by Carter Ashby
She blinked. Then frowned. “I guess I didn’t really realize I was doing that.”
He nodded, took another step toward her, and stopped when she retreated again.
“Oh, God,” she said, on a laugh. “Wow, that’s just ingrained. I’ll have to pay better attention. Thanks for pointing it out.”
They studied each other. He wondered if he should say more. If he should help her more. But time was wasting and he had bar responsibilities to show her before they opened. So he stepped back and led her through the opening routine.
A few customers filtered in shortly after three. It wouldn’t pick up until close to six. But at three-thirty, the door opened, and in walked two, very short people. They had on brightly colored coats and scarves wrapped around their faces so that only their eyes were visible. They wore backpacks and sneakers.
Jayce froze when he saw them. Their cold, evil eyes landed on him and he was sure he could see them imagining his slow and tortuous death.
“Babies!” Maya called. She ran to them and hugged them. She unwrapped their faces and kissed them.
They were a little less scary with the scarves off. Especially the little one; she was almost cute. Jayce frowned at them.
Maya held their hands and brought them to the end of the bar. “Guys, Jayce is gonna let you sit in his office, okay? You can watch cartoons on YouTube and have your snacks in there. Say thank you.”
“Thank you, Jayce!” Sophie said, with a bright smile. Suddenly he wondered how it was he’d ever felt scared of her.
“Thanks,” Matthew snarled so that Jayce was more scared than ever.
“Uh, sure. No problem.”
Maya took them back to the office, and Jayce let out the breath he’d been holding.
“Kids make you nervous?” This from Buck, a bar regular, an old geezer who lived for drink. He never got drunk in the bar, though. He just came, sipped for a few hours, and left.
“Little bit,” Jayce replied, while refilling his whiskey tumbler.
“Ain’t nothin’ to ‘em. You just talk to them like regular people. Give them candy once in a while.”
“Candy?”
“Yeah,” Buck said, with the confidence of an expert. “You keep some candy in your pockets, sneak ‘em a piece once in a while when Mom’s not looking…they’ll be your best friends.”
Jayce frowned in thought. “Makes sense. How do you know about this stuff?”
“I was a mailman for twenty years. Used to keep dog biscuits in my pockets so I could settle down the barkers and biters.”
Jayce chuckled and wiped down his bar.
Maya came back out and busied herself checking on customers and wiping down tables. She was caught up with a table full of college students when Jayce felt a tug on his jeans. He looked down and then jumped back when he saw Sophie standing there. He glanced at Maya and then back to Sophie. “Uh, hey, kid,” he said.
“Mister Jayce, I accidentally spilled chocolate milk on your ‘puter.” She pronounced it ‘pooter,’ so it took him a moment to figure out what she was talking about.
“My computer?”
She nodded, her green eyes wide, like her mom’s. “I’m really sorry, Mister Jayce.”
He figured as long as she called him Mister Jayce in that cute voice of hers, he probably wouldn’t care that much about anything else. “All right, let’s go see,” he said.
She took his hand and he followed her back to the office. There was chocolate milk all in the wireless keyboard. “Hmm,” he said, not sure how to handle the situation.
“You can’t yell at us ‘cause you’re not our dad,” Matthew said. He was kicked back in a chair playing games on Jayce’s iPhone, which Jayce didn’t recall giving to him.
He knew what game the boy was playing, too. “Hey, bud, I don’t know if your mom would want you playing that—”
“She doesn’t care. She lets me play zombie killing games all the time.”
Jayce hesitated, but he really didn’t know. “Um. Okay. Sophie, just wait here. I’ll go get paper towels.”
“Do you have any more chocolate milk?” she asked.
He let out a nervous laugh. “I’ve got Kahlua and half-and-half.”
“Okay!” She bounced up and down, her little ponytail bobbing.
