Page 60 of One Room Vacancy
I should stop him. I should change the subject or leave the room.
But I don’t.
He glances toward me again, cautious now. “You could buy it.”
“Don’t start that shit again, please.”
It comes out sharper than I mean it to, but I don’t walk it back. I can’t.
He doesn’t respond right away, but I can feel his eyes on me. I take another sip of wine, mostly just to have something to do with my hands.
He doesn’t know what he’s asking. Or maybe he does, and he just doesn’t understand what it would cost me.
There’s money, of course. I almost never talk about it, not even with Wes. A trust fund, set aside when my mom died—part of a life that never really felt like mine. Wes has one too, but he’s always known what to do with it. He’s always had direction, stability, plans.
Me? I was the one working odd shifts at three different bars in a year. Bouncing between cities. Picking up temp work, then ditching it because something shinier caught my eye. I made it look carefree on purpose.
Gabe saw it all back then too, and he never seemed to judge me for it. He used to call me free-spirited, said I wasn’t motivated by capitalism like everyone else, like it was a choice. Like I had a philosophy.
Maybe I did, I don’t know anymore.
Truth is, I didn’t think I had what it took to stay anywhere long enough to build something. I was scared shitless of committing to anything I could break.
The trust fund? It’s a trapdoor. A safety net I’m too afraid to step onto, because if I use it and fail, that’s it. I’ll have no one to blame but myself. No excuse, no fallback, just me and the proof I was never built to carry something real.
I set the wine glass down harder than I mean to. “You think I haven’t thought about that?” I ask. “You think it hasn’t been in the back of my mind since the second Harry told me?”
Gabe’s expression shifts—careful now. “I didn’t mean to push. I just…I think you’d be good at it.”
“Youthink,” I repeat, the words bitter on my tongue. “EveryonethinksI’d be good at something until I actually try.”
“Sage—”
“No. You don’t get it.” My voice is rising now, shaking, but I don’t stop. I can’t stop. “You see me as this laid-back, don’t-give-a-shit bartender with weird earrings and no plan, and you think it’s charming. You think it’s a choice, that I’m just too cool to care about owning anything.”
I push away from the table and start pacing, hands in my hair, like if I keep moving I can outrun the panic pressing against my ribs. “You know why I never stay anywhere? Why I’ve never committed to anything longer than a playlist? Because deepdown I don’t think I can. Because I’m the one in the family who bails, who forgets birthdays, who disappears for music festivals and comes back with my scalp burnt and no money and another story about why I left the job I swore I liked.”
He stays seated, watching me carefully, but I see the way his fingers flex against the table. He wants to say something, and maybe he should, but I keep going.
“I didn’t choose to be a flighty mess. I became one because it was the only thing people ever expected from me. And now you want me to, what—use my mom’s trust fund to buy a bar? To tie her name to something I’m statistically probably going to fail at?”
I laugh, and it’s ugly. Harsh, too close to crying.
“You think I could handle that? Losing the last thing I have from her because I wanted to play pretend as a small business owner?”
My throat burns. My chest aches. But I’m too far in now to stop.
We don’t talk about my mom. I seldom do in general—not because I don’t think about her, but because I was so young when she passed that I don’t even have a memory of her. Just stories, a handful of old photos, and a trust fund with her name on it, like a reminder I didn’t earn.
I know Gabe knows; Wes has told him things over the last few years. I’ve seen it in the way he looks at me sometimes, usually around Mother’s Day—like he’s carrying pieces of grief I never got the chance to claim.
And maybe I do the same for him. I never ask, but I know enough to understand his grief is messier—sharper at the edges. His mother didn’t leave him by dying. She left him while still breathing.
“I told you I can’t, Gabe. Not because I don’t want to. Because I don’t believe I’d survive the fallout if I tried and it wasn’t enough.”
There’s a long silence.
Then, quietly, “That’s not what I was saying.”
