Page 11 of Without a Clue

And specifically him of all of them.

I’m about to break into a full sweat and commence running about, grabbing ropes and throwing anchors over ledges and full-on dragging us back to shore, when the bartender steps forward.

“For the lady.”

I raise my head at the sight of a drink slid beneath my nose.

“Oh, no thank you, I—” I begin.

“Rhubarb and Rosewater Fizz Mocktail,” he announces. “Very nice choice. It was new to me; I’ll have to add it to the list. Recipe compliments of the man over there.”

He points somewhere over my shoulder, but he doesn’t need to.

I knew as soon as he said rhubarb that he was here.

How can you put into words exactly what it feels like knowing your coworker / favorite friend / person you’ve been fully allowed to enjoy interacting with during work hours / person who is your person for the proverbial nine-to-five but then erases into memory once the day is done and the weekend has come, or (as in this case) goes off-grid for a series of months, has just returned?

Elated doesn’t do it.

More like . . . like a mother who loses sight of her kid at a playground and anxiously scans the area knowing everything is probably fine, it has to be fine, surely it is fine, and then—pop—there he is hopping out of the bottom of the slide and you find you can breathe again.

Seeing Nash, well, it’s like I can breathe again.

And I didn’t even know I had been holding my breath.

The hours of exhausting emotional strain and physical travel slip away as I push off the barstool.

Nash heads toward me, cowboy hat and jeans and all, making his way through a cluster of women. His eyes are linked on mine, but even so, he tips his hat toward the ladies in one of those endearing little ways that makes women swoon, because oh, isn’t he so charming and dashing and brave—and he smells just like sunlit dew resting on a fresh hay bale.

And to be honest, he does smell like that.

It’s the jeans.

It’s sort of baked into him in all his travels.

Least, that’s my theory.

“You’re late,” I announce, far less enthusiastic than I really am, as I rise off my stool to give him a hug.

“That painful without me, huh?”

“You have no idea.”

“Who’s to blame this time?” he says as he gives me a squeeze.

“Me, actually. I’d tell you all about it, but I don’t think I could live through reliving it.”

He’s a foot taller than I am, and suddenly I’m swallowed up in denim and his signature hay bale scent, and when my feet are lifted off the floor, a few sighs of envious ladies escape in the distance.

Here’s the thing about us.

I’ve never texted Nash outside of a work-related context.

I’ve never been to his apartment.

I’ve never suggested we casually get together “as friends” ever.

He, likewise.