Authors: Ruthie Knox
Roman Holiday: The Complete Adventure (2-Book Bundle: The Adventure Begins and The Adventure Continues) (62 page)
Pulvermacher’s.
She’d recognized the name, and her feet had stopped moving of their own accord. The line had nudged at her heels, urging her inside.
It had seemed possible two hours ago, when she slid her last five bucks across the bar, that she would meet some nice Wisconsin person—some woman named Pat who was built like a tank and knew how to make football dip with two cans of Hormel, a package of Philly’s, and some sliced Muenster. Or a Steve from Oconomowoc who hunted elk just like her dad. May and her new friends would exchange names, origins, stories. Imaginary Pat or Imaginary Steve would buy her a beer, and she would carefully glide the conversation on lubricated alcohol wheels in the direction of what had happened to her.
Here, hon
, Imaginary Steve would say,
use my phone to call your folks
.
Imaginary Pat would clap her on the shoulder.
You’ve had a run of bad luck. If you want, you can sleep in my guest bed tonight. We’ll get you squared away and off to the airport tomorrow
.
It was a fantasy—she knew that. Her mom always said May couldn’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality, but of course she could. Fantasy was what had convinced her to move here and had pulled her into this bar. It was the voice in her head that told her,
Dan’s the one. You’re going to love New York. Pulvermacher’s is going to rescue you from yourself
.
Reality was the thing that was always letting her down.
In reality, bars sat virtually empty between the hours of two and five, even on Fridays, and the people who came in weren’t, generally, the sort whose mercy May wanted to throw herself upon.
In reality, Imaginary Pat and Imaginary Steve didn’t live in New York.
People like this guy did.
The bartender had begun cleaning the counter with a damp rag. He shuffled closer to her, sweep by sweep, and cleared his throat.
Nervous, May lifted her beer and drained it, realizing only with the last warm swallow what she’d done.
“Can I get you another round?” he asked.
This was it, then. Time to go.
But the line was behind her, drawn across the floor, invisible but
there
, and she didn’t want to leave.
She had to choose. Dan’s apartment or this bar. Before or After.
“Maybe,” she said. “Do you have a wine list?”
“I think we’ve got one somewhere in the back.” His disapproving tone made it clear that no one ever asked for a wine list here. Which, yes—she might not know Manhattan, but she knew bars—this was not the sort of place where you asked for a wine list.
“Can you look for me?”
“Sure.” He put his rag down and walked toward a door marked
PRIVATE
. She saw him roll his eyes as he passed the guy.
The guy didn’t look up. He wasn’t interested in the bartender any more than he was interested in her. But his companion wasn’t here yet, and maybe wasn’t coming. He could talk to her for a few minutes, buy her a drink. It wouldn’t kill him.
May hopped off her stool, sucked in her stomach, and approached. “What are you reading?” she asked.
The guy canted the book so she could see the cover, but his hand covered most of the title. All she could read was the word
Dying
.
Awesome.
“Any good?”
He didn’t look at her. He was a bent, dark head, an ear, a declaratory elbow. When she heard a low voice, it took her a second to understand that it belonged to him. “They’ve got their mother’s corpse in a coffin in the back of this wagon, and they’re
taking her into town to bury her. The youngest kid thinks the dead mother is a fish, but he also thinks she can’t breathe, so he bores holes into the coffin and right into her face.”
The bridge of her nose wrinkled. A totally involuntary response.
“One of the two older sons is going insane,” he added. “The other one’s broken leg is starting to rot, and the sister’s knocked up.”
A few beats passed. She tried to think of some kind of segue into normal conversation. The best she could do was “Yeah, but is it any good?”
“It’s super.” He injected the maximum amount of sarcasm into the word.
Sarcasm didn’t scare her. Her sister, Allie, had spent her freshman and sophomore years of high school dripping it all over everyone.
“I’m May.” She extended her hand.
He looked away from the book then, though not at her face. At her hand first. Then down at her shoes, which made him frown. She allowed him some leeway there, because she was wearing dark green leather flats with the bows on the toes, and she didn’t like them much, either.
When he lifted his gaze, it got stuck on her breasts for an uncomfortable period of twelve to fifteen years. “Ben,” he told them.
This offense was harder to forgive. Men had been addressing her breasts since she was thirteen. Her breasts had yet to respond to this treatment.
I’m up here
.
She didn’t say it aloud, but his head lifted, and he finally looked right at her.
He had sort of sleepy eyelids that went with his broad-planed face, his full mouth—a face that made her think of bear-taming and those male dancers in the tall black boots and flouncy white shirts who crossed their arms and stuck their legs out.
Slavic, that was it.
His eyes were brown, lighter than they should have been in the middle and rimmed with black. Weird eyes.
Weirder still, he didn’t seem embarrassed to have been caught boob-ogling, and he didn’t take her hand. She had to retrieve it from the air in between them and find a place to stow it along the seam of her pants.
“What’s with the jersey?” he asked.
“Hmm?”
“Season doesn’t start until next week.”
Oh.
Oh
. The stupid jersey. Not her breasts.
“Believe me, I know.”
“Plus, Einarsson is a douche.”
Right. That.
Even back home, she sometimes got flack about continuing to wear the old jersey of a quarterback who’d abandoned the Packers for the Jets, only to lead his new team to a Super Bowl victory against the old one. She might as well be sporting a pin that read,
I support Benedict Arnold!
Still,
douche
seemed a little harsh.
Ben sat up straighter, his eyes refocusing on something over her right shoulder. He slid off his bar stool and raised a hand. May turned just as another man came off the last basement step and into the bar. A blond, good-looking man who actually knew how to smile.
“How’s it going?” Ben asked.
“Good,” the other man said. “Sorry I’m late. Erin’s been texting me about some crisis, and I lost track of the time.”
“Don’t worry about it. Got you a PBR for old times’ sake.”
“Classic. But you’ll have to drink it—I can’t stay long, and I’m in training anyway.”
“You’re always in training.”
“Tell me about it. Let’s go in the back.”
Ben pushed the spare beer a few inches in her direction. “You want this one?”
“Sure. Thanks.”
He took the other, and the two men walked past the pinball machine and disappeared into the back room.
May allowed herself a small, self-pitying sigh.
She’d hoped to throw herself on the mercy of some kind Midwesterner, and instead the universe gave her Ben. An intimidating stranger who liked to read books about corpses and who’d called her boyfriend—her ex-boyfriend—a douche.
This whole Pulvermacher’s fantasy was a lost cause.
But at least he’d given her another beer. Now she had until the bottom of this glass to come up with a better plan.
And don’t miss the
Camelot
series which begins with a deliciously sexy original novella, in which a good girl, Amber Clark, learns,
How to Misbehave
. Her brother Caleb meets headstrong Ellen and the two bump
noggins—and
bodies—in
Along Came Trouble
. Sister Katie Clark enters a no-strings fling that looks an awful lot like falling in love—or,
Flirting with Disaster
. Lastly, revisit Amber and a story that will take you to new heights with a desire reinvented,
Making It Last
.
Love stories you’ll never forget
By authors you’ll always remember
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