by Katia Rose
I don’t know where this is going, but I like it.
“Well, maybe...”
Before I even have a chance to realize what he’s doing, he’s grabbed a piece of cake with his bare hand and shoved it into my face.
“TABARNAK!” I scream once the piece falls with a plop on the floor, leaving me with a face so full of icing it’s hard to open my eyes. “You put cake in my face!
The whole room explodes with laughter and gasps. I wipe my eyes and mouth off before glaring at Zach.
“Cake! In my face! You put cake in my face!”
“You were asking fo—”
I lean over and snatch a piece of cake for myself, slamming it into his face before he can stop me.
“HA!” I shout as everyone cheers for me.
Zach blinks his eyes open and stares at me in shock. I didn’t get as much icing on him as he did on me, but I still did a pretty good job.
“Okay, I guess I deserv—”
I cut him off by pressing my lips to his, kissing him hard. I hear everyone whooping behind us, but it sounds like it’s coming from far away. When I’m kissing Zachary Hastings, the whole maudit world can wait. The kiss tastes like icing and batter and him. I’ll never get over the way he tastes. I’ll never get over him. I’ll never get over us.
I’d be lying if I said that didn’t scare me a little, but there are things that are so much stronger than fear, things I feel roaring in my chest every time I look at him.
“Zach,” I murmur when we break apart. My arms are around his neck, and my legs have hooked around his waist. “I love you.”
It’s not the first time I’ve said it, but he looks just as totally awestruck every time I do.
Only now he also has cake all over his face. Still, I don’t laugh. I stare at him with just as much awe as he tells me he loves me too.
Then he swipes a glob of icing off my cheek and pops it in his mouth.
“You want to get going?” he asks once he’s done, his voice turning low and husky.
I know that tone. I know what it means I’ll be getting when we’re home, and I squirm on the bar as I picture it and nod.
“Wait,” I order when he goes to lift me down. “One for the road.”
I pull him to me and kiss him again.
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Thank you so much for picking up a copy of One for the Road! It means the world to me to have you as a reader.
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-Katia
Up Next
Glass Half Full
You win some, you lose some.
Back at home with half a college degree after the fiasco of the century sent her packing, it’s safe to say that Renee Nyobé is losing some. She’s a hot mess, and not the cute kind. No, if hot messes had categories, hers would be ‘littering the stairs of the metro station with your sweaty underwear because you were too busy rushing to the job interview you’re already late for to zip up your yoga bag.’
A job—any job—is just what she needs to get her life back on track, and it might as well be at Montreal’s most famous dive bar, Taverne Toulouse.
Dylan Trottard is winning some. As Taverne Toulouse’s new manager, he’s got one rule for himself: don’t screw up. Following that rule gets a lot harder when the woman he’s spent the past three years trying to forget starts working behind the bar.
They were never supposed to want each other, and they sure as hell aren’t supposed to want each other now. She’s the girl that got away before he even had her, and he’s the guy she didn’t think would ever give her a second glance.
Now they can’t keep their eyes off one another, and the stakes are even higher than before. There’s a lot to lose, but as the pull between them gets harder and harder to ignore, Renee and Dylan start asking how much winning is worth.
Read on for a free excerpt from Katia Rose’s next romantic comedy.
One
Renee
CAESURA: A pause or pivot within the rhythm of a poem or sentence that is used to create dramatic impact
“Mademoiselle!”
The shout echoes through the bustling metro station, bouncing off the tile walls and getting swallowed up by the rattling roar of the train approaching down below—the train I’m supposed to be getting on.
I start running, fumbling for my wallet in my backpack behind me and doing my best not to collide with anyone as I charge toward the turnstiles.
“Mademoiselle!” The shout is closer this time, more insistent. “Avec les cheveux!”
That halts me in my tracks. It wouldn’t be the first time someone’s referred to me as, ‘Hey, you with the hair!’
I’ve yet to find elastics that last me longer than a week before they decide to give up on life. Almost every Christmas, someone gets me a bottle of volumizing shampoo as a joke. Salons fear me. That’s one of the things you get with a white mom and a black dad: hair no one knows how the hell to handle.
“Madamoiselle!” The voice is panting now, hoarse like a smoker’s and out of breath.
I turn around to find a man with a grizzled beard and a Van Halen t-shirt hunched over with a hand braced on his thigh as he tries to catch his breath. He’s looking at me, holding something out in his other hand.
“Is this yours?” he asks in French.
My attention flicks to the turnstiles behind me, to the people flooding up the staircase as a few desperate stragglers like me try to weave their way down through the crowd. I take half a step closer to whatever it is the man is holding. There’s a scrap of fabric clutched in his fist, something purple. I only have to move a few inches closer before I recognize it.
It’s a thong—a purple thong, patterned with tiny Neapolitan ice cream cones.
