Page 37 of Bounced!

Finn said, “Good, that’s a decent pub, that one.”

Rod said something about surf and turf.

Benji took a bow.

And down at his end of the bar, Dante didn’t say anything at all. He didn’t look up. He turned a page in his book about a man who kept everyone at arm’s length. He turned it a little too smoothly, a little too evenly. I thought it was the page flip of a man who wasn’t reading the words printed on it. His jaw had done something. It set and held, there and gone, the same tell I’d never once caught on him before but somehow caught now. Then he was reading again, or looking like it.

I got back to work. It was what I did when I couldn’t name a thing. But nothing connected that afternoon. I stood dead in the middle of my own life holding all three pieces—my bar, a terrifying business card, and a stoic man—and didn’t put a single one against another, because I was, and I say this with love for myself, the last man in Tampa to ever truly know what he was looking at.

Chapter 13

Dante

By eleven o’clock, I’d made my peace with it. At least, that’s what I tried telling myself. Mark was at some grown-up bar across town in a shirt Benji had approved, meeting men who owned furniture. I was at home where I belonged, in my good chair with fifty pounds of greyhound draped across my feet like a fainted Victorian. This was the life I’d built, brick by careful brick, and it was a good life, and I was fine.

Really, I was fine.

“He doesn’t need me there,” I told Dosty. “The Anchor’s a decent bar with an older crowd. He’ll be fine. Somebody’ll finally have the sense to want him for the guy he is, and then he’ll stop dragging himself to those places. That’ll be good. That’s a good outcome for him.”

Dosty said nothing.

He was a good listener in the way that furry furniture was a good listener.

“He’ll probably wear the wrong thing. He always wears the wrong thing. He’ll pick whatever he thinks reads as attractive. It’ll be a disaster. Nobody’ll be there to tell him, and some fool will still take one look at those shoulders and—” I stopped. “And that’s fine, too. That’s what he’s there for. That’s the whole point of him going out. Good for him.”

Dosty lifted his head off my feet and stared up at me. He cocked his head, one ear going up in the way that meant he’d heard something a human hadn’t said.

I stared back at him.

I was, I suddenly realized, sitting alone in my condo at ten o’clock at night narrating another man’s dating prospects to a dog. I was doing it with feeling. I’d been doing it for some minutes. I’d even used the word “shoulders.”

“Forget it,” I told him and picked up my book.

My face was warm, which was ridiculous because there was nothing to be warm about. Mark and I worked together. That was the entire scope of it. I stood at his door, he signed my paychecks, and we’d hauled an ice machine once. I had no business, none, sitting there keeping a ledger on who did or didn’t deserve him, because it wasn’t my ledger to keep. He was a coworker, my boss even.

Men didn’t lie awake over their boss’s Tuesday nights.

Men certainly didn’t say “shoulders” to a greyhound.

I’d nearly convinced myself of all of that when my phone rang.

Mark was calling at ten-fifteen, which meant something had gone wrong. Something in me, some traitor thing I’d have denied under oath, lifted, because a bad night for Mark was a good night for me, God help me. It meant another car ride and ten quiet minutes and him beside me smelling of bourbon and defeat, which should’ve been disturbing but somehow sounded like the perfect ending to the perfect night.

I let the phone ring twice so I wouldn’t sound like a man who’d been waiting for the dumb thing to ring in the first place.

“Mark.”

“Hey. Hey, Dante.” Not slurred. Not defeated either, just off . . . or working up to something. My Spidey sense tingled. “You, uh . . . you busy? You up?”

“I’m up.”

“’Course you are. You’re always up. You’re like a . . . you’re nocturnal.” I heard a breath followed by something knocking on his end, a cabinet maybe, then a glass set down, the sounds of a man moving around his own kitchen and not going anywhere. “So listen. Okay. Benji’s been on me about this place, The Anchor, their Tuesday thing. He says it’s where everybody goes midweek, that it’s an older crowd of people who—his words—were people who own furniture. I said I’d go. I told him I’d go tonight.”

“I remember.”

“Right. So I said I’d go, and it’s finally late enough that the place’ll be open and moving, but I’ve been standing in my kitchen for forty-five minutes in a shirt I’ve changed twice. My keys are right here on the counter, and I keep . . . I keep picking them up and setting them back down.” He let out a rough exhale. “I can’t make myself get in the truck, Dante. It’s the dumbest thing. I’ve walked into buildings that were on fire. I’ve told a man twice my size he was fired. Now, I can’t drive myself to a bar because the last one, the young place, just about took the wind out of me, and I don’t . . . I don’t want to walk into another one like that by myself.”

He hadn’t gone yet. That was the first thing my mind reported, and it reported it with an eagerness I didn’t care for. He wasn’t deflated or stranded. He wasn’t calling for the ride at the sad end of a bad night. He was calling before the night even happened, from his kitchen, with his keys in his hand, too scared to go.