Page 70 of Bounced!

Chapter 23

Dante

Iknew it was bad before I got through the door.

I’d learned to read a bar the way others read the weather. This one had every sign of a storm that would earn a name. Everybody there in the dead hour after lunch, hours before open? All of us called in on a day half of us weren’t even scheduled? That alone told me everything. Mark didn’t call the whole bar staff into a meeting at one in the afternoon for good news.

His text had said, “Nobody panic,” which was the single most effective way ever devised to make everybody panic. I’d read it four times on the drive over and felt that old thing come up, the reading-for-exits thing, the bracing.

I strode in and did what I always did: I read the faces.

Benji was wound tight, no jokes loaded. For Benji, that was like seeing a clock with no hands. Jacks stood behind the bar, confused, checking everyone else to find out how worried he should be. Adrian, still in his flour-coated apron, sat on a stool and sipped something steaming from a mug, not Fanta, which meant even he knew this was serious. Rod leaned against the open kitchen door, arms crossed, watching Mark the way you watch a doctor about to give you a diagnosis.

And Finn.

Finn was the tell.

Because I was sure Finn already knew.

I could see it on him, the way he’d set himself off to the side, braced not for the news but for the moment the rest of us got it. Whatever this was, Finn had been carrying it—at least part of it—long before this grand reveal.

Then there was Mark.

He stood behind the bar, beside Jacks, with both hands flat on the wood like it was holding him up as much as he was leaning on it. He clearly hadn’t slept. I knew his body now, knew what it looked like rested, and this wasn’t it. A couple dozen hours ago, he’d been asleep under me with his arms around my back, and the whole world had been good. Something had happened between that bed and this bar.

He caught my eye when I came in. He held my gaze a second. In that second, I understood two things at once.

That this was serious.

And that he was terrified of it, and doing it anyway.

“Okay,” Mark said when the door shut behind me. “Everybody’s here, so you can take a seat. Dante, please lock the door.”

Nobody sat. He didn’t ask twice.

“I got some news yesterday, and my first instinct, I’ll be honest, was to sit on it, to figure it out myself, then come to you with a plan so nobody had to worry.” His jaw worked, and he looked at me when he said it. “But this isn’t mine to sit on. It’s all of ours. So I’m just going to say it straight.”

The bar went quiet.

Even Reina, in the back, seemed to hold her breath.

“Our landlord’s selling the building. It’s done, signed weeks ago. A company called Meridian bought the whole block, and our lease is up December thirty-first. They’re not renewing it.” He swallowed and made himself finish. “They’ve got plans for the space. It won’t be a bar. Come New Year’s, we’re out.”

For a second, there was nothing, then the bar came apart in five directions at once, the way only a family can.

“Out?” Jacks said it like a word in a language he didn’t speak. “Out where? We just did the whole fall hockey-night thing. I’ve got a schedule. I’ve got—”

“Define done.” Benji’s voice climbed thin and high, a mountain goat scaling an impossible cliff. “Define signed. Contracts fall through. People back out. My cousin backed out of a whole wedding. There has to be a—”

“There’s not, Benji.”

“There’s always a—”

“There’s not.”

Adrian stared into nothing, his face blank, his eyes devoid of anything and everything. I thought he’d captured the moment as well as any of us could, and he hadn’t spoken a single word. I’d known him for years. I knew he’d danced, really danced, that there was a whole life back there he’d folded up and put away and only ever showed the edges of. On a good night, I could still catch it in him, the way he’d move across the bar top like he was flowing through choreography. There was none of that in him now. He’d gone still all the way through, the stillness of a man who’d stopped hearing the music.

Rod hadn’t said anything either. He’d stepped into the bar proper, uncrossed his arms, and put one hand flat on the counter, the way he put it on Reina every morning so she’d know his touch. He was looking around the place slowly, at the kitchen door, at the taps, at the walls. He was a man taking a photograph he knew he’d need later.