Michele

It was an extremely slow Monday night at Catfish that evening. There were only a handful of people drinking, and I was idling my time by wiping down the liquor bottles littering the back wall behind the bar.

I hadn’t seen Clint since that night Jacob had to help him to a taxi. He was usually here every other night, and I was worried about him, but I assumed, or hoped, that he had woken up the next morning and decided to give drinking a rest for a while. Since I started working here, I’d seen all manner of alcoholics - but it wasn’t my job to tell them no, unless they were getting out of hand.

“Slow night, eh?”

Jacob’s voice came from somewhere behind me, and I turned to see him leaning against the bar, broad forearms resting against it, fingers laced together. He was supposed to be carding people who came inside, but ever since I started here he’d had his eye on me. I shrugged, and put the bottle of vodka I was holding back in its place.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“So where do you live, anyway?” he asked, casually. As if it were perfectly normal to ask your coworker for their address.

“Not far. Couple blocks away.”

“Damn. It’s a nice neighborhood. Do you have roommates?”

“Yeah. My friend and her boyfriend.” His scrutinizing gaze was making me uncomfortable. I turned away from him, busying myself with more liquor bottles, hoping he’d go back to his post.

“Lila…” he started, and I cringed. Every time someone called me by my fake name, I remembered why I was here. A constant reminder that I was living a lie. “I want to take you to dinner sometime.”

At his statement, I exhaled. Finally, I could put this to rest. I turned my head and gave him a smile, utterly fake and shallow.

“Jacob, I’m sorry, but no.”

He frowned. “Why not? Do you have a boyfriend, or something?”

“No. I’m just not interested.”

The look on his face made it obvious that this was difficult for Jacob to understand. He straightened up, his expression dumbfounded.

“Excuse me? I’d like to order a beer.”

The sound of a voice, new, yet somehow familiar, startled me entirely. I whipped my head toward the source and saw him - Iain. Sitting at a barstool, blending perfectly into the surroundings. The dim lights made his eyes hard to read, but I knew he was watching me.

“Iain?” I asked, making my way over. I noticed that Jacob was walking back to the door, obviously chagrined. He hadn’t been watching the door closely enough and had let a new customer slip in unnoticed.

I pulled a pint glass out of the cooler and waited, watching Iain, a look of recognition on his face.

“Lila,” he said, giving me a bright smile. He looked genuinely pleased to see me, and my stomach flip-flopped despite myself. He was as hot as I remembered, and I forced myself to look cool and professional, not letting myself smile in return.

“This is… a surprise,” I said. “What kind of beer would you like?”

“Have any IPAs on tap?” he asked, leaning forward, craning his neck to see the tap selections. I nodded.

“I have a couple microbrews.”

“Pick one. Surprise me.”

I poured his beer and set it in front of him, taking his card when he offered it to me. I slid it through the system, catching his name embossed in silver.

Iain Sheppard.

His full name felt familiar somehow, like a melody long forgotten, surfacing again. But looking at him now, I was certain I’d never met him before that day on the street. And I didn’t know anybody else that lived in New York.

“Do you like working here?” he asked when I returned his card to him. I found myself nodding, uncertain how to talk to him. If I was honest with myself, I’d thought of him more than I’d wanted to the last couple of days - I'd thought of the way he had looked at me, his brown hair swept back from the wind, his lips as he told me which train to take. I’d thought of his finger on the map, imagining that finger on me.

“I do.” I stepped back a bit, watching him drink his beer. He nodded in appreciation.

“That’s a good IPA.”

“I’m glad you like it.” I wanted to ask him what brought him here, but I didn’t. I had told myself before that Iain probably had a girlfriend - but coming to a bar alone on a Monday night didn’t exactly make me feel confident about that idea. I regarded his handsome face again, wondering what his story was.

“Did you end up finding Central Park?” he asked, another smile creeping over his face. He set his glass down, waiting for my response.

“I did. Thank you.” I flicked my eyes over some of the other patrons. Most of them were talking, or watching The Big Bang Theory on the TVs spread across the bar. I heard the tinny laugh track intermittently filtering through the space.

“Was it everything you’d hoped it’d be?”

“I didn’t see very much of it, but I definitely want to go back sometime.”