It’s my thong, the one I stripped out of after hot yoga and shoved in my bag with the rest of my sweaty gear.
I glance up at the man again. He smiles.
Then he winks.
“Nope, not mine!”
I don’t look back as I sprint away, one hand still flailing for my metro card like the doomsday countdown is about to reach zero and the only way I can stop it is by slamming my card against the machine. I somehow make it down the stairs two at a time without falling on my face and launch myself onto the platform just in time to see the train’s doors closing.
The ding-dong sound that announces departures is the only thing that keeps me from throwing myself against one of the doors and begging for mercy.
That’s a slight exaggeration.
I just stand there, shifting my backpack up on my shoulders as I watch the train pick up speed, faces blurring in the windows as they whip past me and disappear into the tunnel up ahead.
I’m going to be late for my interview.
I glance at the arrival times on the screen hanging over the other side of the tracks and then lean against the wall, taking stock of myself.
One of my shoes is wet from stepping in a puddle, the moisture just beginning to soak into my sock and leave me with a swamp foot. I was so sweaty from yoga that the light makeup I slapped on wouldn’t set, so I’m sure most of it is sliding down my face. I don’t even want to know how much of my hot-yoga-enhanced hair has escaped the thick braid I pulled it into. I dropped a thong in the metro station, for god’s sake—a sweaty thong.
It’s one of the fi
rst cold days of the season, but that hasn’t stopped me from being Montreal’s hottest mess.
“Breathe,” I mutter to myself.
The order comes out more like an army command than the gentle encouragement I was going for. The rushing river of nerves I’d managed to calm to a faint trickle with yoga today gushes to the forefront of my mind, picking up speed like a tidal wave as I try to throw up the dams.
“Breathe.”
Saying it out loud just makes me realize how bad things have gotten, makes me step outside my own body and assess myself as a stranger, feeling all the judgement and aversion of someone watching a sweaty girl on the platform mumble to herself with her eyes closed. I start repeating the order in my head instead.
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
Slowly, syllable by syllable, the command changes from a word to an action, my inhales lengthening and exhales deepening as the squeezing in my chest loosens. The fingers that feel like they’re clenched around my heart get pried off one by one. I open my eyes just in time to see the next train shoot out onto the tracks.
I’m the first one on, so I manage to get a seat. I watch the dark walls of the tunnel fly by, resisting the urge to check the time on my phone. I’m already late. All I can do is accept it and keep moving forward.
At least, that’s what my yoga teacher would say. My therapist would agree.
I hate being late. It isn’t like me. Then again, nothing about this situation is like me. Fighting off a major freak out in a metro station isn’t like me. Applying for food service jobs in the middle of September because my bank account has been drained dry by a summer of unemployment isn’t like me.
Putting my studies on hold with only a year left in my degree isn’t like me either. Giving up scholarships, a guaranteed internship, and a once in a lifetime chance to study overseas—none of it’s normal. Moving back in with my parents after having a nervous breakdown that turned me into the campus freak show everyone whispered about behind their hands is the very definition of being unlike me.
Yet here I stand.
Or sit.
I get off the train at Station Mont-Royal and exit into the grey light of a cloudy afternoon. The bar I’m interviewing at is several blocks up, and I take in the sight of the storefronts and restaurants as I trudge my way along the sidewalk. Hipster cafes and ratty thrift shops with racks of vintage band shirts sitting outside their doors are nestled between boutique furniture stores and hole in the wall souvenir outlets.
That’s one of the things I missed most about Montreal when I was away: how anything and everything gets crammed in together, the ramshackle buildings painted in vibrant hues as disparate and unique as the businesses they hold. The face of the city is always shifting, changing, growing and shrinking with the passage of time, but the soul underneath its surface stays the same.
I spot Taverne Toulouse from a few metres away. A metal sign shiny enough to prove it’s brand new displays the name in a typewriter font, the industrial vibe a compliment to the garage door style windows that make up almost the whole front of the bar. Before I can talk myself out of it, I brace like I’m about to spring off a diving board and walk inside.
It’s dim enough that I have to pause and blink a few times, adjusting to the string lights looped along the ceiling and around the three-sided bar. When I dropped my resume off, the place was still under renovation, and I didn’t even get to come inside. Everything in sight is shiny and brand new, which makes it extra surprising that the space feels so homey, so worn-in. Mismatched couches and dark wooden coffee tables make up most of the seating, with a tiny stage tucked away in one corner surrounded by some empty space for dancing. The atmosphere is like walking straight into an old friend’s living room, somewhere you can plop down on the sofa and kick your shoes off while complaining about how much you need a beer.
It’s a dive bar, that much is clear, but it’s not the grimy get-smashed-and-go-hard student bar this place used to have a reputation as. This room feels like a place to relax, a place you can laugh or rant or dance like no one’s watching. It’s the kind of space you go to meet old friends and end up making new ones too.
