Page 3 of Baby for the Bartender
I blinked. “Different.”
“Less put together.” His eyes moved over my face, just briefly, just enough. “You’re usually very put together, Miss Laine.”
There was something in the way he said it that made it very clearput togetherwas not the actual word he’d considered and discarded. And I was twenty-three and had just been dumped and was two sips into a screwdriver on an empty stomach, so I felt that observation in places I had absolutely no business feeling it.
“I came straight from my couch,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting—“ I gestured at him, at the bar, at all of it.
“No,” he agreed. Like that was obvious. His eyes flicked down to the glass. “Slow down, Miss Laine. Don’t wanna have to cut you off after one orange juice.”
I opened my mouth to once again accuse him of not giving me any alcohol.
He pre-empted me with a wink.
“So…” he said. “Not as put together, asking for sunshine in a glass on a Thursday night ‘because you need it.’ You need to talk?”
I shook my head. “No, gosh, I mean…I shouldn’t?—”
“You’re sitting at my bar and listening is my job,” he said. He was at the sink now, wiping down glasses. “I’m actually the cheapest therapist in town.”
“I have a real therapist.”
“Okay.”
I took another sip of my extremely mild screwdriver and stared at the bar top for a moment.
“My boyfriend broke up with me,” I said. “My boyfriend of five years. Who promised he was going to move here.”
Mr. Nash kept wiping down glasses. Didn’t look up, just listened…which was actually nice.
“We met freshman year,” I said. “At Amherst. And it was just—it was always just Bryce. For five years, and I got this job and I thought, okay…this is it, this is where we start the actual life part, and I found this apartment and it has a second bedroom and—” I stopped.
Mr. Nash set down the glass he was holding, then leaned on the bar with both hands.
My god, hisforearms.
“And?” he said.
I shook my head. “And he called me tonight and said he just didn’t think he was coming.” I turned my glass in a slow circle on the bar. “And that…he didn’t want to ‘drag this out’ anymore. That it was over.”
Mr. Nash took a deep breath and peered down at the bar.
“Bryce is a douchy name,” he said.
I snorted orange juice through my nose. It burned. “And ‘Garrison’ isn’t?”
Again, I felt like I wanted to melt directly through the floor.
But it made him laugh, so I felt better. “‘Garrison’ is douchy as hell, which is why everyone around here just calls me Nash.”
“Nash,” I repeated. “Okay. Um…is it okay if I call you that?”
He nodded. “Of course. But only if it’s okay for me to call you Margot.”
He knew my first name. Again, that made me feel things.
“I actually go by Maggie,” I said. “With my friends.”
He smiled. “Are we friends?”
