Page 123 of When Wildflowers Bloom

He drops his phone on the bar with an unamused sigh. “Nothing.” He pauses as the DJ announces the next karaoke singer, earning a small applause, then, “Why am I here?”

She scoffs. “Rude,” she says over the atrocious rendition of Willie Nelson. “But you’ve been a hermit, and John pissed me off.” She wipes the bar in front of him with a rag. “Him having an extra kid seems fair.”

Bo laughs, lifting his beer to his lips. “Christmas lights?”

“He wouldn’t know holiday cheer if it bit him in the ass!” she defends.

I bite back my own laugh—because I can imagine the whole scenario between the two of them.

“Seriously, Bo. You laugh, but you kn—”

A man taps Bo on his shoulder, pulling himfrom Libby’s rant.

“You Bo?” he asks.

“That’s me,” Bo responds, lifting his beer toward him.

“Dropped this.” The man hands him a blue sticky note then walks away.

Bo’s eyes drop to it, eyebrows pinched. I can’t see it, but I know what it says.

On a scale of 1-10, 10

“What’s that?” Libby asks, leaning over the bar to read.

He looks around the room—almost confused—then back to the note.

“I don’t know,” he says, showing her before sticking it on the bar.

“Bo?” Another tap on his shoulder, a woman this time. “I think you dropped this.”

He takes the next blue sticky note, which I know saysPersonality, 10.

Tap.

“Bo, this is for you.”

Single? Yes.

Another.

Lives alone? No, but kid is cute and can sleep throughanything.

With every tap on his shoulder, he looks around the crowded bar, slow-to-grow smile widening, and I have to put my own hand over my mouth to physically stop myself from calling for him as I watch from behind the tree.

Tap.

“Some girl told me to give this to you, hot stuff,” a woman says. Not just any woman.

He snorts a disbelieving, “Mabel?” then looks down at the note, grinning wide.

Puts Mabel’s smut to shame.

“You’ve got main male character energy, Bo. Romp her socks off,” she says with a tawdry wink before dancing away from him with hands over her head, one holding a gin and tonic, the other a notebook, cheetah-print covered hips rocking to the music.

When Bo told me he loved me in the grocery store, he told me he’d give me a hundred reasons why if I wanted him to. I know he was just saying that, but I really did. I easily came up with one hundred reasons why Bo makes my life better and I never want to let him go. So I wrote them down, passed them out, and they are now being hand delivered to him by the people around Libby’s.

“If it doesn’t work out with her, I’m single,” I hear the dark-haired woman say, biting her lip, handing him one that makes him laugh loudly, which I know must say,Does dirty things to my ear.

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