Maya came in, then, breathless. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” Jayce said. “Just—”
“Okay, go on, Jayce, I got this. I’m sorry they bothered you. Matthew, that’s not yours.” She snatched the phone out of this hands and returned it to the desk. Bugs Bunny was playing on the computer. She turned up the volume on that and sat Sophie in a chair before hurrying back to the kitchen for paper towels.
Jayce returned to the bar and briefly considered the possibility that some people weren’t meant to have kids, and that he was one of those people. When Maya came back out, she apologized up and down. “I swear, I’ll buy you a new keyboard first thing tomorrow.”
“Don’t worry about it, Maya, I’ll pick one up.”
“I can’t even imagine what she was doing drinking so close to the computer.”
“It’s really not a problem.”
Maya huffed. It seemed as though she hadn’t heard a word he’d said. And then she hurried off to serve more drinks, wearing her frustration on her face and in all her actions. It was better than the fear she usually wore.
#
Zoey burst in a little before five. She came right at him, right up to the bar. He had to force his feet to stand firm. An ancient, survival instinct had him wanting to back away. “What?” he asked.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” she shrieked.
“Uh—“
“Kids in a bar? Why are her kids hanging out in your shitty bar?”
“Do you not like it here? Because that’s the second time in a month that you’ve called my bar shitty.”
“It’s no place for children!”
Jayce glanced over at Maya. She was at a corner table chatting with a couple of women. “Zoey, what the fuck do you want?”
“I want you to exert a little empathy and put yourself in her shoes. Her kids are in school all day. If she works here from three to midnight, she’s never going to see them. And also, this bar is no place for children.”
He gritted his teeth and lowered his voice. “Zoey, I’d do anything for her, you damn well know that. It didn’t occur to me, okay? She asked for full-time hours and I’m trying to give them to her. You don’t have to treat me like I’m this asshole making her life hell. Just help me out. I’m happy to schedule her for five from now on, I just didn’t know until today.”
Zoey actually softened with contrition. She closed her eyes and appeared to be counting backwards from ten…he could hear the countdown faintly as she exhaled. Then she opened her eyes again. “Yeah. You’re right. I’m apologize for passing judgment on you without hearing you out first.”
Jayce pressed his lips together to keep from smiling. The woman had been making a major effort, lately, to control her unreasonable temper. She still had outbursts, they were just more short-lived and usually followed by apologies.
All the tension seemed to drain from Zoey’s shoulders. “A five o’clock schedule would be better for her. She could pick her kids up from school, so they don’t have to ride the bus. And she could get a couple of hours with them.”
He nodded, managing to choke back his amusement at her. “Okay. I’ll fix that for next week. Anything else?”
“Yeah. I was gonna yell at you about this, too, but I realize how unreasonable that would be. There’s a support group on Monday nights. Maya was going to start going, but—”
“She’s working. Okay.” Jayce felt his frustration rising. He gritted his teeth and glared at Maya, who was coming toward them with drink orders.
“Pitcher of beer,” she requested, coming behind the counter. He pulled beer as she sat mugs on a tray.
“Come back when you’re done,” he said. “I need to tal
k to you.”
Maya shot him a look of pure terror as she walked off with the drinks. Jayce turned to Zoey. “I’ll take care of it. Kids are in my office.”
Zoey wisely said nothing more. She disappeared down the hall. A moment later, she was ushering the kids through the bar. They stopped to hug their mother, and then they were gone.
Maya appeared to be looking for reasons to avoid joining him behind the bar. She bussed a table, checked on some customers, changed the song on the jukebox, until, at last, she made her way to his side. “What’s up, boss?” she asked, clearly trying to be brave. She even managed to hold eye contact for a full two seconds.
“I don’t like having Zoey tell me what your needs are, and I can’t read minds. If you need Monday nights off, Maya, just fucking say so.” He winced, regretting the language. It was hard to be gentle when he was so frustrated. Maybe he needed to attend anger management with Zoey.
She withdrew a step. “I don’t need Monday nights off.”
