Page 49 of The Love Losers

Learn another language.

It would be a useful skill, to be sure, but it’s not going to happen before the end of the year.

I pause, then say, “Dom, what would you put on your bucket list?”

He leans forward and says in a stage-whisper, “You dying, bro? You can’t be more than, what, forty?”

“I’m about to turn thirty-four.”

He snaps his fingers and grins at me. “Hey, I was pretty close!”

Coming here was a poor idea, and asking a chronically baked bartender for advice was a worse one.

Jake had asked me to grab a drink tonight, but I’d turned him down. I hadn’t wanted him to get on my case about Leigh. So I’d said I was playing chess with my mother, and he should feel free to join us.

I sigh deeply. “I’m not dying, Dom. I think I’m trying to start living.”

“I don’t know what that means, bud, but I’m glad you’re not on your way out…” He leans back in his seat, scratching his head, then snaps his fingers again. “Flash mob.”

“Your baggage,” Gene interjects, the sound of his voice like two rocks scraping together. “You want to start living, you got to put it down or throw it out. That’s the only way.”

“Told you he knows where it’s at,” Dom says, hitching his thumb at his much-older friend, and I’ll be damned, Gene may not say a lot but he says it well.

Something old and dark, like what you’d find on the inside of a rotting stump, rises up inside of me, and I find myself circling one of the items I’d crossed out.

Tell my father what I really think of him.

The pen’s barely left the paper when I hear the front door creak open, wafting in a gust of winter air. I glance in that direction.

“You fucking liar,” Jake says with a shit-eating grin. “You can imagine my surprise when I went over to Smith House with a bottle of gin. Your mother seemed to think I was trying to seduce her. You know, she won money off me in chess. I figured the irony of fleecing someone so much poorer would keep her from collecting, but it didn’t.”

I find myself laughing, which hadn’t felt possible thirty seconds ago. “I’ll buy you a drink,” I say, motioning for him to join me.

“That’s quite literally the least you can do.” When he approaches the bar, he glances at the notebook in front of me but doesn’t say anything…because he’s waiting for me to say something. Jake’s nothing if not discreet.

I nod to Dom, and he pours my friend my preferred beer.

“So I heard you had yourself an adventure the other night,” Jake says as he lifts his glass in salute.

“Yeah,” Dom says, clearly expecting to be part of our conversation. “Some Illuminati called the cops on my buddy here for dancing back there in the warehouse. Like…it’s a free country, man. This isn’t theFootloosetown. You can dance wherever you’d like in Asheville.”

“No, actually,” I correct. “You can’t dance in someone else’s property in the middle of the night. But this ismywarehouse.”

Dom drops the towel he was using to clean the bar. “You’rethe shitty landlord?”

“I prefer to go by Anthony.”

“Sorry,” Dom says, then frowns and adds, “sir.”

“Please don’t ever call me that again,” I tell him, perhaps too forcefully. But this is my safe place—one of the only places where I’m just Anthony.

“Sorry, sir,” he says immediately. Then he takes out his cell phone and heads over to the far end of the bar, as distant from us as possible.

“You’re texting Rosie, aren’t you?” I ask after he starts plugging away with his two pointer fingers, predictive text be damned.

He glances up, his expression alarmed. “Do you have my phone bugged?”

“No,” I say wearily, because it’s happening again. People treat me normally, up until a point. He liked me well enough when I was a sad-sack who liked to hang out at his shitty bar. He liked me better after meeting Rosie. Now, he probably thinks I’mpresidentof the Illuminati. “But she knows who I am and also that I own the building. She’s my friend anyway.” I don’t know what possesses me, because I add, “Maybe you can be too.”

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