Page 70 of Deviant
“Feel better?” she asks.
“Working on it.”
She nods, then starts to move away. I stop her.
“Colt. You heard from him?”
“He’s fine.”
“Where is he?”
She picks up a glass and starts polishing it, which means she’s buying herself a second to decide how much to say. “He went to see a friend—couple towns over.”
“What friend?”
A pause. “Randy.”
She says the name and goes back to polishing the glass and I sit there with the name settling and the beer going untouched in front of me.
Randy.
I don’t know a Randy in Colt’s life; I’ve never heard him mention a Randy. And Halle said it with that particular evenness that means she’s watching to see what I do with it—her eyes on the glass in her hands but her attention completely on me.
He left. He quit and he left and he’s two towns over with someone named Randy and I’m sitting here, in The Bar, with a black eye and the cold clarity of a conversation I should have had months ago, and something is happening in my chest that is hot and specific and has nothing to do with the cold anger I just used on Molly.
This is different.
This is jealousy, and it’s doing things to my ability to think clearly.
“When’s he back?” I ask.
Halle sets the glass down, looking directly at me for the first time in this conversation. “I don’t know,” she says. “He didn’t say.”
I nod, pick up my beer, and take a drink.
She moves off down the bar.
Cash drops onto the stool beside me, signaling Halle for a beer, and looks around the bar before he looks at me and clocks my expression. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing.”
“You look like someone kicked your dog.” He leans on the bar. “Halle, what’s his problem?”
Halle sets his beer down without looking at either of us. “Ask him.”
I sigh. “Colt’s two towns over with some asshole named Randy.”
Cash goes still for a second, then looks at Halle. Halle looks back at him, then Cash looks back at me.
“What?” I ask.
Cash picks up his beer, takes a drink, then sets it back down before scratching the back of his neck. Cash is thinking long and hard about his words, which is not something Cash ever does naturally and therefore means that whatever comes next is going to piss me off.
“Randy? As inRowdyRandy?”
Halle has suddenly found something very interesting to look at on the other end of the bar.
“I don’t know who the fuck this Randy person is, but he’s going to get his shit rocked once I see him.”
