Page 39 of The Reluctant Roommate

“A Corona, please,” Heidi said.

“Do you have a wine list?” Morgan asked.

“White—dry or sweet—red, pink,” the server said.

Morgan blinked. “Then I guess I’ll have red.”

“It’s good,” the server offered. “Not boxed wine.”

That was setting a low bar, but she nodded. “That’s fine.”

“You can explain the rules of shuffleboard while we watch these guys.” Heidi nodded in the direction of two heavyset twentysomethings engrossed in a game.

“There’s nothing to it. You both start from the same end, shoot your pucks. The aim is to get closest to the far end without them falling off. When you’ve shot all your pucks, only the person closest to the end gets all the points. First to fifteen. Or twenty-one.”

“My sort of rules.” Heidi watched as the first guy released his puck and it sailed in a gentle glide along the sanded surface to rest on one side of the two-point scoring zone.

Morgan pretended to study the bar. Heidi’s immersion in the shuffleboard game meant she could process her near miss at the Park Grille. Her stomach churned—what if all her ex-colleagues had come along as she and Heidi had sat at the bar? Asked her where she was working?

Her stomach turned over at the thought. If only she was the sort of person to laugh off a failure, turn it into a joke, shrug it away as unimportant—as Heidi seemed to be able to do.

But she had never been like that. And even if she was, this disaster was something she couldn’t just blow off.

The server returned with two Coronas and two large glasses of red wine. She set them on the table. “Happy hour. Two for one.”

“Cool.” Heidi picked up her bottle and tapped it against Morgan’s glass. “I like this bar.”

Morgan took a sip of her wine. The server was right—it wasn’t anything she’d put in her small cellar, but it was perfectly acceptable. Pleasant, even. She took a larger mouthful.

On the shuffleboard, one player knocked off two of his opponent’s pucks.

“Good shooting!” Heidi called.

The guy high-fived her as he waited for his next turn.

Would she have been able to bluff her way through any questions from ex-coworkers about where she was working? Probably not. The Denver finance world wasn’t that big—had she pretended to be working somewhere, one of them would have known someone who knew someone there, and she’d have been forced to admit that, no, she didn’t know Rufus or whoever. She took another mouthful of wine. And that would have gone south fast. Lies uncovered. Pity in her ex-coworkers’ eyes as she was forced to admit that she was unable to get another job.

And Heidi would have known exactly why she needed a roommate.

Why was the last thing making her so uncomfortable? Heidi was just that—a roommate—and there was no reason her opinion of Morgan mattered. Except, somehow, it did.

Heidi was unapologetic about who she was. No pretensions. She was open about working in a bar, that her ex had defrauded her, that most of her clothes came from the thrift store. If Heidi had secrets, she wasn’t very good at keeping them. Or else she was, and hers were buried so deep that Morgan had no idea.

The shuffleboard players were now best of three.

Heidi turned to her. “Want to play doubles with these two when they’ve finished?”

“Sure.” Her glass was nearly empty. When had that happened? She drained it, then pulled over the second glass.

Heidi crushed the lime inside her bottle’s neck and took a mouthful of beer—she was still only halfway down the first bottle. “Look at the food here.” She nodded at the server wending her way through the tables with two fat burgers and a basket of fries. “That looks awesome.”

“Are you still hungry?”

“I wasn’t until I saw those. Ten-dollar burgers during happy hour. I’ve just found my new favorite place. We should come back again.”

“Maybe they need staff?”

“I might ask. Not now, though, not when I’m drinking.” Heidi tapped Morgan’s arm. “Thanks for bringing me here.”