I stopped short in the middle of the sunny sidewalk, confused. I looked all around us, sure that we were at the wrong place.
Graham walked ahead of me, pulling the door open. “Coming?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
“This is a bar,” I informed him. Because obviously he didn’t know that already, or we wouldn’t be standing here before noon on a Sunday.
He smirked. “I know that.”
I frowned. “I’m not actually a lush. You know that, too, right?”
Though to be fair, I had gotten drunk off an entire bottle of wine the first time we met. Which was only two nights ago. And last night, I’d had a few beers, confessed my greatest sins, and then had a total emotional breakdown. In his lap.
Okay, so maybe he had good reason to believe I was an alcoholic.
But a bar? For breakfast?
“I know.” He gave me a soft, persuasive smile. “Trust me?”
I blinked up at him. Oddly enough, I did trust him. After that amazing dinner last night, and the impassioned speech he’d given me about the joys of cooking, I knew he wouldn’t steer me wrong. So I took a deep breath and stepped into the bar, a cute, rustic-industrial-vintage hybrid of a pub called Amity Ales.
“Two for brunch?” the bartender asked.
Beside me, Graham nodded.
The bartender directed us to pick our seats, and Graham steered me to a sunlit table near the front with his hand on my lower back. Warmth seeped through the thick flannel shirt I was wearing – his shirt – and I smiled to myself as we sat.
“You’re in a good mood,” Graham observed once we were settled. “You must have slept well.”
I nodded. “I actually did, yeah.”
He smiled. “You sound surprised.”
“I am.” I glanced at the menu, though I already knew what I wanted. I hummed as I scanned the list. It was a surprisingly robust offering for a bar brunch. “I don’t sleep so well.”
He nodded. “I get that.”
I frowned, taking in how well-rested and, well, healthy he seemed. He looked like he’d never missed so much as a wink in his entire life. “Yeah?”
He looked down at his own menu. “Yeah, after my mom died, I had a tough time sleeping for a while.”
That was right. He’d said the other night that his mother had died recently. I closed my eyes briefly, and when I opened them, he looked sad.
That was another thing that sucked about this abyss I was in. I tended to forget that other people’s lives were not all rainbows and unicorn farts.
“I just kept thinking about all the things she’d never get to do, you know?” He sighed. “She’ll never get to see my sister or me get married, never get to meet any grandkids, never get to enter the hybrid rose she’d been working on in that gardening competition.”
I shivered. The never-woulds might not be exactly the same, but I knew all too well the feeling of being haunted by them. I went through the same thing every night. Daniel would never father a child. He would never turn thirty. He would never own a dog. He would never get a gray hair or go to the Grand Canyon or travel to Mexico to meet his father’s relatives.
It was exhausting, regretting all the things he’d never get to do. So exhausting that, by some perverted twist of irony, it kept me from sleeping altogether most nights.
He shrugged. “I had the same thoughts when my dad died, too, so you’d think I would know what to expect this time around. I mean, I figured out pretty early that we wouldn’t get a long life with them. But it still hurt, you know?”
“Why did you think that?” He gave me a questioning look. “That you wouldn’t have too much time with them, I mean?”
He hummed in understanding. He stared at me for a long moment, like he was deciding whether to answer me. Finally, he let out a long, slow breath.
“Ellie and I are adopted. My parents were already in their late fifties when we went to live with them.”
I frowned in confusion. “But you look so much alike.”
“We’re biological siblings,” he explained. “We have the same birth parents. But they died when we were young.” He took a sip of his water, clearing his throat. “The Morrises heard about us at church. Their pastor made an announcement one Sunday, telling the congregation that our parents had died, and that we were in foster care. He prayed for someone to take us in, to give us a good home.”
“And they decided to do it? At their age?” I asked, amazed.
He nodded. “They’d always wanted to have kids, but they were never able to. They had already been looking into adoption when they heard about us.”
“A couple of months.” A shadow passed over his face, and I wondered what that was about. “They’d made some inquiries, I guess, and found out that we might get split up if we stayed in the foster system for too long. So they signed on to become foster parents so they could take us both and keep us together. They adopted us about a year later.”
