Page 13 of Most Likely to Match
When we were younger, I used to take her hands in mine, covering them until I felt the fidget cease. I won’t do that now, not today, not with everything between us. Maybe I’m a sucker— still a sucker— when it comes to her. Maybe I need a backbone or some balls. I won’t take her hands and comfort her the way I used to, but I won’t leave either.
I keep my ass in this chair and say, “Start again.”
While I’ve never beena huge day drinker, I am grateful that Moonbar has been experimenting with late afternoon opens. There are a couple full tables on the small sidewalk patio, but I’m the only person at the bar. Nick flaps a Moosehead coaster onto the wood between us.
“You okay?” he asks, with the tone of someone who already knows the answer to that question.
“Did you tell Jasmine I was a sex worker?” I ask.
Nick closes his eyes, removing his glasses to rub at the marks on the bridge of his nose. “Okay, so technically, yes…”
“Dude, what the fuck?” I say, more exasperated than actually mad.
“I told her I thought it was a genius business idea for a first year university student.”
I nod my agreement. It really was. “Well, she told Chloe, and Chloe is not only the winner of the BIA raffle, but also a girl I went to high school with.”
He winces.
“She and her friends kinda ruined my life for a minute there.”
His wince deepens. Jasmine hired me a few months ago to take photos of the bar and the staff, to launch their new website, and Nick and I got along immediately. It was nice to finally make a new friend. A friend who wasn’t Matty or Ricky, who never really stopped being my friends, even though we all scattered across Ontario to go to university. From there, it was easy to tell Nick stories. He’s self-effacing and self-deprecating. He invited me places, to a Leafs’ game that neither of us were very interested in, but that his dad had given him tickets for. Moonbar enveloped me into their little family, inviting me for dinner at Rocco and Ed’s. Probably because they could tell I felt like a tourist in the place where I’d grown up.
“I’m not mad,” I say. “I guess I’m just trying to figure out how Chloe knew to ask me to be her fake boyfriend to save her failing business.”
Nick is surprisingly unfazed by this sentence, which is a feat. I feel pretty fucking fazed saying it. Instead, he nods, mouth flat, and begins to pull bottles off the bar rail and shelves. After he sets the vodka and triple sec down, he pulls cranberry and fresh-squeezed lime juice from the mini fridge beneath the bar. He scoops ice into a cocktail shaker and does that thing that bartenders do, performing cocktail mixing like it is both Olympic sport and classical art, no measuring needed, all of it intuited by feel alone.
When he’s done, he hands me a frosted cocktail glass filled with pink liquid and delicately taps his own glass to the edge of mine. “Slàinte mhath.”
“What’s that?” I ask, taking a small sip. The drink is tart and sweet, with only the slightest taste of alcohol. The kind of drink that you could have way too many of and way too fast and fall off your stool after. “Those words.”
“Good health,” he says.
“Slan-ge vah,” I say back, and he shrugs, good enough.
“I’ll never tell you what to do,” Nick says. He leans across the bar, like he’s about to share state secrets. “But under no circumstances,”he says, taking a gulp of his drink, “should you enter into any sort of ‘fake dating’ arrangement.”
I shake my head. “With Chloe? No.” I shake my head again to emphasize the absurdity of the idea. “No. I wasn’t going to.”
He arches an eyebrow.
“I wasn’t.”
Both eyebrows raise now. He nods slowly, patronizingly.
“That would display a shocking lack of intelligence,” I say, sipping my drink. “She broke my heart. I would never put her in the position to do that again.”
“Ahh.”
It takes a moment, one I’ll blame on alcohol consumption before four p.m., to hear the words I just said. “Not that shecouldbe in that position again. Because I don’t have feelings for her. Not anymore.”
This fucking bastard says nothing. Instead, he starts making more drinks.
“Nick. I’m serious. I don’t.”
He sighs as he refills my glass. “You feelsomething, bud.”
Fuck.