He didn’t immediately reply. I somehow had the feeling that my body and brain weren’t on the same page; my heart was flush in my chest, my skin humming from his presence. My brain was screaming at me to step away.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

My mouth dried. It was a lie I had told several times, but for some reason, telling it to him felt wrong.

“Tampa.”

He let out a low whistle. “You left a tropical paradise for this?”

“Anything is paradise compared to what I left.”

I turned away, my face reddening. Why had I said that? I had never intended to say that. I picked up the rag I was using to polish the liquor bottles, folding it into the smallest square I could. Then I let it loose again.

“You want to talk about it?”

“No. I mean, thanks for your concern.” I turned to look at him, forcing a smile on my face. “So… where are you from?”

“Brooklyn. Born and raised.”

“Around here, then?” I probed, trying to figure out why he was in my bar tonight. Brooklyn was a pretty big place. It didn’t feel, exactly, like a coincidence that Iain was here tonight - although I supposed it could have been. Looking at him now, I told myself that I would have noticed him here before. But with the fog and haze I’d been living in the past several months, I could admit to myself that that was probably a lie.

“Not far at all. I come to Catfish every now and then. You’ve poured me drinks before.”

My face flamed.

“I’m sorry, I -”

“Don’t be sorry,” he said, holding a hand up. “With the amount of people you see, it’d be impossible to remember everyone.”

I nodded, noticing his beer was nearly empty. “Would you like another?”

“Yeah, that’d be great.”

Busying myself with getting him another drink, I considered telling him everything. Something about him made him seem trustworthy. He had no idea who Brandon was. He had no idea where I came from or what my life was like. Wouldn’t it be a relief to tell somebody? Wasn’t that what people said - that talking healed?

“I was married,” I said suddenly, setting the glass down in front of him. He met my eye, and I saw something steadfast there. He was intrigued.

“What happened?”

I regarded him, wondering if I was absolutely idiotic to tell him about this part of myself. A stranger. A stranger I was attracted to, who had shown up in my life when I would have rather been alone.

“Have you ever… been in a situation you didn’t know how to get out of?”

Iain didn’t say anything at first, but he kept my gaze. I forgot where I was, what I was doing. It was just me and him. “Yes.”

“Then you know how helpless you felt. Heart in your mouth, losing focus of all the light in your life. I felt that way for a long time.”

I wasn’t sure what my words were doing to him, because he sat there so stiffly, his face giving nothing away. Then something flickered in his eyes, and my own eyes flicked to his lips, wondering what they would feel like on mine.

“You left him then. Your husband.”

His words abruptly took me back to the day I had left, the day I had come home from the grocery store and found him in bed with some vaguely familiar woman. Someone from the bank, I guessed. I remembered, vividly, the unseasonably warm October day, the stickiness of summer with an incongruous backdrop of orange and red leaves. The sickness I had felt when I heard the sounds of Brandon’s groans from above my head as I stood in the foyer was returning now. I shrugged.

“It was mutual.”

“And you decided to come to Brooklyn? Out of all the places in the world?”

“All my life, I’d wanted to see this city. Now here I am.”

His mouth curled into a sweet smile, and I saw warmth on his face that sped my heart.

“Here you are.”

One of the patrons came up to the bar with an empty glass. I excused myself to help them, refilling their drink and keying it into the system. I told my heart to settle down. I told my body that he was absolutely off limits, and I told my brain to stop worrying so much.

“Lila, could you close my tab? You can run my card. I’ve got an early day tomorrow,” Iain said after I had taken care of my customer. I cashed him out and brought him his receipt.

“Thanks for coming in. It was nice to see you again,” I told him. When he took the receipt from my hand, his fingers brushed mine, and something like sparks shot through me. Our eyes met.

He looked like he was about to say something, but two more people came up, and I nodded and smiled at him before getting their requests, two Long Islands, which took a few moments to make.

By the time I was done, Iain was gone. I felt that strange sense of loss again, knowing he had been about to say something to me but hadn’t had the chance.

A $50 bill was peeking out from under his receipt. I blushed, knowing it was too much. His tab was only $16. On the back of his receipt was a phone number, and a scribbled note that read, I’d like to take you to Central Park sometime.