“How old were you when all this happened?”
The waitress came by to take our orders then, preventing him from answering. When she’d gone, he sighed.
“I was seven when my biological parents died. Ellie was almost two.”
I winced. That was young to go through such a tragedy – too young. And also too old, in a way. At least his sister hadn’t been able to really understand what happened. But Graham would have memories of his life before he was adopted. He would probably have been traumatized by the whole ordeal.
“How did they die?” I asked.
A shadow passed over his face. “That’s a sad story for another day.”
Oddly, irritation flashed through me, and I wanted to push. He knew all about my trauma, after all. I’d laid it all out in the open after barely a day of knowing him.
But I hesitated. Something in his tone told me he wasn’t holding back out of some ill intent, or because he didn’t trust me. He simply wasn’t ready to tell the story. Not yet.
So I nodded. “Oh, I get it. You only tell your super best friends your secrets.” I gave him a faux-hurt expression. “Doesn’t being the founder and president of the Sasquatch Club count for anything?”
He smiled. “I still haven’t agreed to you being the president.”
“This is a coup, isn’t it?” I laid my hands over my chest. “This feels like a coup.”
He smiled. “I’m just going by your logic. You said you can’t be the prettiest and the most powerful. That’s why you can’t be the president.”
I scoffed, though it was really just to hide my smile. Because this ridiculously beautiful human had just called me pretty, in a roundabout way.
“You’re clearly addle-brained. I’m beginning to rethink your membership altogether.”
He laughed as the waitress brought our food. Once she’d set it down, I moaned at the sight of my French toast. It was perfectly grilled, and the scent of vanilla and cinnamon wafted toward me on a breeze blessed by fairies, probably.
My appetite these days was still hit or miss, but I was going all in on this motherfucker.
Graham cleared his throat. When I looked up, his cheeks were flushed, and he was staring at me and not his very-tasty looking food.
Weird.
“Well, what was it Groucho Marx said about clubs?” he asked.
I took another look at his plate, frowning. “That people who tell lies get kicked out.”
He barked out a surprised laugh. “Lies? What lies have I told you.”
I gestured at his eggs Benedict with my fork. “That you eat healthy. What do you call this?”
He grinned, cutting into his muffin-egg-Canadian bacon pileup and spearing a huge bite. “Heaven.” He made a happy noise as he shoveled the whole thing into his mouth, chewing slowly.
I could sit there and watch him eat all day. There was something weirdly sensual about the way he chewed, like he was really savoring his food.
But his answer reminded me that I owed him ALL the teasing about his karaoke session in the shower earlier.
“Well, you’d know all about heaven, wouldn’t you?” I gave him a sly smile. “After all, it is a place on earth.”
He groaned. “God, you heard that?”
I laughed evilly. “And I’m never going to let you live it down. In fact, I’m going to need all your friends’ phone numbers, so that I can tell them all about what a huge Belinda Carlisle fan you are.”
His fork clattered to his plate. “You wouldn’t!”
I shrugged, giving him a sly smile, but otherwise made no answer.
He narrowed his eyes. “What will it take to buy your silence?”
I pretended to think it over for a moment. “Share the Hollandaise, and your secret is safe with me.”
He pushed his plate into the center of the table, gesturing to it as though to say, help yourself. And because I was indeed in a good mood, I did the same, and we both took bites of each other’s breakfasts.
I hummed happily as the rich sauce hit my tongue. “Oh, this is good.”
He smiled. “Worth coming to a bar on a Sunday morning?”
I nodded enthusiastically. “You picked a good one, Morris. I will give you that.”
He chuckled. “Stick with me, buddy. I promised I’d do you right.”
I watched him take another bite of my French toast, marveling at how easy this was with him. He’d said he wanted to be my friend, and maybe it was because I was still raw from – well, from everything. Or maybe it was because I really, really needed one. But he’d smiled at me so sincerely, like he genuinely wanted nothing more than to be my buddy. So, weirdly, I’d said yes.
But the weirdest part of all was, I actually wanted to stick with him.