Page 104 of Bounced!

And the hall stood.

Chapter 35

Dante

The morning after you don’t lose your home is a strange one.

I woke up in Mark’s bed with a headache the size of the Gulf and no memory of getting home. For one terrible second, my old reflexes kicked in without asking permission, the cataloguing, the bracing, the guarding myself, before the whole night came back and landed on my chest like a warm dog.

Which had also literally happened.

Dosty had colonized the space between us and was snoring with his tongue out.

“We didn’t lose the bar,” I said to the ceiling.

“Nope.” Mark’s voice croaked, wrecked and happy, muffled in a pillow.

“Erik brought fake keys.”

“For the drama.”

“For the drama,” I agreed.

Mark started laughing, that big, helpless laugh, and I soon followed. Dosty lifted his head and looked at us both like we’d lost our minds, which was probably fair.

The hockey guys came by that afternoon to do the part they’d skipped the night before, which was to give us all of the actual information. They’d led with the miracle and buried the paperwork, which, knowing them, tracked completely. Erik sat at the bar with a folder he clearly considered beneath him and slid it across to Mark like it was a room-service check.

“Is boring,” he warned. “Good part was last night. This is part with words.”

Mark opened the folder, and I watched his face do the thing it did when Mark the builder read a plan, the going-still, the eyes darting.

“This is a twenty-year lease,” Mark said.

“Ja.”

“Twenty years,” Mark repeated, as though he didn’t believe his own words.

“We would not buy building and then rent to somebody who leaves.” Erik said this as though it were the most obvious thing in the world, which, to Erik, it was. “Twenty years and cheap. Cheaper than cheap. You keep bar. You do not own building. This is better. No mortgage, no, how you say, the thing where roof breaks and is your problem—”

“Capital expenditure,” said Mark faintly.

“That. Not your problem. Our problem now.” Erik looked deeply satisfied. “We wanted, and Skyler said this, you to not be able to lose it again. Not ever. So, twenty years. Then we do twenty more. Is fine.”

Finn had come around the bar and was reading over Mark’s shoulder. I watched Finn, who trusted a gift about as far as he could throw it, hunt the document for the catch and not find one.

“There’s no catch,” Finn said, not a question, almost accusing.

“Why would we catch you?” Murph said, wounded. “We love you. Bar people are weird. We like it.”

Then there was the other page.

Mark got to it and stopped breathing for a second. His eyes went wide, and one hand came up to cover his mouth. I leaned in to see. Across the top, it said something about a renovation coordinator and a scope of work and then a number with a comma in it that made Mark set the folder down very carefully, like the bomb might go off.

“What’s this?” he asked, finally braving a glance at Skyler.

“It’s the rest of the building,” Skyler said quietly, from the end of the bar where he’d been letting the loud ones be loud. “We own the whole thing now. There are five other units, all empty, all a mess thanks to the previous, very temporary, owner who cleared the place out. Somebody’s got to fix them up, make the whole thing, you know, a real building with shops and whatever goes there.” He shrugged, but there was something careful in his casual gesture. “We’re just dumb jocks. We don’t know how to do any of that, but you do. You literally drew it, Mark. You drew the whole mixed-use thing, and some suit told you it was good but no.”

Mark’s brow furrowed, then his jaw was working. His eyes darted like he was dreaming, despite his lids being open.