Page 46 of The Other Side of Green

“Don’t worry, you’ve made your feelings about me perfectly clear, I’d just like a chance to exonerate my character.”

“Exonerate? Now who’s been reading fancy books?” Her lips quirked, almost despite herself, judging by the following frown.

“Here we are.” I pointed at the bar I’d found the other night.

“Jack, I can’t go in a bar, I’m underage.”

I lifted both my eyebrows until they were almost lost in my hairline. “You worked in a bar until a week ago, and anyway, I’m hardly offering to buy you hard liquor.”

She peered at me closer. “Is that so you can drink it all?”

“Touché.” I sighed. “I’m trying not to.”

“You know, Jack, you shouldn’t put so much weight on genetics. You are nothing like your father.”

I shrugged. What else could I say? The facts spoke for themselves. “After I left here, I fell into it in a bad way.”

“What sort of bad way?” She shivered in her thin, denim jacket. The evening air had a sticky edge, so it wasn’t the weather making her shiver.

“Like I searched for a solution to the end of my problems at the bottom of a bottle.”

“Yet you still ended up owning a bar and having a faculty job. Your problems must have been surmountable.”

I smirked at her big words. Lyra Lennox and her love of multiple syllables.

“So I told you that Miriam managed to help me get a place at Berklee.” She pulled a face at Miriam’s name.

“Yes.”

“Obviously it wasn’t a scholarship or anything. She just took her ‘bad boy’ boyfriend home, told her parents I was the love of her life. Of course Jensen Collins didn’t want his daughter associating with an alcoholic bum—I guess what she was aiming for all along—so he paid for my tuition. Well, the first year anyway.”

“First year?” We still stood outside the bar, neither of us moving.

“Jensen Collins came back with his counter deal which resulted in Blue’s Bar. I had to stay sober though, that was part of the deal.”

“Why Blue’s Bar?”

“Evan and I had started performing together.”

Lyra shook her head. “You know, I really didn’t know you still loved the piano. After your dad created his bonfire you never spoke about it again.”

“What was I supposed to say?”

“I don’t know. I thought we used to tell each other everything.” Her face folded in on itself and she bit down on her bottom lip.

“What’s the matter? I thought talking was good.”

“It is.”

“But?”

She offered me a smile forced with brightness. “But nothing. So come on then, you got the bar, given to you so you could annoy the life out of Miriam Collins as payback on her trying to screw over her dad.”

“Yep. Not my finest hour, but as Evan and I went about setting it up, I realized how much I loved it. Loved the business, the music.”

“And church? In a bar?”

I laughed. “Evan used to be a choir boy.”