“Look, I have six employees, including you. I can schedule around certain things. You have to get a weekday off, anyway, because you wanna work Saturdays, right?”
She nodded.
“So, I’ll just schedule you off on Mondays, okay?”
Tears pooled in her eyes. “It’s just a support group. I don’t have to go.”
“Go. Dammit, Maya, go. Go now, if you want. You can come back, later, finish your shift. From now on, you have Mondays off, okay?”
She nodded and rubbed her hand up and down her arm. “The one tonight starts at seven. I’d need to leave at six-thirty. I could be back by nine.”
“That’s fine. Take care of yourself.”
She sucked in a breath and blew it out slowly. “Okay. Thanks. I’m sorry Zoey bothered you—”
“She didn’t bother me,” he said.
Maya blinked.
It was so hard to talk to her. He wished she could just read his mind. He couldn’t seem to get his words to match up with his feelings. He wanted her to know that she could come to him with anything. That she could count on him if she needed anything. He wanted her to know that he’d move mountains or die trying if she asked him to. “If you need something, just tell me yourself,” he said. It was right, but it wasn’t enough. He cleared his throat. “And…I won’t schedule you to open on weekdays after this week. It just didn’t occur to me about you not getting to see your kids, so—“
“Jayce, it’s not your job to be my friend. You’ve got a business to run. My personal life shouldn’t affect how you schedule things.”
Not his job to be her friend? What was he doing then? His sole hope in life, lately, had been to become friends with her. He may as well be invisible for all the good it had done. It hurt, and the hurt pissed him off. He took a step back. “We don’t have to be friends for me to be a good boss. You need time with your kids and that’s that. Get on back to work, now.”
She bobbed her head and scurried away.
Jayce tried not to watch her. He found himself relieved and relaxed when she left at six-thirty. Tension returned when she walked back in at nine. It was gone again when she left at eleven. He had no idea how he was going to survive working with her.
Being a Monday night, Janice was his only employee after eleven. There were only a few customers at the table and none at the counter. Janice sidled up to him. He slipped his arm around her waist. “You regret rejecting me? Wanna come up after work?”
She laughed as though he’d suggested the absolutely ridiculous. “No, I’m good.”
He nodded. “Figures.”
“I was just thinking,” she said, but then she stopped talking.
He waited a moment, then let her go and stepped back so he could look at her. “Thinking?”
“Yeah. About the bar.”
“Okay,” he said slowly.
“It’s just, the lighting’s kind of bright in here, you know?”
Janice had worked here for four years, since he’d first bought the place. She’d never mentioned anything remotely related to the lighting. “Bright?”
“Yeah. I mean—I think—stark is the word she used. Stark. What do you think that means?”
“Bright,” he answered. “Who said?”
She shrugged. “Maya. Actually, she asked me if I thought it was a little stark, and I said yeah, I guess, and she said maybe if we mentioned it, you might like the suggestion.”
“What suggestion?”
“To change the lights or something. Make it dimmer. More—intimate, I think she said.”
“Hmm.”
Janice shrugged again. “I don’t know. Seemed like a good idea.” She looked around and wandered away.
Jayce stood there frowning, wondering what he was supposed to think about Maya’s criticisms of his bar.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Kellen was due home Wednesday. He’d been gone two weeks, and Maya was excited to have her brother-in-law home. Sometimes she wondered how Kellen and Damon could be related. Damon was cocky, hateful, and abusive, whereas his little brother was the kindest, most generous person Maya knew. The morning after Damon had given her the worst beating of her life, Kellen had been the one to carry her to the hospital, never hesitating to take her side in the matter, even at the risk of alienating his family. Of course, his family had come around, and his actions had led him to the love of Maya’s best friend, Zoey, so Maya took comfort in the fact that he’d been rewarded for his gallantry.
For her part, she didn’t see how she could ever repay his kindness. He was more family to her than anyone else outside of her children. But Kellen’s attention was no longer solely Maya’s. With Zoey in his life, his priorities had made a dramatic shift.
