by Ruthie Knox
“I’m May.” She extended her hand.
He looked away from the book then, though not at her face. At her hand first. Then down at her shoes, which made him frown. She allowed him some leeway there, because she was wearing dark green leather flats with bows on the toes, and she didn’t like them much, either.
When he lifted his gaze, it got stuck on her breasts for an uncomfortable period of twelve to fifteen years. “Ben,” he told them.
This offense was harder to forgive. Men had been addressing her breasts since she was thirteen. Her breasts had yet to respond to this treatment.
I’m up here.
She didn’t say it aloud, but his head lifted, and he finally looked right at her.
He had sort of sleepy eyelids that went with his broad-planed face, his full mouth—a face that made her think of bear-taming and those male dancers in the tall black boots and flouncy white shirts who crossed their arms and stuck their legs out.
Slavic, that was it.
His eyes were brown, lighter than they should have been in the middle and rimmed with black. Weird eyes.
Weirder still, he didn’t seem embarrassed to have been caught boob-ogling, and he didn’t take her hand. She had to retrieve it from the air in between them and find a place to stow it along the seam of her pants.
“What’s with the jersey?” he asked.
“Hmm?”
“Season doesn’t start until next week.”
Oh. Oh. The stupid jersey. Not her breasts.
“Believe me, I know.”
“Plus, Einarsson is a douche.”
Right. That.
Even back home, she sometimes got flack about continuing to wear the old jersey of a quarterback who’d abandoned the Packers for the Jets, only to lead his new team to a Super Bowl victory against the old one. She might as well be sporting a pin that read, I support Benedict Arnold!
Still, douche seemed a little harsh.
Ben sat up straighter, his eyes refocusing on something over her right shoulder. He slid off his bar stool and raised a hand. May turned just as another man came off the last basement step and into the bar. A blond, good-looking man who actually knew how to smile.
“How’s it going?” Ben asked.
“Good,” the other man said. “Sorry I’m late. Erin’s been texting me about some crisis, and I lost track of the time.”
“Don’t worry about it. Got you a PBR for old times’ sake.”
“Classic. But you’ll have to drink it—I can’t stay long, and I’m in training anyway.”
“You’re always in training.”
“Tell me about it. Let’s go in the back.”
Ben pushed the spare beer a few inches in her direction. “You want this one?”
“Sure. Thanks.”
He took the other, and the two men walked past the pinball machine and disappeared into the back room.
May allowed herself a small, self-pitying sigh.
She’d hoped to throw herself on the mercy of some kind Midwesterner, and instead the universe gave her Ben. An intimidating stranger who liked to read books about corpses and who’d called her boyfriend—her ex-boyfriend—a douche.
This whole Pulvermacher’s fantasy was a lost cause.
But at least he’d given her another beer. Now she had until the bottom of this glass to come up with a better plan.
CHAPTER TWO
Ben Hausman took a deep breath, quieting his body and his mind.
He thought of the farm. The view of Lake Superior from the roof of the chicken house, flat and deep blue, stretching away until it fell off the end of the world.
Calm.
Lifting his arm, he bent it and directed all his energy toward the target on the wall. On an exhale, he cocked and flung the dart.
It hit the outermost ring of the target at an angle, bounced, and fell to the floor.
“Dude, you suck at darts,” Connor said from his perch on the arm of the bar’s ratty couch. “Give up. I’ll play you at pinball.”
“Bite me.”
Connor shook his head with a grin. “It’s Tron.”
“What’s Tron?”
“The pinball. They changed it. Didn’t you see? It’s Tron now.”
“Tempting, but I’ll pass.”
“What are you so worked up about?”
“I’m not worked up.”
“Your neck just disappeared.”
Ben blew out a deep breath and rolled his shoulders. Fuck. The whole point of playing darts was to practice not being tense. He refocused on his technique.
Right as he was about to send the shot, Connor said, “You didn’t used to be this hostile.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Yeah, okay, maybe. But you were good at darts.”
Ben had been good at a lot of things.
“I read this article about Tiger Woods,” he said, aiming. “Early in his career, he had some problem with his drive, so his coach made him take the whole thing apart and build it up from the ground level. He spent more than a year playing like complete garbage. None of the different parts of the swing were working in concert like they were supposed to. But then he pulled all the elements back together again, and it was magic. There was this click. The swing came back. He became Tiger Woods, you know? But even better.”
“Your point?”
“It’s a process,” Ben explained. “I’m evolving into the Tiger Woods of darts.”
“You don’t want to be Tiger Woods. Everybody hates him.”
“What, because of the adultery thing?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s still a great golfer.”
“Doesn’t matter. You need a better role model.”
“Fine. I’ll be the Jack Nicklaus of darts.”
Connor smiled. “That barely even makes sense.”
“That’s what you get for messing with my analogies.”
The analogy didn’t matter. The point wasn’t for Ben to get good at darts, it was for him to get better at life. To break his personality down to the raw elements and then recombine them for a less disastrous result.
“You going to shoot that thing or not?”
