Just a Heartbeat Away

by Cara Bastone

  “Oh. Yeah, totally fine. Just a misunderstanding.”

  Seb’s eyes searched hers. Those gray-green beauties, like seagrass turning belly-up in the wind. Via was holding her breath because of course she was. The man was big as a house and smelled like laundry detergent. Of course she was attempting to keep that scent inside her as long as possible.

  “A misunderstanding that I should know about?” he asked slowly, quietly.

  A little petal opened up in Via, a bloom of surprise. He wasn’t playing coy. He wasn’t coming right out and saying anything explicitly, but he was kind of, sort of, acknowledging that she and he might be mixed up in a misunderstanding together. That wasn’t saying nothing...right?

  “Well...” Via chose her words very carefully. She was alternately terrified of slamming the door closed or flinging it way too wide open. “I guess I’m not sure.”

  Seb’s eyes continued to search hers for a minute. “Fair enough. You want another?”

  “Oh.” Via looked down at her empty beer glass. “Sure. I’ll buy, though. I didn’t exactly pay for my last one.”

  She was rising up in her chair when he laid one of those gigantic, rough-palmed hands against her forearm. “Sit. Please. Let me buy you a drink.”

  His eyes were right on hers, not bouncing around the way Evan’s always had. It was disconcerting almost, to have a man be so sure of himself. It wasn’t that he was confident in how she would react, exactly. It was more like he was holding his hand out to her and waiting patiently to see if she would take it.

  “All right,” she answered, and to her dismay, heard a small tremor in her voice. Via watched him stride away toward the bar. He said something that made Christian the bartender laugh. And then she watched Seb forcibly jam cash into Christian’s hand. He came back, a beer in each hand, shaking his head.

  “What was that all about?” she asked him, accepting the beer he was handing down.

  “Son of a bitch does not want anyone but him buying you beers.” Seb glowered over at the bar, and Via watched as Christian shot a cocky smile in their direction, shrugging his shoulders.

  “I was afraid of that,” Via muttered.

  “Afraid? I thought the Golden Oldie over there was the man of your dreams.”

  Via laughed, rolling her eyes. “You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?”

  He shrugged, grinning into his beer.

  “I never said that that guy—” she nodded her head dismissively in the direction of the bar. Was she really doing this? She was doing this. Fuck it, she was just going to say it “—was the man of my dreams. I just said that I’m attracted to older men.”

  Seb shifted in his seat, his stance widening just a bit. He didn’t exactly lean toward her, but he might as well have. His eyes fell to the bottom half of her face, and it was strangely as if somebody had hit Mute on the music. There was a rising buzz in her ears that seemed to correspond with the tingle in her fingertips.

  She waited, but he said nothing. Had she struck him speechless?

  A whippy, charged feeling suddenly zipped through Via. Nothing about their circumstances had changed in the last ten seconds. But suddenly, Via didn’t feel significantly younger. She didn’t feel younger at all. Suddenly, she felt like there was a chance that she might, sort of, be in charge.

  To test it, Via let her eyes drop to the condensation on the outside of her beer. She drew a little squiggle through the fog. She lifted her finger to the rim of the glass and touched every inch of it. When she looked up, Seb’s eyes shot to hers on a delayed reaction. He’d been watching her hand.

  Keeping her eyes on his, she cocked her head to one side. She let that same hand inch forward and carefully, carefully, touch the cuff of his navy shirt, rolled to his elbow. “Is this a new shirt, Seb?”

  He looked a little dazed, his eyes a little fuzzy, as he shifted his hips against the seat. Via swore she could see his heartbeat in his neck. “Ah, yeah, actually.”

  He scraped a hand over the back of his neck and around to his stubble.

  “When you mentioned my other shirt last week, it got me thinking that I hadn’t bought any clothes for myself in a long time. Maybe a couple years.”

  Since his wife?

  “It’s easy to just roll out of bed and slap on my dad uniform. And I guess I just wanted to...look a little nicer.”

  For me?

