Chapter 4: Last Call

Muldoon's was full by ten on Saturday night.

I wore my green sweater dress and the boots I had not worn since the engagement ended.

I sat in the back booth with a glass of red wine I did not touch.

Dex saw me from behind the bar and put down a bottle in the middle of a pour.

The man he was serving cleared his throat, and Dex said, "Hang on," and kept looking at me.

He came around the bar with a second glass and slid in across from me.

"You came," he said.

"You said the first one was on you."

"I said the rest was up to you." He grinned, but his hand shook a little around the glass. "That's the part I'm nervous about."

"You're nervous?"

"I run a bar. I've been punched, bitten and proposed to by a woman in a bridal veil. I'm nervous."

I laughed, and my shoulders came down for the first time all week.

My phone buzzed on the table.

It was a text from Grady.

I think I made a mistake. Can we talk?

I turned the phone face down.

"Who was that?" Dex asked.

"Nobody I want to talk to."

He didn't push.

He told me about a regular who tried to pay his tab in scratch tickets.

He told me about the night the walk-in cooler died.

Every time I laughed, he looked a little more relieved.

At midnight he flicked the lights twice and the room began to empty.

By one he had locked the front door.

I stood at the end of the bar while he wiped it down, and I watched his forearms flex under the rolled sleeves.

"You can say it now," I said. "Nobody can hear."

"Say what?"

"What you'd do. If you could."

He put the rag down.

He came around the bar slowly, until he stood close enough that I had to tip my head back.

"I'd start here," he said, and his thumb brushed my bottom lip, "because you've been biting it all night."

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