both appreciated the plentiful amount of non-taxable income, things were changing. Cheyenne was a new mother, and her husband wanted her home more than a day once a week, and I had a dream. Neither one of us was a lifer, and the owners needed to come to that realization.
Slipping behind the bar, I walked up between Kyle, the man who resembled a defensive lineman, and Ronnie, the small sprite of a girl, both of them smiling big and fake as they took orders, both mixing drinks as quickly as humanly possible.
“Oh, thank God,” Ronnie moaned when she turned and saw me. “You can’t—no more days off for you, Jere, or I swear to God I quit. The new guy is a douchebag who can’t run the night shift for shit.”
“What she said,” Kyle barked at me.
“He’s new,” I told them dismissively. “He’ll learn.”
“The hell he will,” Kyle grumbled. “He wants to be a fuckin’ glorified greeter, and he enjoys comping drinks.”
“So many drinks!” Ronnie assured me with a roll of her eyes.
I ignored them because I had a bar to clear out.
“Who needs a beer?” I asked the crowd, and immediately there was yelling.
I served everyone who needed a soft drink, water, or one of the fifteen craft beers we had on tap. I rang people out, started tabs, filled pitchers of ice water for the servers, and once the wait was back to the normal ebb and flow of a busy Thursday night, not a clusterfuck, I stepped out from behind the bar and went to check on the floor, telling each table to figure out what they wanted for dessert because it was on the house. It took another half an hour, but after, I could tell from the sound in the building, having been there so long, that everything was back under control. It felt like it usually did, familiar, so before I checked on the kitchen again, I ducked into the back to take a moment.
Standing there in front of the time clock, hand braced on the wall, head down, I realized that even though it was stupid, I was going to drive back to the hotel tonight after my shift, at the insane time of two in the morning, and knock on the guy’s door. I had to know; was it a fluke, or was it something else? If it was something else, he wouldn’t care what time it was. If it wasn’t, and he was gone or, worse, had someone new in his room, in his bed, I’d know that somewhere along the line, I’d lost all common sense.
I couldn’t explain it, but the stranger from the night before felt like he belonged with me. I could see myself sitting and talking to him for hours. I wanted to watch movies with him. I wanted to talk to him about my plans and see if his and mine could possibly align. See if maybe he might want that.
It was nuts.
The whole love-at-first-sight thing was a crock of shit, and I wasn’t in love anyway, but there was something there, something I had to question and know the answer to. There was no way I could let it go, because while I was feasting on him, I’d had the compulsion to claim him somehow, to tattoo my name over his heart, and that had never happened before in my life. When he was lying there with his head on my chest, smiling at me in the near-darkness even as he drifted off to sleep, I wanted to ask if I could see him again. I wanted to ask if he wanted to take a ride on my bike, and more than anything, I wanted to ask if he’d like to see the sunrise from my fire escape.
Breathing deeply, feeling better, as I always did when I had a plan, I headed back out. I was surprised when I went toward the area near the stage, which wouldn’t have a band on it for another two hours, and saw the owners, Charles and Rita Bowen, were there with a table full of people. Before I could turn to make my loop, I heard my name called.
Approaching the table, I went around to Rita, who immediately grabbed my hand and stared up at me as she always did, like I hung the moon.
“You see, I told you we just had to wait for Jeremiah to get here and he’d fix everything.” Her sigh was deep. “Kingman’s