  “Well, you do look very nice. I like it. But I also like your dad uniform. It’s very lumberjack.”

  He snorted, set his beer aside and wiped his chin with a napkin as he laughed. “Christ. That is not the look I’ve been going for.”

  She laughed, too. “That’s my problem, too. I go for a certain look, and everyone thinks it’s something else completely.”

  “What look do you go for with all this?” he asked, leaning away from her and squinting at her outfit, like he was trying to get the whole picture.

  “I pretty much desperately try to wear anything that will make me look thirty.” They both laughed, but as soon as she’d said it, Via knew she’d said the wrong thing. Reminding him that she was still in her twenties right now was so stupid. They’d just stepped into this new, hot little rhythm. They’d been flirting. She was positive. And now his face was sobering, and he was thoughtfully looking into the golden effervescence of his beer with a look so sad she just wanted to nuzzle his neck like a puppy. Great. Just great.

  Seb jolted a little and pulled his phone out of his pocket. He’d gotten a text.

  “Sorry,” he muttered distractedly. She couldn’t help but notice he’d tipped the screen away from her a little. Was he texting someone he didn’t want her to know about? Another woman maybe?

  Of course, he probably was, Via tersely reminded herself. She needed to stop acting like a lovesick kitten. This was a single, virile, incredibly attractive man who dated people. It was common knowledge. Dating often included texting. There was nothing wrong with him texting some other woman right now.

  Seb chuckled and handed the phone over to her.

  Oh. He was showing her whatever had been texted to him. It was a picture of Matty and Crabby leaping toward one another in the air. They were obviously in the middle of some sort of wrestlepalooza. They were on a dark green mat of some kind.

  Via laughed delightedly, her mood significantly warming as she looked down at this kid she liked so much. He looked delirious with delight, and a little hysterical.

  “Mary’s babysitting,” Seb explained. “And things always get a little out of hand when Mary babysits.”

  “He looks like he’ll be a perfect angel when it’s time to put him to bed,” Via joked and Seb snorted again. “Where are they, though? You guys have a playroom I don’t know about?”

  She thought of the second floor she’d never seen.

  Seb leaned over her shoulder to look at the picture, he must have zoomed in before he handed it over because his arm snaked around her and he zoomed out now. She realized the green mat wasn’t a mat at all; it was a comforter on a huge, wooden bed frame. “Nah, they’re in my room.”

  So, that was his room. She was staring at Sebastian Dorner’s huge, handsome bed. Cool cool cool. No big. No big at all. Her hand started sweating.

  She took one last look at the picture and was just handing it back when a banner slid down from the top of the screen. He was getting a text. She didn’t see what it said, but she didn’t miss the name. Marisa Simmons. “You got a text.”

  Her hands empty, Via filled them with the beer she suddenly didn’t want. She rolled the glass between her palms and scanned the bar, hoping she looked casual. It really looked like Greg was making time with Rachel up at the bar. She was sitting on a stool, tilted toward him, and he had one hand on the bar top, boxing her in. Via sighed a little as she looked at them. Rachel was pretty and sweet. Her top was, in her usual way, a little too tig
ht for school, but whatever. They were definitely in the same age range. Via imagined they’d go home together and see what happened.

  She was so jealous she was suddenly exhausted. She felt like she could sleep for a week. She wanted to find a cave and a double-wide sleeping bag. She’d stuff the other half of the sleeping bag with queen-size pillows and pull the blankets over her head. When she woke up, she’d still be single but maybe she wouldn’t be pining over the sweet giant sitting next to her.

  “Another one bites the dust.”

  “They look like they’re hitting it off.”

  Seb and Via spoke at the same time. And then again, when they both identically said, “What?”

  “Oh,” Seb said, shaking his phone a little. “I was just saying that I’ve had another strikeout from a woman.”

  “She rejected you, you mean?” Via was very confused. She felt like she was on one of those wobbly chain bridges they had on playgrounds. He was talking to her about the woman he was texting? Was that a buddy-buddy type of thing to do or something else altogether?

