Page 7 of Bounced!

“Yeah,” he said with feeling. “We really need to order the bigger size. You’re not the first.”

“How many of us are there?”

“You’d be surprised. Lots of big guys in Tampa.” He slid my ID back across the counter. “Have a good one.”

Outside, the night had that thick Florida funk to it, the air only a few degrees cooler than the steam room yet somehow even more humid. My truck sat alone under a light with a moth situation happening around the bulb.

When I climbed in, I didn’t turn the key right away.

I sat there with my hands on the wheel and my phone in the cupholder. My body was still humming, still warm from the inside out. Only now, on top of it all, I felt wrung out by a man whose face I had deliberately refused to see.

Maybe it was him.

Maybe Wes was back in Tampa, drying off in a bathhouse on a Tuesday, close enough to touch.

Maybe it was a stranger who happened to have his shoulders and his ink and his unhurried way of taking up a room, and I’d fled a total innocent.

I would never know.

I had made very sure I would never know.

That was the one thing I’d accomplished, and I’d accomplished it thoroughly.

I felt the whole shape of it settle over me in the quiet. I was forty-eight years old with a bar full of people I loved like blood, a ghost in a steam room, and a towel-shaped hole in an evening where a simpler man’s good time should have been.

I picked up my phone. I don’t know who I thought I was going to call. The screen lit my face and showed me the truth of it, a contact list full of people who worked for me, drank with me, depended on me, and not one single name I could dial at midnight to say the actual sentence out loud, something like, “I think I just saw Wes, or I think I just needed to, and I’m not sure which is worse.”

I put my phone back in the cupholder, face down, then I started the truck, because the one thing I still knew how to do, reliably, at any hour, fully clothed, was drive myself home.

Chapter 2

Mark

The bar didn’t care about my feelings. The bar only cared about the ice machine, which had died sometime between two and six that morning. I discovered this when I walked into a kitchen that had become a shallow lagoon. The machine sat there, silent and smug, radiating the energy of an appliance that had thought about this for a long time and picked its moment.

“You did this on purpose.”

The machine said nothing. Machines never confess.

I’d slept maybe three hours. The other five I’d spent staring at the ceiling, re-litigating a night I didn’t want to even remember. Every time I got close to the part with the shoulders and the ink, I made myself think about drywall instead.

It half worked.

So, I wasn’t at my sharpest when Finn came in at seven and found me on my knees in an inch of water with a wrench.

He froze, took in the lagoon, took in me, kneeling in it, soaked to the thighs.

“Are you baptizing our ice maker? Was it a bad machine? Did you need to cleanse its sins?”

I rolled my eyes and resisted the urge to flick him and his chipper Irish lilt a bird. “I think it’s dead. It needs absolution, not baptism.”

“So you drowned it. That’s murder.” He tossed his keys on the nearby counter and stepped around the water like a man avoiding hot coals. “You look like hell. Get any sleep?”

“Some.”

“How much is some?”

“Three.”