The Bitter Brew of Second Chances

Alicia was forty minutes from closing when the door stuck in its usual way and then swung in, letting a slab of humid August air into The Wicker Tap along with the man who had ruined her for every man after him.

She was wiping down the counter with a rag that had seen better years, and her first thought was not Don, it was that the rag needed throwing out, and then her eyes came up and her hand just stopped moving.

Don. He stood in the doorway like he was still deciding whether to come in, fifty-two years old now, broad in the shoulders the way a man gets from thirty years under car hoods, wearing a grey work shirt with his shop's name stitched over the pocket. His hair had gone silver at the temples and he was thicker around the middle, but it was him, and the years between their last night and this one dropped away so fast she felt dizzy.

She was fifty-four, she had buried a husband and raised two kids and run the coffee counter at the county annex for eleven years, and none of that kept her face from going hot.

He came in. Of course he came in. He sat down at the bar, two stools down from her end of the counter, because the universe had a sense of humor that way, and she picked the rag back up and pretended her heart wasn't hammering.

"What are you drinking," she said, and it wasn't a question so much as a door slammed in the face.

"Alicia." He said her name like he'd been saying it to himself for thirteen years, slow, letting it out. "Jesus. Look at you!"

"What. Are. You. Drinking."

He almost smiled, and she hated that she remembered how that smile worked. "Whatever's on tap. And a water."

She poured both without looking at him more than she had to, which was a lie, because she looked at him plenty when he wasn't watching, the way his forearms still had the grease from the shop in the creases even though it was nearly ten at night. He'd built something for himself. Good for him, she thought, meanly, and hated herself for the meanly.

"I heard you took over Hollis's garage," she said, sliding the beer across. "Congratulations or whatever."

"Six years now. You been reading up on me?"

"A man opens a business in a town of nine thousand, people talk."

He laughed, a short one, not unkind. "People talk about you too. The coffee lady. Champion of the dawn shift."

"Better than champion of the dawn patrol at Hollis's, which is what your guys look like by nine a.m."

"There it is," he said, and drank. "There's that mouth."

And the air between them changed, thickened, the way it does when two people who used to tear each other's clothes off start circling the same old ground. She remembered the last fight, his apartment, her shouting about how he'd never once said the word love in three years, him shouting back that she never once stayed the whole weekend, and the door, and her car, and thirteen years of nothing since.

"You look good," he said.

"I look tired. It's closing time at a dive bar and I worked a double."

"You look good," he said again, and he wasn't smiling now, and his eyes were doing the thing they used to do, going down her face like he was reading it.

She snorted. "You're full of it, Don Brandt. You drive out here in your fancy shop-owner truck to say you look good to a woman who used to scrub coffee grounds out from under her nails for you?"

"I drove out here because the Wicker Tap is on my way home and I heard they hired a new bartender."

"They hired a new bartender in February. Where were you in February?"

"Driving a longer way home," he said, quiet, and she had no answer for that, none, so she grabbed his empty glass and refilled it out of pure spite.

Her knee bounced under the counter, nerves, old nerves, and she realized too late that her stool had turned her knee into his line of sight, and she stopped bouncing and it was too late anyway.

His hand came down on her knee.

Just that. Warm, heavy, a mechanic's hand with calluses like roof shingles, resting right there on her kneecap like it had never left, and her whole body went still.

"Don." Her voice came out lower than she wanted.

"Tell me to move it."

"Get your hand off my knee."

He didn't move it. He looked at her, steady, that maddening patience he'd always had when she was spitting mad, and he said, "Then tell me like you mean it."

She meant it. She absolutely meant it, and her knee didn't move an inch, and she could feel her own pulse beating up into his palm, and that was the humiliation of it, that her body was ratting her out after all these years.

"You broke my heart," she said. "You know that? Three years. Three years, and you never, not once."

"I know."

"You don't get to sit there and say I know like that fixes anything."

"It doesn't fix anything," he said. "It's just true."

His thumb moved, once, a small stroke across the side of her knee, and she closed her eyes for half a second, which was half a second too long, and when she opened them he was watching her mouth.

"Dammit," she whispered.

"Yeah," he said. "I know that too."

She looked at the clock, 10:40, and at the three sad regulars at the far end playing pull tabs, and at her own hand lying on the counter four inches from his beer, and she thought about her pride, which had been her best friend for thirteen years, which had kept her upright and employed and mostly unlonely, and she thought about how pride doesn't keep you warm at night, as her mother used to say, usually after a third gin.

"Give me ten minutes to close out," she said.

He took his hand off her knee then, and she felt the loss like a pulled tooth. "I'll be outside."

He left cash on the bar, too much, she didn't count it, and he waited by the door while she finished wiping down and killed the neon and flipped the deadbolt, and then they were out on the sidewalk together in the thick summer dark, the sign buzzing its half-broken flicker over both of them.

The parking lot was to the left. He went right, toward the alley beside the building where the dumpster lived and the owners had never gotten around to a security light, and she followed him, heels clicking, telling herself the whole twenty steps that she could still turn around, go home, microwave a burrito, and be a woman with her dignity by eleven.

She did not turn around.

The alley was narrow and warm and smelled like old beer and hot asphalt releasing the day, and he stopped by the brick wall where the jukebox thump came through faint and muffled, and he turned to face her, and neither of them said a word for a second that stretched.

"I'm not asking for the last thirteen years back," he said finally. "I know I can't have that. I'm asking for tonight."

"Tonight," she repeated.

"One night. And then you tell me to go to hell or don't, and either way, I'll take it like a man."

"You're fifty-two years old, Don."

"Fifty-two and asking," he said. "Which is harder than it sounds, for the record."

And she laughed, one short ugly laugh, because that was so exactly him, and then she grabbed the front of his work shirt with both hands and pulled him in, and his mouth came down on hers and thirteen years broke open all at once.

He tasted like the beer and like himself, that same self underneath everything, and his hands found her hips and pulled her against him and she made a sound against his mouth she would have denied under oath, and he walked her back two steps until the brick was against her shoulders, cool through her blouse, and she thought, dimly, that this was a terrible idea, the worst, and that stopping was completely off the table.

His mouth left hers and moved down her jaw, her neck, that spot below her ear, and she tipped her head back against the bricks and breathed his name.

"Alicia." He said it into her neck. "Tell me to stop and I stop. I mean it."

"If you stop," she said, "I will set the shop on fire."

He laughed against her throat, and his hands were already working at the hem of her blouse, and the jukebox thumped through the wall, some old country song about a cheat and a train, and Alicia closed her eyes and let thirteen years of pride go straight to hell.

His hands pushed her blouse up and out of the way, not off, just shoved up under her arms, and the brick was rough against her bare back, and she didn't care, she'd wanted this too long to care about a little scraping. He worked the front clasp of her bra open one-handed, which annoyed her, actually, because where had he gotten that kind of practice, but then his mouth was on her breast and the thought dissolved into nothing. Her nipples had always been a weakness of hers and he'd always known it, and he took one between his lips and sucked until she had to grab a fistful of his grey shirt just to stay standing.

"You always did like that," he said against her skin, and she yanked his head back by the hair.

"Don't get smug."

"I'm not smug. I'm remembering."

"Then remember faster," she said, and reached down and undid his belt, because her hands were shaking and her heart was somewhere up around her ears and if she had to wait one more minute she was going to scream into the dumpster. She got his jeans open and got her hand around his cock, hard and hot and familiar, thirteen years and her hand still knew exactly how to hold it, and he swore, low, and pressed his forehead against the brick above her shoulder, a man taking a moment to say grace.

"Condom," he said, into her hair.

"Wallet?"

"Truck."