  Seb laughed. “Thanks for the vote of confidence. No, well, I guess she sort of did. She kept wanting to meet up at times that I was busy with Matty. She got frustrated. Bid me good night and good luck.”

  “You weren’t busy with Matty tonight,” Via said quietly, her heart doing its best imitation of a hummingbird.

  “I’m busy with you tonight.” Seb shrugged. Almost like it was no big deal. “What were you saying before?”

  Via commanded her mind to start working more clearly. She was being ridiculous right now. She just needed to get herself together. Live in the moment. She could analyze everything later. “Oh, just that Greg and Rachel look like they’re hitting it off.”

  “Yeah,” Seb mused, cocking his head to one side to study them. “Greg’s got way more game than the geeky hair initially implies. Like that, for instance. Solid move, Greg.”

  “What move?” Via asked, confused. She must have missed something.

  “See the way he stepped to the side just then? Well, he did it so that she’d turn to face him. Which she did. And now that she’s facing away from the bar, your Golden Oldie will be less likely to flirt with her. And he just boxed out that other guy. AND best of all for good old Greg, her knees are touching his leg now.”

  “Wow.” Via was bemused. She looked for a second longer and then dismissed the idea, shaking her head. “I think you’re giving him too much credit. The guy just moved over a few inches. There’s no way he had that master plan cooking.”

  Seb gave her a pitying look. “Via, if you’re a guy talking to a pretty woman at a bar, there’s always a master plan.”

  It wasn’t lost on her that Seb was a guy, and she was a pretty woman, and they were, in fact, in a bar right now. If she were Fin, she would have immediately pointed that out, watched while Seb squirmed. But she was Via. So she kept things moving instead.

  “Maybe,” she conceded. “But that move was so subtle. I really don’t think that was part of the Greg school of romance.”

  “Trust me. As a man who used to do that,” he pointed toward the lovebirds, “fairly successfully, it’s the little moves that count. The big ones are far less successful.”

  Sebastian leaned back just a touch in his chair, and Via shifted to hear him better. She both thrilled and despaired at the idea of Sebastian picking up women in bars. It was sexy and deflating at the same time. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that Greg wants Rachel to only pay attention to him right now. And he wants to touch her, just a little bit. Now, he could have achieved all of that by just reaching out and grabbing her chin, tilting her face toward him.”

  Via wrinkled her nose, and Seb pointed at the expression she was making.

  “Exactly. Most women would hate that. Not all, and maybe if Greg had done that, Rachel wouldn’t have minded. But probably, she would have smacked his hand away, slid off the barstool and come back over here. So, instead, Greg just sort of moved over an inch or two and got what he wanted in a much more respectful way. And Rachel doesn’t feel pushed around or manhandled. Win-win.”

  “Huh.” Via felt terribly naive. She’d gone home from a bar with two men in her life. One of them had been Evan. She wondered now how many of these subtle moves those men had employed on her. “I don’t know. I think a woman knows exactly what’s going on in a situation like that. Men aren’t slick. If he’s putting the moves on her, she’ll know. And that?” She pointed back toward the bar. “Wasn’t a move.”

  “Some men are slick.”

  “You?” She raised her eyebrows at him. Her look said skeptical, but her brain said, Flirt with me more, you gigantic, gorgeous man!

  Seb shrugged. “I mean, you’re pretty much sitting in my chair right now, aren’t you?”

  Via looked down in surprise and realized that...yeah. Somehow while they were talking, he had shifted enough, and so had she, that she’d leaned all the way toward him. She was sitting on approximately one eighth of one corner of her own chair and the toe of one of her heels was about half an inch from the toe of that unlaced boot of his.

  She straightened up immediately, her eyes going wide and her cheeks going pink.

  He chuckled, but his eyes searched her face, checking to make sure it was okay that he’d just done that.

  She dipped her chin to him. She was flustered, but not exactly put out. “Hats off.”

  He studied her face for another second. “Now, if I wasn’t subtle, I could have done the same thing by crowding you.” He demonstrated by flinging an arm over the back of her chair and pushing his wide-stanced legs into her space. Via felt the blank circles of other people’s faces turn to look at them, but she almost, almost didn’t care.

