Second Chance on Felt

Camila racked the balls one more time even though the table was done for the night. It was a habit, and she knew it. The Velvet Cue closed at midnight on Fridays, and by twelve twenty she was usually alone with the mop and the jukebox and that one eight ball that had a scuff on it nobody ever replaced.

She straightened the rack, slid it off the balls, and stood there holding it like an idiot. Twelve years. Twelve years since Tobias Fischer had walked out of this same room with a duffel bag over his shoulder and a bus ticket to a job in another state, and she had said exactly nothing. Not "wait." Not "call me." Not even "have a good life," which would have been easy, at least.

She was thirty-five now. He'd be thirty-six. She did the math sometimes when the bar was slow, which was embarrassing, but there it was.

That summer they'd both been in the Wednesday league, and they were twenty-three and twenty-four, young adults who should have known better. He'd buy her a beer after every match and she'd pretend it was just a league thing. And then one August night he told her he was leaving for a warehouse management job up north, and he stood there by the jukebox like maybe she'd say something, and she said, "That's great, Tobias, you deserve it." Like a greeting card. He'd nodded, and he'd left, and she'd cried in the back office where the mop water lived.

So what did you do with that kind of regret? You racked balls. You wiped down the leather stools. You got decent at your job and bad at dating, and every year the story got heavier and you carried it anyway.

The jukebox clicked over to another ballad, some slow thing about a man who came back too late, and Camila laughed out loud at the universe's sense of humor. "Very funny," she told the machine. It didn't answer, because it was a jukebox.

She was stacking the last of the coasters when she heard the door.

Now, the door to the Velvet Cue had a bell on it, an old brass thing, and regulars knew to knock the snow or rain off before they pushed in. But nobody came in at twelve twenty on a Friday. Nobody except maybe her boss, Shawna, who forgot her reading glasses half the time and had a key anyway.

"Sorry, we're closed!" Camila called out, not turning around. "Last call was twenty minutes ago, you just missed it!"

"I always did have bad timing."

The coaster in her hand was suddenly the most interesting object in the world. She knew that voice. She'd have known it underwater, through a wall, at the bottom of a well. She turned around slow, like in a movie, except real life doesn't do slow turns well and she nearly tripped over the stool.

Tobias Fischer stood by the door, older, broader in the shoulders, with a little gray coming in at his temples. He still had that crooked front tooth she used to notice when he laughed at losing a game. He was wearing a jacket that said he'd walked here from somewhere, and he looked at her as if testing whether the ground was still solid.

"You're closed," he said. "I can see that. The sign says it too. I just, I got into town Sunday and I heard this place was still open, and I told myself I'd come by before I talked myself out of it. Guess I picked a hell of an hour."

"You picked the worst hour," Camila said, and her voice came out steadier than she felt. "Twelve twenty on a Friday. That's the worst one. Congratulations."

He laughed, and there was the tooth, and something in her chest did a thing she refused to name in front of witnesses, even if the only witness was a jukebox.

"Can I just sit for a minute?" he asked. "I'll leave. I'm not trying to be a creep who shows up at closing. It's just, I've been standing outside for ten minutes trying to decide, and I figured standing out there was creepier."

Was it? Camila thought about it honestly. It kind of was.

"There's a stool with your name on it," she said. "Well, not literally. Shawna took down the name plaques in like 2015. But you know which one."

He knew which one. Fourth from the end, near the pool table, the leather worn soft on the left side because he used to hook his heel on the rung. He sat down in it like no time had passed at all, and she hated how good that looked.

"Beer?" she asked. "I can't sell it to you, technically, but I can pour one and call it a house gift, and Shawna will yell at me Monday and it'll be worth it."

"You'd get in trouble for me?"

"Twelve years of trouble, apparently, and I'm still here. What's one more write-up."

He grinned at that, and she turned to the taps before he could see her face do whatever it was doing. She poured two. She told herself the second one was for her, and it was, mostly.

"So," she said, setting the glass down in front of him. "You're back. For how long? Visiting your mom? Job thing?"

"My mom passed in March," he said, and she put her hand over her mouth. "I know. I would've sent word if I'd known where to send it. The service was small. I stayed up north through the spring, and then in June I got an offer from the distribution outfit here, the one off Route 9, and I took it. Started Monday. So I'm back for good, I think. Assuming the town still wants me."

"The town doesn't get a vote," Camila said. "I'm sorry about your mom, Tobias. She was always nice to me. She used to come in here on Sundays and put five dollars in the jukebox and play the same three songs."

"That sounds like her." He turned the glass a slow half circle on the bar. "Camila, I have to say something, and you can throw me out after. Twelve years I've been rehearsing this, so it might come out weird."

"Nothing about tonight has been normal so far, so go ahead."

"I was in love with you that summer. The whole league season. And when I got that job offer I told myself you'd never say anything, and then I waited by that jukebox for you to stop me, and you didn't, and I was too much of a coward to do it myself. And I have regretted the way I left this room every single day since. Every day. That's it. That's the speech. It only took me from twenty-four to thirty-six."

Camila looked at him for a while. The jukebox changed songs. Somewhere in the back the ice machine rattled and shut off.

"Fourth stool from the end," she said finally. "Do you know why I never changed it? Why I told Shawna to leave it alone when she wanted to recover all the seats?"

