Page 7 of With Any Luck

“Oh yeah. I did, didn’t I?” I feel quite proud of myself for that, actually.

Theo interferes, stepping up beside me. “We’re just looking for a friend of ours. We were wondering if you knew where he went last night?”

“Probably not.”

“Dark hair, a tattoo of a Medusa on his left arm?”

The bartender gives it a thought. Then they say, “Yeah, he left withher.” They point at me, and appraise Theo, frowning. “I don’t remember you from last night. You with the bachelor party, too?”

“Bachelorette,” he clarifies.

“Good on you.”

I shake my head, frustrated. In the back of my mind, I began to think that maybe I remembered kissing someone else and Rhett’s disappearance is just a strange coincidence. But if he leftwithme ...

The smell of the bar makes my stomach flip. Or maybe it’s my mounting panic that’s making me sick.

I ask, swallowing the knot in my throat, “You didn’t catch where we were going?”

“You don’t remember?” the bartender asks.

“No, and we’ve lost him. His wedding is in two hours—”

“One and a half,” Theo corrects.

I shoot him a sharp glare. “And we can’t find him.”

The bartender gives me the first sympathetic look, because I’m sure I’m not the first best man to have lost their groom, and relents, pulling their hand through their short hair. “All right, yeah. I think I might’ve heard something about where you were going, but I’ve got a request first.”

I incline my head. “What?”

They take a receipt about a mile long out from beneath the bar and slam it down on the mahogany, and tap their finger on the bill total. “Your bill.”

Theo gives a snort that sounds suspiciously like a laugh. My jaw drops as I look at the total and skim up the items. There is somuch. “I couldn’t have drunkthatmuch. There’s no way. That would kill André the Giant.”

“Oh,” the bartender replies coolly, “youdidn’t, but youdidstand up on the bar right there”—they point down the counter a little way—“and declare that the next round was on you. Then you left out the back and never paid.”

Theotsksin disappointment. “Audrey Love, did you really drink and dash?”

“I don’trememberdashing,” I hiss, mortified. “I’ve never not paid before in my entire life!”

The bartender taps their finger on the receipt again, and that’s apparently enough to bully me into grabbing my purse and digging into it for my wallet. Which ... isn’t there. At all. I search again, feeling all the blood rush out of my face. Not only is my wallet missing, but so is my ID and my maxed-out credit cards and the number for that really cute barista back home—

Theo watches me dump the contents of my purse out on the bar and then shuffle through the various tampons and receipts and tubes of half-empty lipstick to ... still not find my wallet. This can’t be happening.

Quietly, he takes his billfold out of his back pocket, flips it open, and puts a worn credit card down on my receipt.

“Oh no, you can’t—” I begin to argue.

He interrupts with, “It’s fine. We’re running out of time, anyway.”

Even if I want to argue, the bartender snaps up the credit card immediately, like Gollum presented with the One Ring,and rushes over to the register to swipe it, as if they think Theo’s going to change his mind. When it’s returned, he puts it back in his wallet.

“I’ll pay you back,” I tell him. “Do you do Venmo? Or Cash App or—”

He puts a hand up to stop me. “Audrey, it’s fine.” He signs at the bottom of the receipt without so much as a second glance. “Now, where did Rhett go?”

The bartender tells us that last night, Rhett and I had been complaining about a lack of food at the establishment and wanting hot sugar holes. “So you guys left out the back and didn’t come back,” the bartender finishes in a deadpan voice.

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