But I like to think so. Mom’s probably two-stepping around a cloud, pissing off the angels with her loud clapping and whistling.” He smiles like that image speaks to him, but there’s a tinge of sadness to it. He doesn’t mention his father, so neither do I. People are open books about some things and not others, and I learned long ago to be okay with that.
“She sounds like fun,” I tell him.
He lays his hand back on the bar, his pinky finger a bare inch from mine. I’m acutely aware of the small space, wondering if the heat I feel is radiating from him or my insides melting to mush and racing out to my extremities. “What about you? Happiest memory?”
Tit for tat seems fair, I guess, especially since I started this round.
“My first paycheck from photography. Not because I needed the money, though I did splurge on a fancy dinner. No ramen noodles that night. No, this girl got a whole rotisserie chicken,” I joke, remembering how I’d eaten the whole thing with my hands while sitting on the floor because I didn’t have a couch yet. More seriously, I say, “But like you, it was that it symbolized something greater. That my art was worth something, that I was worth something.”
“What was it a picture of?”
I shake my head, feeling ridiculous for getting choked up over something so trivial. “Something stupid. It wasn’t that. It was what it meant to me.”
His eyes narrow, his voice going impossibly deeper. “What was it?” he demands.
I sigh, already knowing I’m going to tell him. “Promise not to make fun of it?” He doesn’t agree, but I say it anyway. “A doughnut. A close-up of a big pink doughnut with multi-colored sprinkles.”
He laughs, a deep, rusty chuckling sound that forces a smile to my face.
“Don’t laugh at me. It was a big deal. That doughnut got me a whole chicken!” And now I can’t help but laugh too. “It had the doughnut shop owner’s wife smiling in the background too, so proud of her doughnut baby.”
“Doughnut. Baby.” He repeats my words, and we both laugh harder, our heads getting closer as we share in the private joke.
The moment freezes, and I suddenly become very aware that he’s moved his pinky finger over mine and our mouths are inches apart. He licks his lips, and I know with every fiber of my being that he’s going to kiss me. I’m waiting, ready, damn near holding my breath in anticipation of tasting him, of being under him if only for a kiss across a sticky bar.
Bar.
Oh! The bar.
And the world outside the bubble I was in with Bobby comes roaring back into focus. I pull back, my hands feeling the instant cold at the loss of contact with him. “Work. I have to . . . work.”
His lips part ever so slightly on an exhale, and I know he was just as primed for that kiss as I was. But he lets me go.
Just in time, too, because Unc comes around the corner calling out, “Last call. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”
“Do you even know that song?” My words are too fast, but not as fast as my heart is racing.
“What song?” he grunts, passing me to get back into his sacred space behind the bar. “Would you help Olivia out and do a round of bussing glasses so we can get out of here tonight?”
That’s the first time Unc has asked for my help nicely instead of bossing me around as though my very presence is somehow both welcome and unwelcome at the same time. I’m calling it progress.
“Sure thing.”
I grab a dish tub and start my way around the room, grabbing empties as I go and letting my mind race away.
What was that? What just happened? Oh, my God, I almost kissed Bobby Tannen. It is a well-known fact that hot musicians do not kiss girls like me. Nope, never happens. But it did. Well, almost.
Distracted, I lean over table nine, trying not to interrupt the guys’ conversation. But the blond closest to me runs the back of his hand up my arm and a creepy shiver runs down my spine.
“Hi there.” He’s not drunk, or at least he’s not slurring and his eyes are focused. But he’s clearly lost his ever-loving mind.
“Hello,” I answer coldly, shifting away from him.
I hate to say it, but I’ve been in enough bars that I’m well aware that