It feels like a bar that was built for being yourself.
If only I knew who ‘myself’ was.
“Desolé, sweetie. We’re closed for another twenty minutes.”
I turn away from studying a framed photo collage of old Polaroids on the wall and find a girl with bright pink hair hanging down past her shoulders smiling at me from behind the bar.
“I’m here for an interview?”
That’s not a question. Why did I say that like a question?
“Oh!” She leans forward on the bar, her smile getting even wider as she starts to bounce a little with excitement. “Then welcome to Taverne Toulouse, choufleur. You know what? You look like just what we need around here.”
If what they need is a girl with foundation sloughing down her face like a mudslide, I’ve come to the right place.
“Hey.” Pink hair girl beckons me closer, whispering in her thick Québécois accent like she’s about to share a secret. I cross the few steps between me and the bar.
“You know what always helps me when I have to do something scary?” She ducks behind the bar and then pops up with a bottle of Patrón, lifting it above her head and shaking it. “Tequila shots!”
I start to think she might be crazy, but it’s the kind of crazy you can’t help wanting a piece of. I grin back at her as she sets the bottle down on the counter.
“DeeDee, who are you—oh no, not again.”
A guy who looks like a cross between a hipster and a farmhand appears from somewhere behind the bar, his woodsy red flannel open over a white t-shirt, a scruffy blond beard covering half his face.
“Câlice, Zach. We’re having fun. Don’t spoil it.”
“Maybe you should have this kind of fun later. I take it this is the interview?” He waves at me as the pink haired tequila enthusiast responds in the affirmative. “I’m Zach. You can come around the back here, and I’ll take you to the bosses.”
He unlocks a gate at the far end of the bar, and I follow him down a little hallway after calling out a thank you to answer the shout that my tequila will be waiting for me when I’m done.
“Yeah, she’s uh, she’s something, as I’m sure you can tell.” Zach chuckles and scratches his neck. Even in my bracing-for-an-impending-interview state, I can tell just what kind of ‘something’ he thinks she is. It’s too dim in the hall to tell if he’s actually blushing, but he might as well be. It’s kind of adorable.
“I’ll just tell them you’re here, and then you can go on in.”
He pops his head into a doorway before motioning me inside, wishing me good luck as I go. I’m about to thank him as I step into an office as shiny and new as the rest of the place, but the words die in my throat.
My mind blanks. Everything blanks.
Out of everyone I could have imagined facing behind this doorway, he is the very last one.
Yet there he is, his presence sucking all the air out of the room as he sits in a folding chair pulled up beside a woman behind the desk. I note her round, smiling face, and I know I should smile back. I should smile at both of them, but instead I stare at my hands, at the desk, at the woman behind it—anywhere but at him.
Smiley woman is now saying words I should be paying attention to. Her voice sounds like it’s coming from underwater, dulled by the thumping of blood in my ears. I barely catch her name and her explanation that she’s the bar’s owner before she’s offering me her hand. I zombie-walk toward it, offering my own name in return, but all I hear is his.
Dylan Trottard.
I almost called it out, nearly yelped it like it was a swear word and someone had just stepped on my foot. I don’t think I ever fully understood the term ‘shocking’ until I saw him sitting there.
That’s what it feels like: a shock, like someone zapped my brain with electricity and left me short-circuitin
g. Live wires are sparking inside me, all frayed ends and billowing smoke where just seconds ago a steady connection used to flow.
“This is Dylan, one of our most trusted cooks and now our recently promoted kitchen manager. Dylan tells me you two already know each other. You used to do poetry slams together?”
I let go of Monroe’s hand—some miraculously functioning part of my brain managed to catch the woman’s name—where I’ve been reaching across the desk to shake it and nod.
“We did, yeah,” I rasp, my mouth dry. “A few years ago.”
This is the part where I’m supposed to turn and shake his hand too. This is the part where I start acting like a normal human who’s here to get herself a job.
I am Renee, hear me roar.
I borrow my best friend’s signature phrase of encouragement as I fix my gaze on Dylan, steeling myself for however awkward or weird or painful this is going to be, but it turns out it’s none of those things.
My eyes meet his. He blinks. I blink.
Then the impact of how much I’ve missed him hits me so hard it’s like he’s crushed me into one of those giant Dylan bear hugs without even moving at all. The tension loosens, the air in the room no longer feeling too thick to pull into my lungs, and my head starts rushing with the dozens of questions I want to ask, everything I want to know and share.
How are you? How are Stella and Owen? How are the slams going? Who made nationals this year? Are you still performing?
I let myself take in the sight of him. He looks the same: same bulky frame, same doorframe-width shoulders we were always teasing him about, same tufty chestnut hair and coffee-with-cream coloured eyes that always made me shiver when they locked on mine.
