silence for a few deep breaths, long enough that my eyes lift from the bar to find his, to find footing in this moment. His full attention is focused on me. I know this look. It’s the one he was giving me the first time I realized I loved him. I know from more than a few emotional cuttings that I’ve boxed up that moment and perfectly preserved it. I also know that I can’t unpack it now. Not in front of him.
It’s a sucker punch all the same.
Words aren’t on the tip of his tongue. They’ve completely evaporated from my being. Mercifully he doesn’t actually seem to expect anything. The silence bottles up again until it’s full pressure against a stopped cork.
“Do people read books in bars here?” he finally asks. I just nod, grateful for the change in subject, then gesture toward the empty stools. He pulls a tattered book from his back pocket and unfolds his long body onto the barstool. My heart twists at the action. “Can I have a Gold Mine?”
“Of course.”
We have four Gold Mine beers on draft, but I know which one he wants. I always know which beer James would want whether I want to or not. It’s a game my brain refuses to stop playing. When I taste beers, when I buy them for the restaurant, when I’m at a new brewery, I always know.
“The Gold Mine Dunkel,” I say as I set it down in front of him.
He doesn’t look up at me but his smile tugs on his cheek, and the partial dimple that only comes out when he truly smiles, starts to hollow his cheek. His long eyelashes dust his sharp cheekbones, and I recognize the faint freckles that speckle the bridge of his nose after he spends his time in the summer sun. After he takes a deep drink of his beer, his smile grows as his long fingers thread open the pages of book.
I take up polishing glasses from the shelf. With a quiet mind. And weightless heart.<
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Because the version of heaven I used to like to imagine most—James Larrabee reading a book with me on a quiet, sunny afternoon—is somehow, inexplicably, true.
“So he just sits here?” Courtney leans over the bar and lowers her voice as she asks.
“Yup,” I answer as I pop a glass into a shaker and lift it to shake. Courtney’s eyebrows almost shoot off the top of her forehead.
“Do you guys talk at all?”
“Nope.”
Her face contorts even more. I let her keep her twisted up and shocked look until I strain my cocktail into a glass and deliver it. “Just say it, Courtney,” I demand when I return.
“Is that healthy?”
“Is anything about us even remotely healthy?” I roll my eyes.
“No,” she answers seriously. “And it’s getting worse.”
My heart sinks. Not because she’s harsh, but because she’s right. An unsteady truce between us is just that. Unsteady. I know it, she knows it, and God only knows what James knows because he always has been, and likely always will be, a closed box. Even when we were friends…
“You know I’m right.”
“Yup.” I hold my breath after I say it because I do. I always have.
“May I remind you of the letters? And the last three years?”
I wince at her words.
“I mean, I could just remind you of the last three weeks that he’s been here.”
“Jeez, Court.”
“Look, I love you, and I’ll always be here, but this,” she points to the front table where James is sitting, reading, “is not good for you. And I’d be a shit friend for not reminding you of it.”
“He lives here now,” I protest weakly.
“That doesn’t mean you need to break yourself into a million pieces over it.”
I wonder if the subtext is that she won’t clean up the mess if I do.
“Hey Mina,” James greets me with his simple, casual, and utterly charming wave. “What should I drink today?”
“Hey.” I smile at him—a real smile—because that’s what another week or so of easy between us has done. “I have this Chuckanut in—”
“Yes. Obviously,” he cuts in.
I chuckle. I even let myself remember the first time he told me about the brewery. The pizza place where we ate, sharing food and stories. It was one of the first times I saw inside of the beautiful shell of a man.
“Did you get this beer because of me?” he asks, a knowing half smirk on his face.
“No.” Not exactly, anyway. “I mean, I have you to thank for introducing me to it, but they just started distributing to Colorado.”
“Good to know.” He smiles as he takes a sip.
I watch him turn for the front table that seems to be his favorite and let myself submerge in his walk, so singularly his. I feel the memories surround and caress me like crisp, cool water. And I’m happy floating there.
A few hours pass that way. Easy. Floating. He reads. I alternate between bartending and random admin work on my laptop at the far end of the bar.
But then a girl walks in. The typical tourist type. Beautiful and shallow. Missing the point of why we all live here.
“I am buying him a drink.” She levels a finger at James and something wild and unbridled flares in my chest. Anger is the outline, jealousy colors the flame, but it’s so much more than that too. “Do you know what he’s drinking.”
I do, and I want to keep that locked up tight like it’s my deepest secret, but I can’t. I know that as soon as I bite the inside of my cheek. As soon as I want to keep my words to myself and claim something of James for myself. Again.
Courtney was right, this is getting worse.
“The Chuckanut.” I smile as I force the words through my dry throat.
“Thank you.” She smiles graciously even as I picture wringing her neck.
And when James looks up from his book and smiles at her—really smiles, complete with half dimple and everything—something inside me shrivels and dies.
