Page 38 of Bounced!

He’d never done that before.

In two years of him needing me for a million different things at the bar, he’d only ever needed me after. This was new, and the newness of it got into me somewhere I kept locked up, because the “after” was a man handing me his wreckage. “Before” was that same man handing me his fear, and the second one was the more dangerous thing to be trusted with.

I glanced at the clock on the stove. I’d been in my chair with Lermontov for two hours, sulking, though I’d have called it reading, telling myself the night was mine and I was glad of it.

“So . . . I thought—” And there it was, the circling, the sound of a man closing in on something he was afraid to land on. I’d read thousands of pages of men doing exactly that. I knew the music of it. For one clean, stupid, weightless second, before he landed wherever he was headed, I let myself believe he was circling me. I let myself hope that the thing at the center of all that fear was some version of a question I’d have crawled across town to answer.

“I thought maybe you’d come with me,” Mark said. “Be my, you know, wingman.”

Wingman?

Seriously?

The word landed like a coaster set down on a bar, small and flat and final. Not, “Come with me because I want to spend time with you.” Not, “I called because it’s you I want.” Oh no, this was, “Come stand at my shoulder and help me get someone else.”

He’d reached all the way down into whatever he was afraid of and come back up holding “wingman.” He’d said it with relief, like he’d found the safe, harmless, thinkable word for it, the one that didn’t mean anything and cost him nothing.

“You there?” he said.

I was. I was up and out of the chair now, though I didn’t remember standing. My keys were already in my hand, which told me how this was going to go before the sensible part of me got to raise its objection. And, oh, the sensible part had objections.

Say, “No.”

Say, “I’ve got an early morning.”

Say, “Find another wingman. I’m the last man on earth built for that job. Ask a man who isn’t in love with you to help you flirt with strangers.”

That last bit nearly had me stumbling over Dosty’s sprawled-out form.

“Yeah,” I said. “All right. Text me the address. I’ll meet you there.”

Because the sensible part of me had never once won a vote that mattered, and the wingman beside Mark was still beside Mark. I’d decided a long time ago, without ever admitting I’d decided it, that I’d take him in whatever way I could get him—even this one, even walking into a bar to help him look for some other guy.

“You’re serious? You’ll come?” The relief in his voice was palpable and warm and completely oblivious. “God. Thank you. I mean it. I owe you.”

“You owe me nothing,” I said, which was true. It stayed true no matter how many times I said it, because you can’t owe a man for a thing he’d have paid to do.

“Okay. Okay, good. Now I can get in the truck.” There was a pause, and then, softer, the nerves back at the edge of it, “Hey. What do I wear to this? Benji said lean into my strengths.”

Whatever you put on, I thought, you’ll be the best thing in the place, and you won’t believe me if I tell you that.

“Wear whatever’s comfortable,” I said. “You’ll be fine.”

He would not, as it happened, be fine, but I didn’t know that yet, and neither did he.

I hung up and looked at my dog, who had lifted his head and was watching me with both ears up and an expression I chose not to interpret.

“Don’t,” I told him.

He didn’t. He was a good dog. He watched me get my jacket and slide a leather band up over my arm, which I told myself was about the theme and not about wanting, for one night, to look like something special to a man who’d never once looked my way.

Mark got stopped at the door. That was where the evening began to reveal its true character.

By the time we’d both made it over, it was near eleven. The crowd was well past arriving and had settled into its full, strange glory. I got there a minute behind him, so I had a clean view of the whole thing from the sidewalk.

Mark stood at the front of the short line, reaching for his wallet. The doorman, a compact fellow in a leather vest and very little else, held up one hand, though his stop sign wasn’t for the cover Mark was already surprised to be paying. It was for something else entirely.

“Ten to get in,” the doorman said. “But first, honey, you gotta pick.”