Page 35 of Tangled Up In You
“What are you having?” the bartender asked. She had short, spiky black hair, dark purple lipstick, and black liner fanning out from her eyes in sharp points.
“Do you have Angry Orchard?”
She chuckled before grabbing a bottle and popping the cap. “Didn’t take you for the hard cider type.”
“Yeah, I’m just full of surprises,” I said with indifference, handing her my card to pay.
“Ah, I know that look,” she said after swiping my card and returning it to me. She placed the Angry Orchard in front of me before leaning against the counter. “Girlfriend troubles.”
“Hate to be the one to break it to you, sweetheart, but you’re wrong again,” I pointed out with maybe just a bit too much bitch in my tone.
Surprisingly, she grinned. “So some dude has you sitting at my bar and being a bitter old Betty, huh?”
“You can say that,” I said, finally letting the façade slip and smiling a little. I scanned the room, seeing a large group of college-aged guys at a table in the center, drinking and being unreasonably obnoxious. A couple was dry humping each other in one dark corner of the room, and they were really going at it too. I rolled my eyes before turning back to her. “Does it ever get old playing shrink to all these drunkards?”
“Drunkards?” she asked, cocking a brow. “What, are you some bloke from the fifteen hundreds? No one says that. But since you brought it up, you’re kind of included in that category, sweetness.”
“I beg to differ,” I stated before taking a drink. The beer was both tart and sweet, and it’d been a while since I’d had one. I made a face at it before going in for another drink. “To be a drunkard, I’d have to be drunk.”
“Well you keep on sipping your little cider and you’ll get there eventually.”
“Are you mocking me?” I asked, setting the bottle down and arching a brow at her. “Isn’t the customer always right?”
“Not when said customer is acting like an ass. No.”
“Touché,” I said with a curt nod of my head. “I’m not always an asshole by the way. He just makes me crazy.”
The bartender walked a few feet away to grab the discarded shot glasses from earlier and placed them below the bar before coming back over to me. “And what did this guy do to get you to leave the comfort of your home—which I assume is full of books and probably fancy art and shit, Mr. Scholar—and come out drinking when you obviously don’t drink much?”
She was more perceptive than I’d given her credit for.
“Honestly?” I wrapped my hand around the bottle and fidgeted with it. “He didn’t do anything. All he’s tried to do is get close to me and make up for lost time. It’s me who’s the asshole in this equation. He makes me crazy because I’m in love with him, but I know it won’t ever work.”
“How do you know?” she asked before looking toward the end of the bar where that group of guys from earlier were now shoving each other around. “God dammit, hang on. Break it up, guys!”
She stood on her tip toes and motioned to the bouncer, who was quick to act.
Since it was a small bar, there was only one bouncer, but his size alone was a good way to ward off threats. The man was a beast. He easily broke up the fight, and tossed one guy aside, who was still trying to get to the other guy.
Both drunken men were screaming obscenities at each other, and by the sound of it, one guy had apparently fucked the other’s girlfriend or something. The group of them was kicked out, and I decided right then that I’d had enough of mynight outand just wanted to go back home.
“Hey, Shakespeare,” the bartender called to me just as I slid off the stool. “Not sure what the deal is with your man, but nothing is impossible. Before I opened this bar, I was told all the time—mostly by men—that a chick like me wouldn’t be able to run this kind of place. I proved them wrong. So don’t say it won’t ever work. If it’s meant to be, it’ll find a way. Fate is funny like that.”
“Thanks,” I said before walking out, leaving my barely touched beer behind.
Fate.The word nudged something inside of me.
Corbin and I used to talk a lot about fate. Just like how we’d often discussed classic literature, the symbolic meanings of certain plays and poems, football—of course—and happily ever after endings. In the late nights when I couldn’t sleep, we’d talked about the meaning of life, soulmates, and all of that weird shit that most people never actually said out loud.
No topic was off-limits for us, though.
He’d said it had been fate that it wasmyblue crayon he’d tried to grab when we were in kindergarten—the incident that had caused our first ever fight that then led to us being inseparable. I had said it’d been his only-child-syndrome that’d caused it, basically calling him spoiled.
And that had circled back around to him calling it fate.
Once I was home, I changed into my night pants and sat on the couch with a book. It was kind of late, but I wasn’t tired. When nights like those struck, I’d read for hours and try to mentally exhaust myself so I could sleep.
I didn’t suffer from full-blown insomnia, but there were times where it affected me worse than others. Sometimes it was hard to shut off my brain because I tended to obsess about things. Death being the main one; which way was the worst to die, how will the world end, and will I still be alive when it does? Even things that’d already happened and there was no changing them would haunt me, but for some infuriating reason, I still played the scenario out in my head over and over, trying to come up with different ways it could’ve ended.
