options are there in a town as small as Oak Dale? The truth is we’re at rock bottom. We’ve been surviving down here so long, I’m not quite sure what life would feel like otherwise.
When I’m done with my beer, I push it away and polish off my cherries. I can practically hear my stomach groaning in protest: Please, please put some kind of leafy green inside me before you die.
Chairs screech across the floor as the suits stand to leave. One of them comes up to the bar to close out their tab, but it’s not the one I’m interested in, so what do I care?
There’s a sense of loss as I realize he’s going with them, exiting the bar and leaving me behind.
As they walk out, I strain my ears, trying to listen for him, but they’re all chatting at once and I can’t distinguish one voice from another. The bar’s door swings open and road noise from the highway rushes in, cars zooming past our small neck of the woods on their way to someplace better.
I pick at the label on my beer as the door swings shut again, leaving me alone with two regulars down at the end of the bar and the bartender who’s still harboring ill will toward me about the cherries. I know because he keeps grumbling “ungrateful brat” under his breath. Altogether, we’d make a well-rounded cast for an antidepressant commercial, and I know I must be feeling down because even that thought doesn’t make me smile.
“You need anything?” the bartender asks, speaking to the area of the room where the suits were sitting a few minutes ago, and my head whips over my shoulder so fast I nearly fall off my stool.
He’s still there.
Alone.
Sitting at the table and telling the bartender he’s all set. He doesn’t want another drink…so then why is he still here? There’s no game on the TV over the bar—it’s been busted for years. There’s no one around to offer up witty conversation unless you count the belching pair in the far corner. (I don’t.)
Then his gaze finds mine and I get it.
He’s here for me.
My heart lurches to a stop, misses a beat, and then starts to thump wildly.
He’s not the answer to my problems. He’d be nothing more than a distraction, a short reprieve from the weight of life’s boot on my neck.
I meet his eyes head on.
God, he’s so good-looking with that rough edge to him. He’s a man’s man. Broad chest, veined forearms, tall frame. Even now, he’s not smiling. His brows are furrowed and his supple mouth—arguably the only soft thing about him—is marked by a terse frown. It’s like he’s mad at me for putting us in this position, mad at me for making him want to stay.
I could aim the same resentment right back at him. I’ve never had a one-night stand before because I’ve never met a guy who made me want to do it. This man is seductive without even trying, sensual even as he sits half a bar away from me, partially reclined, assessing me coolly. In any setting, he’d turn heads. In this setting, he captures my full attention.
It occurs to me that I could walk out of the bar right now and keep my heart in one piece. Nothing good would come from this encounter.
Tomorrow, this stranger will be gone and my life will resume.
My life.
Four years since graduating from high school and I’m still here, unable to escape this nightmarish merry-go-round. We work and we save only to have some disaster strike—car breaks down, insurance doesn’t cover McKenna’s new asthma medication, A/C busts, roof needs fixing—and here we are again, right back at square one, just as broke as the day we started.
My hands shake and my throat aches from trying to keep these tears unshed.
I can’t do it anymore.
This life is going to send me to an early grave. I need an emergency stop button, a safety valve that triggers a spring that will propel me from this barstool and send me to a deserted island where credit card bills and crappy bosses don’t exist. Actually, let’s scrap the island. I’m not picky. I’ll take a quiet night in my mom’s trailer, staring at a blank wall as long as no one reminds me of the doom that awaits me in the morning.
That emergency stop button doesn’t exist, but this man does.