Zoey was beyond excited to have him back. She fluttered around the house cleaning and rearranging things. Fluttering was not a typical Zoey behavior. She even bought a new dress and was likely wearing new lingerie underneath. Maya suddenly felt very out of place.
“Maybe the kids and I should crash out at Kellen’s tonight,” Maya offered on Wednesday morning. Zoey was having a cup of coffee before heading to work. The kids had already taken the bus to school.
“Don’t be ridiculous. You won’t be home from work until after one.”
“I wish their grandparents weren’t sick.”
“Maya, honestly, stop worrying. Kellen will be just as excited to see the kids as me.”
“I somehow doubt that.”
Zoey kissed her on the cheek and went to work. Maya puttered around the house for a while, doing laundry and getting dinner prepped. She sat at the kitchen table with her laptop working through the GED prep material in the online course she was taking. Later, she called her babysitter to see if she would be available to watch the kids that evening. Then she drove to the bar. She didn’t go all the way in, instead turning up the back staircase, knowing that Jayce wouldn’t be downstairs just yet. She climbed one floor. At the landing was the daunting door. She knocked.
A few seconds later, the door swung open and a shirtless, sweaty Jayce appeared before her. He was breathing hard.
She took a step back. “I’m sorry, is this a bad time?”
He was gaping at her. “No. No, of course not. Come on in.”
Skeptical, she stepped in. She didn’t know why he was sweating, but if it had anything to do with activities involving her fellow barmaid, she didn’t want to know. Still, there didn’t appear to be anyone else in the apartment.
“What can I do for you, Maya?” he asked. The door clicked shut.
She froze at the sound. She tried to force herself to be comfortable around him, but then she would inevitably remember that he was a man. A big man. An occasionally violent man. She bit her lip and stood still. He came around in front of her. She no longer had to wonder what was under his shirt. What she’d taken to be an abstract design along the length of his arm was actually the body and tail of a dragon whose head began over Jayce’s left pec. He also had the word “survive” intric
ately tattooed along his right obliques, as well as a few smaller tattoos.
“Maya? Everything okay?”
She quickly, guiltily, forced her eyes up to his face. “Everything’s fine. I had come to ask a favor, but then I just realized how unreasonable it is. So I’ll just go.”
She turned, but he asked, “What’s the favor?”
“Well…”
“Yes.”
She turned back to face him. “Huh?”
“Yes. To whatever the favor is.” He flashed a quick smile.
She laughed. “Jayce, you really should hear the favor first.”
“Doesn’t matter. Anything else?”
She was baffled by his acquiescence, and then her eyes, of their own volition, dropped back down to his bare chest, slick and defined. Down to his abs, trim and chiseled. Down to his low-slung sweatpants, hanging almost too low, barely covering his—package. Anything else?
Something stirred low in her belly. A tingling she hadn’t experienced in a long time. It shocked her eyes back up. She hoped he didn’t notice the heat in her cheeks. But how could he not? “Kellen’s coming home today,” she blurted.
“I know. Can I tell you something without you laughing?”
She grinned, momentarily forgetting her intimidation and her misplaced desire. “Sure.”
“Promise not to tell?”
“Promise.”
He lowered his voice and leaned in. “I’m glad he’s back. I always miss him when he’s gone.”
She did laugh, but not because it was funny. She laughed because it was so utterly surprising and charming.
“What?” he asked in mock offense. “He’s my bff. If Zoey or Addy left for two weeks, you’d miss them, wouldn’t you?”
“I didn’t know boys had bffs.”
“Of course we do.”
Her laughter faded as she found herself smiling up at him, adoring him for a moment. Maybe there was nothing here to be afraid of. Damon certainly never would have admitted to missing his best friend. Maybe that meant that Jayce was a good guy. A safe guy. “Anyway,” she said, still not able to take her eyes from his. “Kellen’s coming home, and I know all he and Zoey are going to want to do is be together.”
