Dax

Two Weeks Later

“Got ’em.” Barrett strolls into the North Street building, his thumb pointed behind him. “They’re on the truck.”

I set aside the saw and pull off my safety glasses. The rebuilt bar doesn’t look like much, but it will once we stain the top and tile the sides. I’m going with a bohemian style for this one. At least, that’s what my mom called it when I texted her a few photos I found online and asked what she thought.

“I was going to say ‘I got wood’ instead, but that seemed immature.” Barrett shrugs his shoulders and gives me the grin not dissimilar to the one he gives girls to get them to come home with him.

“I’m impressed by your restraint.”

“What can I say? I’m growing.” He opens a cooler, pulls out a few cans of beer, and tosses me one.

I catch it but toss it back and gesture to the saw. “How about a water? I’d rather not slice off a finger this early in the day.”

He throws the bottle in a neat spiral that I have to back up a few feet to catch. He winces in pain and grips his right shoulder. That’s the one he fucked up. The injury took him out of his Miami Dolphins contract. The same one landed him back in Ohio and in the arms of his ex-girlfriend-turned-girlfriend-turned-ex-girlfriend again. The injury and the girlfriend share the blame for Barrett’s still living in my apartment. But he’s been helping me build my bar, so I can’t complain. We don’t do anything more at the house than crash for six to eight hours of sleep before we come here and work a full day.

“I got it,” he announces as I slug down half the water in the bottle.

“What, wood? We covered this.” I swipe a few stray drops from my mouth with my arm. His smile and cocky-ass expression tell me all I need to know, but he spells it out anyway.

“The sportscaster position. I got it.” He spreads his arms and waggles his beer can. “Sure you don’t want to celebrate?”

“Fuck yes, I want to celebrate!” I say, changing my tune.

Barrett’s been trying to land the gig on the air ever since he returned to Columbus. It’ll put him on the field as an announcer for OSU games.

I abandon the water bottle and the rest of my chores for the day to crack open a beer, tapping his can with mine. We drink, and he sits on a chair while I collapse onto a stack of tile.

“Feel sorry for the cameraman that has to line up your ugly mug every game, though.”

He grins. It’s eat-shit-and-die dazzling. Barrett’s what the girls call a “ginger,” though he has some golden tones mixed in to keep him from being a true carrottop. If the hair doesn’t work for women, the sea-blue eyes and dimples seal the deal.

“This face sails ships, my friend.”

“I never understood your appeal. On the field or off.”

He laughs, knowing I’m giving him shit. It’s what we do best. “Good news is there’s a big signing bonus, so I’m almost out of your hair.”

“No more free labor in trade for room and board, then. Bummer.” But I’m happy for him.

“I’m finishing what we started. You could always throw in free beers for life.” He tries.

“You’re not a TV star yet and already you’re trying to get free stuff from local establishments? Pathetic. You’d drink me out of business.”

“Free food, then?”

I shake my head but give in. “Free food it is.”

We finish our beers and stop at one. Because who are we kidding? Neither of us can leave the day’s work unfinished. We unload the truck, do a few more hours’ worth of sawing and nailing, and then clean up the mess.

Barrett and I were a good team on the football field and we work as well together off.

“That’s it for me. You should come out,” he says for the eightieth time today.

“Double dates are a bit too high school for me, Bare.”

“If you saw Kim and met her friend Cherokee, you’d eat those words. Hot chicks.”

I shit you not, he draws an hourglass figure in the air with both hands.

“I’ll pass. I’m beat.”

“You’re not beat, friend,” Barrett says. “You’re whipped. By a Tennessee cutie you refuse to talk any more about.”

The night I came home, Barrett and I had a few beers. Those few beers loosened my lips and I told him about Becca. Never have I more regretted sharing so many details with anyone. I was exhausted from driving, heartbroken, and overwhelmed by the call about this very bar. He caught me at a weak moment and I confided in him.

“You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?” I ask him now.

“You vacationing in the woods and falling apart over a long-legged beauty? Never.”

“Have fun with Kim and Cherokee.” I grab a broom and sweep the remaining specks of sawdust into a pile.

“Why don’t you call her? The Tennessee girl?”

“I don’t have her number.”

“The main office of the resort. The place she works. Come on, Dax. I’ve never known you to be a pussy about these sorts of things. You want the girl, go get her. It’s only been a few weeks.”

He’s trying to goad me into calling her, but he doesn’t understand.

Two weeks felt more like two months. The miles between us are nothing compared to the distance created when we separated that last night at cabin 13.

“Sometimes, Bare”—I lean on the broom on the edge of the unfinished bar—“there’s no way to go back to what you once were. You and the ex-girlfriend. You know what I’m saying. You go back to her over and over and it doesn’t work. Why do you think that is?”

“Probably because every time we split up, I date other women like my life depends on it. She hates that shit.”

They didn’t call him “the bad boy of the NFL” for nothing. But he’s also full of it. Yes, he dates, but Beth has broken his heart a few times. I’m not sure why he goes back to her if he knows they’re going to fall apart again.

“I hear you,” he says. “Once bitten is enough. You want to leave it pure. The memory of her. The unachievable goal that all other women in your life will aspire to reach. You’re setting up a lot of honeys for heartbreak. Never knew you to be so cruel.”

He’s wrong. The real reason is because, like an idiot, I fell in love with Becca on that mountain. And like an even bigger idiot, I turned and walked away without telling her. It took me two weeks to fall in, and I’d hoped it’d take two weeks to fall out. I was wrong.

Maybe it’ll take twice that long. Maybe it’ll take ten times that long.

I hope it doesn’t take longer than that.

“Exactly right,” I say anyway. Telling him the truth would be social suicide. You’ve never seen this guy at a cocktail party. He’d skewer me like one of those weenies dipped in barbecue sauce.