Ben threw it without aiming or thinking. The dart hit the very edge of the board and dropped to the floor. Connor shook his head, amazed. “Who was that blonde you were talking to?”
“What, at the bar?”
“Yeah.”
May. Her name was May. “She asked me about my book.”
“She looked kind of …”
Like a dairymaid in jeans. Brown eyes with golden lashes like wheat stubble. Milky skin. Freckles on her nose. “Kind of what?”
“Like she was having a bad day.”
She had. Uncomfortable, nervous, a little sad—way too pliable. She reminded him of three-quarters of the girls he’d gone to high school with, and she interested him not at all.
Except that when he’d told her Einarsson was a douche, the sour shape of her mouth had chastised him with all the force of a whip, and his heart had kicked in his chest, hard.
Then she’d blinked and turned innocuous again.
“Not my type.”
“No shit. She’s all soft. You spend a week filling in for Sam in the kitchen, and you look like you’re ready to take somebody’s head off. I’m surprised she even had the courage to talk to you.”
“I’m not that bad.”
“You’re worse. I bet you couldn’t be nice if you tried.”
Ben exhaled and threw another dart. When it lodged, quivering, in the floorboard, he felt like ripping it out and stepping on it, but he didn’t do it.
Progress. Even if it looked like failure.
He used to bulldoze his way through his days fueled by tension and aimless hostility. He’d wanted to be the best chef in New York. He hadn’t had a lot of time for darts, but on the rare occasion that he’d played, every missile had flown straight and true from his fingertips, like a bolt of sheared-off fury.
And t
hat was great, except he’d also been a miserable bastard with stress-induced hypertension, insomnia, and a tendency to fly into unprovoked rages. He’d screamed at his kitchen staff and fought with his wife so much, they’d practically made an Olympic sport of it.
He didn’t blame Sandy for leaving him for greener pastures eighteen months ago. Hell, he would have left him, too, if he’d been able to figure out how. She’d done him a favor, delivering that wake-up call. Hey, Ben? You’ve turned into an unbearable asshole.
These days, he was learning how to keep a cool head. Even if it was hell on his dart game.
Ben inhaled, squinted, cocked, and let another dart fly. It hit the drywall to the left of the target.
Connor snorted. “When’s Alec back?”
“I’ve got a week.”
“You find another place to live yet?”
“No.”
“You even look?”
“Sure.”
Connor raised an eyebrow.
“Some.” If glancing at Craigslist for five minutes a week ago counted as looking.
Ben went through his whole routine—deep breath, focal point, directing his energy—and threw the last dart. This time, he managed to hit the target.
“Two points,” Connor said. “You’re setting the world on fire.”
“I have to savor the small victories.”
“You know it’s supposed to be a big deal, right?”
“What, two points?”
“Finding an apartment in New York. You’re not supposed to be this casual about it.”
“Something will work out. Alec will let me sleep on the couch for a while if I have to.”
This was true, because Alec was a pushover. It was also a bad idea. Ben’s former pastry chef was bringing his new bride home from Spain. Ben crashing on the couch would put a real cramp in the honeymoon.
“You can always come stay with us,” Connor said. “Erin and Bridget can bunk together, and you can have Erin’s room.”
“Yeah, that’d be really cozy. Right up until your sisters killed me in my sleep.”
“They wouldn’t mind sharing if it was for you. They like you.”
“Thanks, but I have to stick close to the bees.” Connor lived way the hell out in Queens.
“You and those bees.”
Ben gathered all the darts and positioned himself for another shot. The dart died on the way to the wall and buried itself in a crack between the floorboards. Connor checked his watch. “Shoot.” He grabbed his jacket off the arm of the couch and stood. “I have to head out. I told Erin I’d take her for her driving test in an hour.”
“You’re going to be late.”
“Don’t say that. She’ll whine if I’m late.”
Connor came up behind him, clapped one hand on his shoulder, and raised Ben’s dart-clenching fingers with the other. He cocked Ben’s arm like a puppet limb, aimed, and shot.
Forty points.
“You should really stick to pinball.”
“Check back again in six months. Tiger Woods of darts.”
Connor chuckled. “See you next week for the game?”
“Yeah, I’ll be here.”
He and Connor usually got together on game days. In college at UW, they’d been roommates, first by luck of the draw, then by choice. The Badgers and the Packers became their religion. The church had been forced to close its doors when Ben was in Europe, but after he came back and started working in New York he’d connected with Connor again. It didn’t take them long to figure out that Pulvermacher’s was a better venue than Connor’s place. His sisters didn’t treat the Packers with sufficient gravity, and Ben liked to say things to the refs that weren’t fit for the ears of teenage girls. At Pulvermacher’s, everybody took the Packers seriously, and bitching at the refs was a communal activity.
As Connor headed out, Ben threw again. Missed by a mile.
Son of a bitch.
He gave up and stuck all the darts in the board. Flopping onto the back room’s couch, he pulled his book from his pocket, intending to finish his beer before he took off.