  He leaned back and stopped crowding her. As soon as the heat from his body was gone, mild embarrassment rushed into its place. He was more than flirting with her. He was showing her exactly how he’d seduce her. Except without actually seducing her. It was confusing. And hot. Via wished like hell that their colleagues would all simultaneously decide to go home and watch Jeopardy!

  “Or I could have dragged your chair over or slid an arm around your waist and put you in my lap.” He was compiling this list casually, apparently unaware that Via was sort of melting into a pile of vibrating honey in the chair next to him. “But all of that is way too aggressive in my opinion. I’m not trying to intimidate you into feeling me. I want you to want it, you know?”

  The proverbial you. He’s using the PROVERBIAL YOU. She bullied herself into believing it. Because otherwise, he’d just point-blank told her that he wanted her to want him, and that didn’t happen in real life, in this bar, on happy hour Friday with a bunch of their colleagues talking shop three feet away.

  Via surreptitiously let out a long, slow breath and took a sip of her beer. She tried to look casual. “Right. I guess that makes sense.”

  “Maybe I’m rusty,” he told her, his eyes like bright lights on the side of her face.

  “You’re not,” she answered too quickly. If he hadn’t heard the mild tremor in her voice, he was as thick as a brick wall.

  When she looked over, she knew a different man would be smugly grinning at her, knowing he’d gotten under her skin, given her a thrill. But not Seb Dorner. Nope. He was just looking at her, serious as could be. That plain-handsome face, all wide and open and blunt. All of it set off by his dark haircut and...she noticed, a clean shave. He really did look nice tonight. Like he was dressed up for a date. She wondered when exactly he’d decided to come to happy hour. Was it while he was getting dressed that morning?

  “I wish I could stay,” Seb told her and those honest eyes of his told the whole story. No subtext. No lines. Just the truth. “But I got a kid needs tucking in at home.”

  Can I come?

  She sucked her lips into her mouth along with the words. “
Understandable. It was nice that you came out, though.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “Maybe I’ll try to do it more often.”

  Seb tipped his glass, one swallow left, toward Via’s and they cheers-ed. Her breath caught and her eyes snapped away because was that...? Did he...? Yes, she was almost positive that he’d laid his pinky over hers for just the hottest little second when they’d clinked glasses.

  But he was up and pulling his coat on, saying his goodbyes all around. He’d been gone from the bar all of three minutes when she felt that familiar buzz in her pocket.

  He wasn’t around to see her nerd out over his texts so she didn’t bother stopping herself from whipping her phone out of her pocket in a flash.

  Should have asked at the bar, but you’re gonna take a cab home, right?

  Now that her body wasn’t tense and spotlighted and tingling like hell from his mere presence, Via could once again pay attention to the gravity-hungry dense cloud of feeling in her chest. It grew another inch and sucked the whole bar into its ravenous force field. She loved everything right now.

  He was concerned about how she’d get home. What a flipping gentleman.

  Grace always walks me home. We’re only a few blocks from each other.

  The text reply came almost instantly. Grace is lucky.

  Another buzzed through a few seconds later. Have a good night, Miss DeRosa. You made mine.

  She thought of about thirty different ways to reply but all of them, all of them, said way too much. Put every single one of her cards on the table. In the end, she just went with the ever solid You, too. He could go ahead and interpret it in whatever way he wanted.

  She saw the let’s-get-the-hell-out-of-here eyes that Grace was throwing her way across the table, and Via was grateful. She needed to get home, get in the bath and squee her face off.

  She said her goodbyes around the table, kissing Sadie and Shelly on the cheek and squeezing Cat’s hand. She slid her coat on, arranged her scarf and bag and stepped up to the bar to say goodbye to Christian. She gave Rachel and Greg a wide berth, not wanting to mess up whatever flow they had going on; apparently it was much more subtle and complicated than she’d ever thought and she didn’t want to risk anything.