Page 49 of Crash Out
He looked at me for a second. Recalibrated. Smiled anyway, because these things happened, and moved on with the easy grace of someone who had other options, because he did, because everyone in this bar had other options.
I sat there.
The group was still going around me, the story finished, someone else talking now, the energy having found a new center the way energy always found a new center. I was already peripheral. That was how it worked. You were the thing and then you weren't the thing and the room moved on and you'd neverreally been the thing to begin with, you'd just been standing in the right spot.
I needed air.
I found the bathroom instead.
The bathroom was nice, because of course it was, same dark wood and low lighting, a mirror that showed me myself in the unflattering clarity of a person who has had too much to drink in a place that didn't know him.
I looked fine.
Messy blond hair, but the kind that looked messy on purpose, like I'd spent time making it look like I hadn't. Brown eyes clear enough, bright enough, still doing the job. Clothes that were stylish enough to pass in a place like this, even if they probably should've seen a dry cleaner at some point, though I had no idea how dry cleaners even worked.
Objectively, I looked good.
Like someone having a great night.
But inside? Inside I was completely hollow.
I had no idea when those two things had gotten so far apart.
I went back to the bar.
The next ten minutes were the longest ten minutes of my life. I was telling another story now, something I was inventing as I went because I'd run out of the prepared ones. The room was still laughing in the right places but I was somewhere else entirely.
Someone touched my arm.
I startled.
It was just the bartender. He wanted to know if I needed anything. I said no. He moved on. The group moved on. I sat at the bar and ordered water because some part of me was still functional enough to make that decision.
I was halfway through it when I felt someone sit down on the stool next to me.
I knew who it was before I turned my head.
I turned my head anyway.
Dylan was looking at the bar. Jacket on. Water already in front of him, which meant he'd been here for at least a few minutes. He didn't look at me. He just sat there.
"Hey," I said.
"Hey," he said.
The bar kept doing its thing around us. The low music. The four-page menu nobody was reading.
I waited for it. The look. The catalogue.Wesley, what are you doing?The thousand previous versions of this conversation, in a thousand previous bars, where Dylan would arrive and Dylan would assess and Dylan would deliver the verdict in his flat older brother voice and we would both pretend it was the first time we'd done this.
He didn't look at me.
He drank his water.
That was somehow worse.
"How did you know where I was? I didn't text you."
Dylan set the glass down.
