I swing my hip into the bar and slide my elbow over it as I face him. “Hey, tiger.”
His hazel eyes slowly lift to my face, blink. “Hi?”
“Do you come here often?”
He studies me for a minute, visibly weighing potential replies. “No,” he says finally. “I don’t live here.”
“Oh,” I say, but before I can get out any more, he goes on.
“And even if I did, I have a cat with a lot of medical needs that require specialized care. Makes it hard to get out.”
I frown at just about every part of that sentence. “I’m so sorry,” I recover. “It must be awful to be dealing with all that while also coping with a death.”
His brow crinkles. “A death?”
I wave a hand in a tight circle, gesturing to his getup. “Aren’t you in town for a funeral?”
His mouth presses tight. “I am not.”
“Then what brings you to town?”
“A friend.” His eyes drop to his phone.
“Lives here?” I guess.
“Dragged me,” he corrects. “For vacation.” He says this last word with some disdain.
I roll my eyes. “No way! Away from your cat? With no good excuse except for enjoyment and merrymaking? Are you sure this person can really be called a friend?”
“Less sure every second,” he says without looking up.
He’s not giving me much to work with, but I’m not giving up. “So,” I forge ahead. “What’s this friend like? Hot? Smart? Loaded?”
“Short,” he says, still reading. “Loud. Never shuts up. Spills on every single article of clothing either of us wears, has horrible romantic taste, sobs through those commercials for community college—the ones where the single mom is staying up late at her computer and then, when she falls asleep, her kid drapes a blanket over her shoulders and smiles because he’s so proud of her? What else? Oh, she’s obsessed with shitty dive bars that smell like salmonella. I’m afraid to even drink the bottled beer here—have you seen the Yelp reviews for this place?”
“Are you kidding right now?” I ask, crossing my arms over my chest.
“Well,” he says, “salmonella doesn’t have a smell, but yes, Poppy, you are short.”
“Alex!” I swat his bicep, breaking character. “I’m trying to help you!”
He rubs his arm. “Help me how?”
“I know Sarah broke your heart, but you need to get back out there. And when a hot babe approaches you at a bar, the number one thing you should not bring up is your codependent relationship with your asshole cat.”
“First of all, Flannery O’Connor is not an asshole,” he says. “She’s shy.”
“She’s evil.”
“She just doesn’t like you,” he insists. “You have strong dog energy.”
“All I’ve ever done is try to pet her,” I say. “Why have a pet who doesn’t want to be petted?”
“She wants to be petted,” Alex says. “You just always approach her with this, like, wolfish gleam in your eye.”
“I do not.”
“Poppy,” he says. “You approach everything with a wolfish gleam in your eye.”
Just then the bartender approaches with the drink I ordered before I ducked into the bathroom. “Miss?” she says. “Your margarita.” She spins the frosted glass down the bar toward me, and a ping of excited thirst hits the back of my throat as I catch it. I swipe it up so quickly that a fair amount of tequila sloshes over the lip, and with a preternatural and highly practiced speed, Alex jerks my other arm off the bar before it can get liquor splattered on it.
“See? Wolfish gleam,” Alex says quietly, seriously, the way he delivers pretty much every word he ever says to me except on those rare and sacred nights when Weirdo Alex comes out and I get to watch him, like, lie on the floor fake-sobbing into a microphone at karaoke, his sandy hair sticking up in every direction and wrinkly dress shirt coming untucked. Just one hypothetical example. Of something that has exactly happened before.
Alex Nilsen is a study in control. In that tall, broad, permanently slouched and/or pretzel-folded body of his, there’s a surplus of stoicism (the result of being the oldest child of a widower with the most vocal anxiety of anyone I’ve ever met) and a stockpile of repression (the result of a strict religious upbringing in direct opposition to most of his passions; namely, academia), alongside the most truly strange, secretly silly, and intensely softhearted goofball I’ve had the pleasure to know.
I take a sip of the margarita, and a hum of pleasure works its