He shook his head.

"Because it was yours, and I was stupid enough to think you'd come back and want it." She picked up her own glass. "I let you walk out that door, Tobias. I've had twelve years to think about why, and I still don't fully know. But I know I'm not twenty-three anymore, and I'm done being the person who says nothing."

"That sounds like maybe there's more to that sentence."

"There might be. But you're drinking my house beer, so let's start there and see where the night goes."

They drank for a while, and it was the strangest kind of easy, like the twelve years had happened to two other people entirely. The jukebox rolled into another ballad, some song about a train, and Tobias tapped his glass along with it without seeming to notice he was doing it.

"Wednesday league," he said. "Tell me you still remember the standings."

"Are you kidding? I kept the standings. It was literally my job."

"Third place. We took third place that summer."

"Third place out of six teams, and Shawna bought us a round anyway because she felt sorry for us." Camila laughed, a real one, the kind that surprised her coming out. "You sunk the eight ball on the wrong table twice. Same table. The one with the scuffed eight that nobody ever replaced."

"It's still here, isn't it. I saw it racked up when I walked in and my whole body went cold."

"It's still here. I could've ordered a new set a hundred times. I just never did."

He turned toward her on the stool, and his heel found the rung, the way it used to, and Camila had to look at her beer because that little detail alone was going to do her in.

"Can I ask you something honest?" he said.

"You've been asking me honest things all night. Keep going, see if I stop you."

"That summer. Did you ever think about me? Not in a, oh, we were friendly way. In the other way."

Camila took a breath. Here was the part where she could do the old thing, the safe thing, the laugh-it-off thing. She was thirty-five years old. She was done with that.

"Every Wednesday," she said. "And every Thursday, which was worse, because Wednesday was over and I'd just seen you and I'd lie in bed going over every single thing I'd said to you, like some kind of crazy person. Did I laugh too loud? Did I look like an idiot missing that easy shot? You want to know the worst part?"

"What's the worst part?"

"When you told me about the job, I had a whole speech ready. I'd had it for weeks. Something like, don't go, or go but come back, or take me with you, I never did settle on the ending. And then you were standing there with your duffel bag and I said, good luck, Tobias. Good luck. Two words. I'd rehearsed paragraphs and I gave you two words."

"Good luck," he repeated, soft, like the words themselves stung.

"I cried in the back office after the bus left. Shawna found me and didn't even ask. She just handed me a tissue and told me the ice machine was acting up, which was her way of giving me ten more minutes."

He set his glass down. "Camila."

"Wait, I'm not done, I'm being brave here and you're going to let me finish. I thought about you after. For years. When a slow song came on, when somebody in the league mentioned your name, when a guy at the bar had your kind of laugh. Not every day. But enough. Enough that it's embarrassing to say out loud, so I'm saying it out loud."

"That's the bravest thing anybody's said to me in this room, and my mother used to tell me off in this room."

Camila snorted, and he grinned, and for a second it was just that summer again, except older, and heavier, and with way more at stake.

"Okay," she said, and slid off her own stool before her courage had time to reconsider. "Enough feelings. Rack them up."

"Wait, what?"

"You heard me. You still owe this table for the two eight balls you gave away in 2011, and I intend to settle up. Rack them up, Fischer. Unless you're scared."

"Scared? I've been playing in a league up north for twelve years. What have you been playing?"

"Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I've been leaning on this table and watching other people play for twelve years, and I'm still going to beat you, because I watched you lose to Earl Hartford's team twice and I remember every mistake you made."

He laughed and got up, and she went to the rack, and her hands were actually shaking a little as she pulled the balls out. Twelve years. This man had been gone twelve years and her hands were shaking over a game of pool.

He broke clean, nothing dropped, and she lined up her shot and missed, and he ran four balls before scratching, and she whooped loud enough that she was glad the bar was empty.

"That's the spirit," he said, dry as chalk.

"Shut up and shoot."

They played, and it was the same as before, the trash talk, the groaning, the way he chalked his cue like he was buttering bread. Somewhere in the middle of the third game she realized she wasn't thinking about the past at all. She was just having fun, right now, tonight, with a man who was here.

He ran the table down to the eight, missed the corner pocket by a mile, and stepped back with a bow like a game show host.

"Get over here," she said, laughing. "I need a cue."

"There's a rack right behind you."

"There's one good cue in this bar and it's not that one. Hand me the house cue off the wall, the shorter one, it's actually straight."

He got it out of the rack and held it out to her, and she reached for it at the same moment, and their hands met on the wood.

Neither of them let go.

It should have been nothing. Two hands on a stick, half a second, done. But his fingers were warm and hers were cold from the tap handles, and he looked at her, and she looked at him, and the jukebox hummed through a moment of silence between songs.

"Camila," he said. Quiet. Not the speech voice from before. Something lower.

"Yeah," she said. Her mouth had gone dry.

"I don't want to hand you the cue and have this moment be over."

"So don't."

"Is that all right? Me standing here like an idiot, holding a pool cue with you?"

"It's more than all right." And then, because she was done being the person who says nothing, she said the rest. "Tobias. I've wanted to touch you since you walked through that bell door. Since before that, honestly, since you were twenty-four and I was twenty-three and too dumb to know what I was looking at."