Page 2 of The Spice Play

“I mean, on one hand, yes,” I sighed. “But on the other, he wanted kids, and I couldn’t give that to him. Is it my fault he didn’t believe me? I wasn’t what he envisioned. We never should have been engaged in the first place.”

Rosie blinked at me as she sucked from her straw, the cocktail slowly disappearing from her glass. “Nell, no.”

“What?”

“You’re defending him again.”

“I’m not.”

She rolled her eyes dramatically, her fluttering fake lashes lowering over her eyes in irritation. “You told him at the start that you couldn’t get pregnant. Correct?”

“Yeah, but…”

“He strung you along for five years, having blind faith every time you brought it up. He pretended he wasfinewith the idea of you not being able to have children withoutmedical intervention because he didn’t believe you. And the moment he tagged along to one of your gyno appointments, and they asked if you’d be considering IVF after the wedding, he lost his goddamn mind because his fragile view of reality was smashed to pieces.”

The disgust was evident on her face, from how her brows furrowed to the slight curl of her upper lip.

“And instead of being a man and admitting he’d fucked up and didn’t want to pursue things any further, he started sleeping with your best friend. And now he’s marrying her. You have every right to be upset about this.”

I bit back the urge to down the entirety of my margarita in one gulp. I’d been tryingnotto remind myself of every little detail, but here we were. I settled for licking the salt off the rim and downing half, trying my absolute best to appearfine.

But I wasn’t fine. It felt like a hurricane was brewing inside of my chest.

“If anything, Rosie, it all just makes me feel inadequate.”

————

Rosie had insisted on celebrating instead of wallowing. She’d also insisted on starting a tab so she wouldn’t have to keep feeling bad about taking my card every time she got us drinks.

But that meant that when her Uber arrived earlier than expected, and she had to run, I was left to wander up to the bar tipsy and alone to settle the tab.

It was fine. I wasfine. The alcohol and the chats and the shit-talking had calmed me down enough, but there was stilla part of me that feared going back to my apartment alone and the weight of it all crashing down on me, submerging me, drowning me.

“I just need to settle my tab. Table…uh…” I turned to glance behind me, hopeful I could see the little number embossed on the edge of the table, but my eyes were tired, and my contacts were starting to scratch, and the moment I thought I had a clear enough view, a waitress covered it with her body as she started cleaning it down.

“Eighteen,” the bartender said, dragging my attention back to him as he absentmindedly polished a glass. “You’re the only one who started a tab this evening.”

“Oh.”

“Tuesday nights aren’t exactly popular for long stays.” The cash register popped open and he plucked my card from one of the slots, handing it back across the counter.

I tried not to let his words rub me the wrong way — it wasn’t my fault that Rosie and I mostly worked weekends lately. Weekdays were our best days to go out. “Your total is eighty dollars and twenty-seven cents.”

The bar stool creaked beside me, and a second later, as I slid my card into the reader, an unfamiliar voice filled the space from my right.

“Weak tab.”

I chuckled and typed my pin behind the shield of my hand. “Yeah, well, there were only two of…”

Oh my God.

I hadn’t even noticed him sitting there when I walked up, but the timbre of his voice, low and smooth with a touch of humor, had intrigued me enough to turn the moment my card slipped from the machine — and I swear, I knew how to breathe, but it was like my body somehow forgot.

He leaned forward on the bartop, one hand casuallyholding up a short glass of something amber, looking entirely too comfortable in his own skin. Brown waves of hair fell around his temples effortlessly but somehowdeliberately,like he’d taken the time to style it in that way that looked the right amount of messy, framing a face that could have been carved by Michelangelo himself — sharp and angular jaw, high cheekbones, and those fucking lips curved up in a slight, knowing grin. But it was his eyes that roped me in, held me like a vice grip for half of a second too long, their warm, blue depths catching the dim light of Smokey’s just enough to make them glisten.

The rest of him was somehow just as demanding. Broad shoulders with built arms that strained at the leather of his jacket, the faintest outline of muscles beneath his white tee, the way…Christ,the way his jeans hugged his thighs and told me they could probably break a watermelon between them like I’d see that guy online do. He looked like he could hold his own without even trying, without even lifting a fucking pinky.

“You good? You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he laughed. Shit, even that sound was pretty.

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