Page 5 of When Wildflowers Bloom

“Have you ever had a one-night stand before?” he asks.

“Maybe…”

“Do you usually drink two fingers of triple sec?”

He’s trying to shatter my lies, and it makes my blood boil. “Why does that matter?” I demand.

He stares at me as a George Strait song starts to play through the speakers. My plan—and heart—cracks with every familiar lyric. The normally comforting sound of his voice becomes a cruel mockery of my life.

My forehead drops to the bar, eyes screwed shut, and I hear myself groan, “I can’t do this.”

Bo’s stillness lets me know he’s uncomfortable, not that I blame him. Nobody comes to a bar to sit next to this kind of crazy, even I know that.

The silence that follows lasts years.

“Why don’t I meet these sticky note criteria?” There’s a playfulness in his rusty voice that I can hear even with my eyes closed.

Somehow, I lift my head off the bar, stitch myself back together, and look at him.

“All this”—I gesture from his head down the length of his torso—“is way more than aseven, my friend.”

He laughs with a shake of his head and bobble of his toothpick, but even in the neon, I swear the peaks of his cheeks turn the slightest shade of pink. For the first time, I notice his dimples, visible despite the scruff of his beard.

I force another sip of my beer and swallow the gag before it comes out of my mouth.

“What about him?” he asks, pointing to a guy shooting pool.

I scoff. “Maybe a six, but that gold chain takes him down to a four.”

He laughs softly, then repeats, “Him?” tilting his head across the bar to a man who smiles with all his too-big teeth when our eyes meet.

I fight to keep the laugh in my mouth. “You know, it’s the beret and fully unbuttoned shirt that makes it hard to say if he’s a one or a twelve.”

He laughs, hair falling across his face, toothpick bobbling on his lips.

I don’t know if Bo knows that I need this or if it’s just who he is, but it’s what we spend the next hour doing. I don’t drink any more of my beer and he doesn’t order another one as he asks me to rank every man in the bar.

Just like that, I’m a stranger in a foreign land, and he’s a local on a barstool. When we get bored of my ranking, we talk about nothing important. I don’t tell him about my family, about my fate, and I don’t ask about his. Every answer I give him is more truth than lie, but never fully me. It’s easy and fun, and for one night in my whole exhausting life it doesn’t feel like a battle to the death.

I forget about my rules and plans, and I soak the ease of him in like a dry sponge absorbing water from a swimming pool—entirely and with excess.

“What’s with the toothpick?” I ask as it rolls across his lips. Mesmerizing.

He pulls it out and looks at it, as if he’s forgotten it was there. “Gives me something to do with my mouth.” Then he gives this smile that starts out small before slowly curving into something big. Dangerous, even. Without pulling his eyes off mine, he snaps the toothpick in half and drops it into the mouth of the empty bottle in front of him.

Either his words or his smile or the unexpected snapping of wood heats my chest. My neck. Some place low in my belly.

I shift on my stool. “What would be on your list?” I ask, driving the conversation away from his unnerving mouth. “If you were in the same position as me, I mean.”

He blows out a small breath, looking away from me and spinning the empty beer bottle in front of him. “I don’t think what I need can fit on a sticky note.”

“Why?”

He hesitates, still spinning the empty beer bottle in a way that’s hypnotizing to watch. When I don’t think he’s going to answer, he says, “Because sometimes life is messy.”

Then we’re quiet. As much as I want to ask what he means by that, I know what it feels like to not want to talk about it too. What it’s like to have a mess.

Finally, “I have to go,” and I hate the words as soon as I say them. Maybe it’s him or maybe it’s because it’s just not everything else, but I don’t care. I don’t want it to end. I want to be Pam Beesly at a bar with a man named Bo forever.

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