I watch as he gestures to the seat across from him and takes the extra drink out of her hands. As they talk and laugh, lit from behind with sunlight like they’re in some damn movie. When she let her hand fall to his forearm and trace the dips and valleys I’d always wanted to know so badly, the safety net that had been keeping me from plummeting broke.
Feelings tore through me with fury and vengeance on their barbed teeth. They cut across my skin, my stomach, my heart.
James Larrabee wasn’t mine. He never had been.
And the person who had told me was James. Over and over and over again. Not just with words but with actions too. I was the fool who didn’t listen. Ever. I always blamed him for not listening but we—the two of us together—combine to be a magnificent destructive force battering each other.
I close my eyes against the hurt, the pain, the piercing sorrow of the realizations all over again. At the anger flaring at myself, for being a fool about him, if even for a few weeks. Or the last three years, give or take.
The urge to text Courtney, to tell her what just crashed into me and how the fall left me bruised all over again, is itching at my fingertips. But I stop it. And I make sure to school my face so James doesn’t see. I’m the only one meant to suffer for this.
I round the bar and sit at my laptop, my fingers poised on the keys, but I can’t type. I’m trying but I can’t breathe.
“You’ve been lying low,” a man says over my shoulder, and I have to turn to see who it is. Swany standing there is disorienting. I’m not sure why he’s there or talking to me. The way things are jagged inside me, cuts any sense or reason into ribbons. “I can’t stop thinking about you.”
I want to heave.
“And about what you said that morning… I gave you an orgasm, didn’t I? Admit it.” His impish smile implores me for an answer he doesn’t want to hear. That I don’t want to give. Even talking about it is salt in a newly-festering wound.
“Swany…not today, okay?” I can’t quite hide the pathetic from my voice.
“Mina, you’ve always had a rain cloud hanging over your head, but it’s gotten darker lately.”
I close my eyes and hang my head. I know. Oh my God, do I know.
“I could cheer you up.” His hand slides around my ribs, and my reaction is to jerk away but the temptation to feel better is almost too much. James is over there with another woman, and there will always be another woman. I had another man then; I might as well have another man now.
“Just give me a minute, Swany.” I sigh and push away from him.
I feel a little wobbly as I walk down the hall toward the back office. This time it’s not James that has me off-balance. It’s me. It’s that I forgot. That I wanted to live in that naive moment where James and I were happy, where James and I were friends, for a little while. It’s that we never could be and never should be.
Tanner reading my letters comes back to me. The pain and agony that ghosted on his voice and hunched his shoulders. The accusations and the guilt. It’s one of the other memories I’ve preserved in pristine condition. It’s one of the reasons that I should’ve never tried with James.
Forward. That’s the only way I can go. Why not go that way with Swany? At least then I’m not alone with my thoughts and my shame at forgetting.
I grab my backpack and shoulder it before heading back to the man I’m using as a getaway car. I swallow the guilt that comes from knowing that’s all he is. And that I’m walking out with him anyway.
“This isn’t you, Mina.” James—James fucking Larrabee and his voice—stops me in the hallway.
When I don’t move, don’t answer, he puts his arm out, blocking the way. He inches in closer and the smell of him—malt, sun-warmed book pages, and one of the fresh Old Spices
—bewitches me. Breaks me. It was always the one sense that didn’t begin and end with him. The one trait that didn’t stay with me long after he had, but now that I smell it, him, I know it�
��s a certain kind of home. Indescribable and comfort complete all at once.
I thump against the wall behind me, the zippers on my backpack jangling as awkward shapes press into my skin. James raises his other arm, boxing me in. I take my time and a deep breath before I look up and meet his gaze. His face is twisted in an agony so familiar and yet so foreign. One gut-wrenching second is all I can manage taking it in before the weight of everything between us pins all of me up against that wall. Tears pool in the corner of my eyes.
“You are not the type of girl who sleeps with random idiots.” His voice is urgent, pleading, and condescending all at once.
“How do you know what kind of girl I am?” The wounded animal inside me bites back.
He never knew. Not really. Isn’t that what got us here? Had he really known me, down to the morrow of my bones like I knew him, we’d still be friends. He would have trusted me. He would have heard me when I spoke.
“I know you’re not a whore.”
That word. That word that more than one person called me when I lost my fiancé because of another man, hurts. No, hurts isn’t the word for it. Hurt is too simple. Being called a whore is the pin in my fragile world and James just pulled it.
I shove him, ignoring the electricity that comes from touching him, except to wish I could channel it into the lightning I’d zap him with if given a small bit of Zeus’ power. I would smite him in some straight up Old Testament way. For now, I shove him out of the way and all but run for the door, Swany in tow.
“You know nothing you flaming piece of shit,” I yell on my way out.
The second we’re outside, I double over, gasping for air. I don’t care if James is watching from inside. I don’t care if all he’s seen is me bolting from him. He certainly hasn’t made me want to stay.