There was a lull in the music, and from the main room he heard the friendly murmur of Connor’s voice followed by a woman’s laugh—a deep, throaty, way-too-loud bray that echoed in his head after the jukebox started playing again.
Without thinking, Ben rose and walked to the pinball machine, curious to pinpoint the source of that sound.
There were a few other people in the front room now, but they were all engaged in conversation or fondling their cell phones. Connor was backing toward the exit, beaming his trademark ear-to-ear grin, and May was still at the bar, smiling back.
It had to be her who had laughed.
Some laugh.
Connor jogged up the steps. His torso disappeared from sight, then his legs, then his feet. May’s smile faded along with him.
She blew out a breath, her unfocused gaze falling on the liquor bottles.
I bet you couldn’t be nice if you tried, Connor had said.
It wasn’t true. Probably.
Niceness wasn’t a prized commodity in restaurant kitchens, and the divorce had amplified Ben’s bad temper. In the first year after he and Sandy broke it off, he’d felt fucking scary. Pissed off and clenched, like he might strike out any second if he’d been able to find anything to strike out at. He’d started getting headaches in the season before she took the restaurant, Sardo, and in the months after his ears were ringing all the time. His doctor had doubled his blood-pressure medication and warned him to chill out before he had a stroke.
It had taken Ben another half a year to back away from that ledge. He’d tried everything anybody suggested—prescription drugs, yoga, meditation, even an anger therapy group. None of it had done any good, but the bees helped. So did all the hours he’d put in on the rooftop at Figs, getting his hands dirty pulling weeds, digging holes, and spreading cow shit. Making things grow.
He was getting better, but he had a long way to go before he’d be any good at polite chitchat with brown-eyed dairymaids.
He should go back to the couch. The woman radiated fragility. She was like that assignment in high school where you had to carry around an egg for a week and pretend it was your baby. If he was too much of an asshole, she’d crack open. Spill all over the place, and then he’d have to deal with the mess.
But it was strange. That laugh—so loud and unapologetic. It didn’t fit.
It didn’t fit that she’d tried to pick him up, either. She’d been far from oblivious to the signal he was putting out. Busy here. Fuck off.
Ben had already burned through the obligatory post-divorce phase of sleeping with any passably attractive woman who was into it. He’d landed in the ashes on the other side—tired, bleary-eyed, flat-out not interested.
He wasn’t interested now. This wasn’t interest. It was something else. An opportunity.
Because how was he supposed to learn how not to be a dick, except by talking to someone who actually seemed to notice when he was one?
The logic probably wouldn’t survive scrutiny. Ben didn’t stop to scrutinize it. He moved.
“You want to play darts?” he asked her.
She gave him a skeptical look. “No.”
“What, did Connor warn you off?”
“He said you were sorrier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.”
That explained the laughter. They’d been mocking him.
“What, you’re some kind of master?”
“I’m all right.”
“Play me either way. I’ll buy you a drink.”
After a moment, she nodded. “Okay to the drink.”
“Not the darts?”
“Not the darts.”
He could live with that. “What do you want?”
She scanned the selections behind the bar. “Glenlivet, if you’re buying. And a Red Hook.”
“That bad, huh?”
She did that thing with her mouth, that whip-frown, and
his heart kicked his ribs again.
Those weren’t a milkmaid’s eyes. They were sharp and intelligent, full of a feeling he knew far too well.
“You have no idea,” she said.
But he did. He knew repressed fury when he saw it.
CHAPTER THREE
When Ben came through to the back room from the bar carrying four drinks, May wiped her hand over her mouth. It had settled into a sort of battle rigor. She forced herself to smile.
Maybe he’s not so bad.
He set the drinks down and sucked spilled beer off the flat space beside his thumb. His hands were big, his knuckles covered with dozens of tiny scars.
He took a seat on the opposite end of the couch. “So. May.”
Then silence. He seemed to have nothing more to say.
May took the initiative. “Ben. Are you from around here?”
Small talk. Bright and cheerful. Just what her mother would have prescribed for such a situation. Not that her mother would ever find herself in this situation, because who moved in with her boyfriend, attacked him, slunk out of his apartment, got purse-snatched by a paparazzo, and ended up drinking with a hostile stranger?
Only May.
“I live in Hell’s Kitchen,” Ben said. “Ninth and Fiftieth.”
“I’m staying in the Meatpacking District.”
Ben nodded but didn’t comment.
It was as if he didn’t know how small talk worked. Or he hated her.
So why had he bought her a drink? Pity?
“Have you always lived there?” He seemed like the sort of man Hell’s Kitchen might have spawned.
“I grew up in Ashland.”
“Ashland where?”
“Wisconsin.”
“All the way up north?”
He nodded.
“I’m from Manitowoc.”
Another nod, and now he looked bored, probably because this conversation was lame even for small talk. Whereas May was kind of stunned. She’d never in a million years have guessed he was from back home. He was so armored.
He passed her one of the short glasses of whiskey.
“How long have you lived here?” she asked.
“Six years.”
“I’ve been here six weeks.”