“You’re sure you don’t want to come with me tonight?” He asks one last time.

“Maybe next time.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He waves a hand and walks out of my bar. I kill time for another hour, then head across town to McGreevy’s to check in.

One of my managers, Grace, with her bright smile and brighter red hair, is behind the bar. She fakes like she’s having a heart attack when I stroll into the restaurant.

“Is it really you?” She gapes. Her boyfriend—excuse me, fiancé—Davis chuckles at her reaction. He’s in his usual spot on the customer side of the bar. Those two are quite the mismatched set. Grace is tats and tight leather pants, and Davis is suit and tie. Mismatched kind of like a former-jock bar owner and a plucky blonde who can’t show up anywhere on time.

“I haven’t seen you since the day after your vacation, Dax. I thought maybe North Street Bar was your new bae and you were giving McGreevy’s the shaft.”

“I still need someone to run North Street, you know.” I asked Grace if she’d like to manage her own place. She promptly and politely gave me a “no,” explaining that she loved McGreevy’s and her schedule.

“Sorry.” She turns me down again. “I’m planning my wedding. I can’t run a bar right now.”

Davis smiles and she grins at him. They’re gone for each other and it works. Why that shakes out well for some people and not for others will forever mystify me.

McGreevy’s is winding down for the night. Only a few tables are full, and other than Davis there are three patrons at the bar.

Grace moves to cash one of the barflies out while I check the office. I can do the number crunching on my laptop, but on occasion Margo leaves me a note taped to the keyboard. I keep asking her to text me or email me instead, but she’s old school and jots her notes on Post-its.

The second I unlock the door, the office phone rings. I grab it and save Grace the hassle.

“McGreevy’s.”

There’s a beat of silence, but I hear someone on the phone.

“McGreevy’s. Hello?”

“Dax.”

My heart hits the bottom of my stomach as I recognize that soft voice.

“Becca. Hi.”

“Hi.” She laughs nervously. “So. There’s only one McGreevy’s in Columbus. Still, I didn’t expect you to answer. I thought you were rarely there.”

“I’m never here,” I agree. “You happened to catch me. I’ve been at my new place, fixing it up.”

“You bought it?”

“I bought it.”

“That’s great. You’re probably so busy.”

I have a premonition of doom like she’s dancing around bad news, but I can’t put my finger on what it could be.

“Barrett and I have been remodeling. It’s coming along.” Inviting her out to see it is on the tip of my tongue, but she called me. If she has news to deliver, I’m going to let her do it before I shove my size-twelve boot in my mouth. “How are you? How’s the menu coming along?”

“Great! Better than I would’ve thought.”

Snippets of our last night together crash into my brain mercilessly. Her breath in my ear. The stars above, shining bright. Tears streaming down her cheeks and the bone-aching love we both felt in that moment. Improbable after just two weeks together, but there nonetheless.

It was there. It was real. And because I know how real it was, I know how fake this conversation is. How forced.

We didn’t used to have to force it.

“Princess.”

She lets out a sigh I hear through the phone.

“What’s going on?”

“I’m . . . leaving. Tennessee.” Her voice wavers and the laugh that follows is more nervous than the last. “I’m going to move back to New York. I might go to culinary school. I have a friend of a friend who needs a roommate. She’s a sommelier at a really fancy restaurant and said she can get me a job there. I had a long talk with Tad, but he’d already figured out I was ready to leave. He said I didn’t seem happy here, and he’s right. I’m not happy.”

I’m not happy either. I press my lips closed to keep words like “I miss you” and “What we had was real” from tumbling out. I press them tighter when I’m tempted to admit that I might still love her.

No, fuck that. There’s no “might” about it. I do love her.

I was in denial until I heard her voice. Now that I’m numbly holding the handset of the piece-of-shit desk phone to my ear, I know.

I love her, dammit.

And she’s leaving Tennessee yet again.

“Is that what you want?” I finally ask. I should congratulate her, but I can’t get the word out.

“Yes.” To her credit, she doesn’t hesitate. She doesn’t say, “I think so” or “Maybe” or even “Yeah.” She says a clear, concise, absolute affirmative. Yes.

“I wanted to call you before I left,” she says. “You were important, Dax.”

Were. I caught the past tense.

“I appreciate that,” I say, my chest caving in.

“Hey, we’ll always have cabin thirteen.” Her casual tone is false. There’s not a note of sincerity in it. I wonder if she’s as miserable as I am, and then I figure she’s not. She’s the one who called me to tell me that she’s heading off to new horizons. She’ll have new experiences. New relationships.

That sucks.

A long, awkward pause precedes her asking, “Did you put the quesadilla on the menu?”

“Yeah. Here, at McGreevy’s. It’s a big hit.” I debate telling her, then decide it doesn’t matter and tell her anyway. “I didn’t name it the Cabin Thirteen, though.”

“No? What’d you call it.”

I swallow hard and then say, “I call it the Princess.”

“Oh.” The word is so quiet I almost miss it.

Meanwhile, either I’m experiencing cardiac arrest or that crackling feeling in my chest is my heart suffering an irreparable split. I’m not a total selfish bastard, so I say something supportive.

“You’re going to do great things, Becca. You’re bigger than Grand Lark. Go get ’em.”

I swear I hear her sniffle before she chirps, “I’m so excited.”

“You should be. You deserve an amazing life.”

“So you keep telling me.”

Fuck, this hurts.

“Bye, Dax.”

It hurts too much for words. So much that I forgo the farewell and rest the handset on the cradle.

I don’t sit on purpose—more like I lose the ability to hold myself up. Or, hell, maybe I’m tired from the long day.

That’s what I tell myself.

That’s what I’ll keep telling myself.

For as long as it takes to get over Becca Stone.