Page 53 of Face Off
His fingers loosened around the new one. “Bottle had it coming.”
I laughed and lifted my fresh glass toward him. “Thank you.”
Ryan tapped his beer against it. “You’re welcome.”
Briggs watched us over his whiskey.
When I looked toward him, he immediately turned to Rider and began an aggressively false conversation about lawn maintenance. Rider listened with the blank resignation of a man accustomed to being used as social camouflage.
They were all watching.
Bliss pretended to discuss flowers with Aura while checking Ryan’s expression in the mirror. Cade stood behind her with one hand against her waist, looking directly at us because subtlety had never interested him when he already possessed the answer. Easton kept his attention on Aura until Ryan laughed, then glanced our way before quickly returning to the conversation. Even the bartender sensed something because he stopped flirting and began serving us with the careful efficiency of someone who had discovered the man beside me might consider a wink an act of war.
No one stared long enough to be obvious.
Nothing about the attention went unnoticed.
I leaned toward Ryan. “They’re watching us.”
“I know.”
“Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Everything bothers me.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
He drank his beer before answering. “Let them watch.”
The response moved warmly through the vodka and mezcal already softening the edges of my thoughts.
Our friends remembered this version of us. Ryan and me sitting beside each other while every conversation eventually narrowed into one only we understood. The teasing, arguments, accidental touches, and way he anticipated what I wanted before I asked had existed long before either of us admitted it was love.
Fifteen months should’ve made the rhythm unfamiliar.
It hadn’t.
Ryan looked different. I felt different. The pain remained between us, heavy and unresolved, yet speaking to him required less effort than most conversations I’d had during the year without him. We kept finding the same openings and finishing the same jokes as though no time had passed.
That frightened me more than his anger would have.
Anger created distance. This felt like returning to something my body had never accepted was gone.
Aura asked the bartender whether the estate had a signature wedding cocktail. Bliss immediately became invested and requested something pink without tasting like “aggressive fruit.” The bartender began listing possibilities while Easton rejected every drink containing another man’s name.
“A Tom Collins isn’t a man,” Aura told him.
“Tom is definitely a man.”
“It’s a cocktail.”
“Named Tom.”
“You need help.”
“I have you.”
She attempted to glare at him, but Easton kissed the side of her head until the expression failed.
