Page 108 of Bounced!

When the laughter finally calmed, Rod made us apologize to Reina.

At forty-eight years old, I’d owned and run a construction company and a bar and a family. I considered myself reasonably accomplished and level-headed. Despite all that, on the second Tuesday of January, I stood in a commercial kitchen in Ybor and formally apologized to a six-hundred-pound ice machine for having made out against it, while my boyfriend stood next to me apologizing, too.

Of course, our entire family filmed it.

Benji went live.

“I’m sorry, Reina,” I said.

“With feeling,” Rod demanded.

“Rod—”

“She waited months for apology. Give with feeling.”

I looked at the ice machine. I thought about the night behind it, honestly, the best night, the night Dante first kissed me stupid against cold steel and everything in my life started over. I found, to my surprise, that the feeling came easy.

“I’m sorry, Reina,” I said, and meant it. I reached up and patted her cold flank the way Rod did every morning. “But I’m not sorry it happened. That was the night I got him. You were there. You’re part of the reason I have all of this.” I looked around the kitchen, at all of them, at the bar we didn’t lose, at Dante trying not to smile beside me. “One of the best things that ever happened to me happened against your side. So, thank you, actually. I take it back. I’m not sorry at all.”

Reina hummed and dropped a perfect measure of ice into her bin, which Rod chose to interpret as acceptance.

“She forgives,” he announced. “She has generous heart, unlike her chef, who will be watching you both, always.” He closed his folder, tucked it under his arm, and then, because he was Rod, because under all the theater was pure heart, he paused at the kitchen door and looked back at the two of us. His face went soft for just a second.

“Is good, though,” he said gruffly. “You two. Is—” He waved a hand, searching. “Is good. Even on my queen. Is good.” He disappeared into his kitchen before anyone could catch him being sincere, then hollered back through the pass-through, “BUT IF HAPPENS AGAIN, I CALL POLICE,” and we heard Reina hum.

That was the end of the Case of the Defiled Queen.

Chapter 37

Epilogue

Dante

We reopened on a Saturday in January. The whole world came. Okay, not the whole world, but it felt like everyone who had ever walked through our door over seven years, and everyone they’d ever known, and half of the Tampa Bay area besides, all of them pouring down a cold, bright sidewalk toward a bar that was supposed to be a hole in the ground but instead was blazing with every light it had.

There was a new sign over the door. Erik had insisted on hanging it himself, up a ladder in the January chill, refusing help. When he’d bolted it in place and climbed down, he’d stepped back and looked up at it with his hands on his hips and said, “Now is official. Now is real.” The thing glowed to life over the entrance, blue and white, the bolt and the words,

OFFICIAL SPORTS BAR OF THE TAMPA BAY LIGHTNING.

Benji had, as predicted, lost his entire mind. He’d been making content about the reopening for weeks. He called it “the brand crossover of the century.” He had a countdown. He had a hashtag. He had, at one point, a spreadsheet projecting our new “audience penetration,” which Finn made him stop saying out loud in a gay bar.

Inside, it was a different place than the one we’d almost buried, and also exactly the same.

Mark had poured himself into his drawings, the ones Dante-in-October had made him keep, the ones a suit had called an encumbrance. He hadn’t torn the bar down and rebuilt it. That wasn’t the job. The job was the rest of the building, the five dead units around us. The transformation was starting already. I could see it through the far wall where he’d opened a doorway that had been bricked up for a decade.

“A coffee place is going in next door,” Mark said. “A little bookshop after that, if I can find the right tenant. I want an indie, not a chain, something quaint where people go and hang out and actually meet each other and talk books.” I caught him looking at me sideways when he said it. I pretended not to see the pure joy in his eyes.

The bar itself he’d left alone. On purpose. Because some things you don’t improve. You just keep the lights on.

I stood at the door.

It was my job, and it was an old habit. For years, I’d worked that spot. Even now, a co-owner with my name on the paper, even now some part of me went to the threshold out of muscle memory, to watch the room fill, to read the faces coming in. Except I wasn’t reading them for threats anymore. I’d finally realized that. Somewhere in the last year, I’d stopped standing at that door braced for what might come through it and started standing there just to watch the people I loved arrive.

And Lord, they arrived.

All of them, on a cold, bright Tampa night, stamping the chill off their shoes and filling the place up faster than the heat could keep pace with, and I stood at the door and let them come. Most of them I greeted the way you greet people you’ll see a thousand more times, quick and easy, a hand on a shoulder, a joke half finished before they’d moved past me into the warmth.

Adrian came in with his hand easy in Brendan’s. They strode past with a smile and kind words, then crossed to greet Benji at the bar. A heartbeat later, I caught Adrian’s eye from across the room, and I made myself hold it a second, because only weeks earlier, that man had danced all of us to pieces and then went quiet again. I’d been afraid the quiet would swallow him back down, but it hadn’t. There was color in his face now, and he looked, for the first time since Mark had told us about the card, like a man at rest. He nodded at me, small, and I thought, There you are. Welcome back. We missed you.