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yeyinde · 1 year

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fever in a shockwave., i | Joe "Bear" Graves x f!Reader

pt., i | swallow him whole (like a pill that makes you choke)

It's one thing to sit back and passively watch a man self-destruct on minimum wage and tips, but another thing entirely to help him on that journey. So, you call it. Or: this is what happens when resident travesty Joe Graves meets a local track star fleeing from everything. (The only problem being: no one ever taught you how to run.)

warnings: implied/references to cheating (but not really); angst, pining, yearning; eventual smut; trauma; grief and the existentialism of moving on; recovery; reader has a backstory; spoilers for the series wordcount: 15,1k

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It's one thing to sit back and passively watch a man self-destruct on minimum wage and tips, but another thing entirely to help him on that journey.

So, you call it.

(Like you should have months ago.)

Get me a scotch. Whisky, and—his hazy gaze slides to the woman barely sitting on the broken stool, eyes drooping and grinning much too wide considering where she's at, before jerking to you again—uh, whatever, uh… she's having.

She's having long island iced tea. You're tired of making it, anyway.

You nod, dutifully, but hand him a glass of room-temperature water, instead.

"This isn't what I asked for."

His voice is pitched low. Always. A strange, rasping timbre that you pretend does nothing to you no matter how many times his eyes slide over your body, liquid blue, and asks for something—bourbon, a scotch, rye.

You can't quite meet his gaze when you shrug. "I know."

There is something about this man who reeks of stale cigarettes, motel shampoo, and wheat malt. Something that makes you ache in all the wrong ways. A man on the verge of implosion; a deadly, gaseous bomb that will leak miasma into the aether until you're rotten from the inside out. Organs full of those awful fumes he'll exude.

Going out with a bang, heavy and suffocating.

His hand jerks on the table. You watch his knuckles slide over the wood, clenching into a tight fist. So tight the scarred tissue around his bones turns white. Bleached under the strain of barely keeping it together.

There is something about an angry man that itches under your skin.

"What the fuck?" The woman beside him breaks the stifling silence. "We paid—"

"S'alright," he says. Low, low—voice scraping against the gravel. His chin falls when you look up. Expression blank, but not vacant. Anger, and—

Maybe a little bit of guilt, sadness, regret.

"Let's get outta here, then," she coos, hand trailing over his chest.

"Yeah," he mutters, and you wonder what caused the shadows in his eyes this time, the ones dulled, glossy, and drenched in cheap liquor. His fist clenches, eyes narrowing. "Let's go."

Anger clings to him. His shoulders are drawn tight even when he wobbles on his feet, unsteady. His hand slams down on the counter, nails—dirty, chewed down the wick—grazing the chipped grain as he tries to stable himself.

His chin lifts, as if he's demanding you to say something. Threatening in blotchy malt, eyes fixed on you like a cobra, a predator. Ocean blue, foggy and glazed over with the nearly hundred dollar tab he tossed on tonight —all in shots, in long island iced teas—and wonder what the blue looks like on a clear day.

Wonder, haltingly, if you'll ever find out.

He leans forward, eyes cresting. Corners turned down in some facsimile of goading, of jeer. His palm turns on the table, closer, now. The space between you is cut by the counter; a perfect partition.

He waits a beat, takes three inhale, two exhales, and then—

Hands loop around his broad waist, chipped pink shaved into almond points catching on a stain in the shade of grease-yellow.

"You comin'?" She murmurs from behind him, voice muffled.

His eyes don't waver. "Yeah."

Yours drop. A flash of gold catching in the jaundiced light.

There are bad ideas, and there is this.

(A sickness.)

On the opposite side of the Virginia Beach boardwalk is a dive bar on the fringes of obsoletion. One just barely clinging to its last vestiges of life. It is considered too far away for a younger, rowdier crowd to congregate, and too dilapidated to pull anyone who wasn't searching for one thing, and one thing only: escapism.

Numbed apathy at the bottom of cheap ale. Curated indifference in a bottle.

There is no affection in some of the older generations' tones when they speak of this place. It isn't something of their youths, or anything to feel that weepy sense of nostalgia over.

It's just a beaten-down pub in a sea of many.

Hardly anyone's first choice.

(Somewhere in the crumbling pages of Freud, you're sure, it would tell you why you decided to work here of all places, too.)

You clock into work, ready for the usual slough to pass through. Another mundane night that the chef has dubbed the usual.

The usual being: opening at five to an empty bar that stretches until eight, maybe none, when the solid sea of regulars (lifers, you've taken to calling them), will have settled in their spots. It mostly consists of twelve people—max—dispersed in the bar, some of them truckers on break or passersby, tourists, who wandered too far down the boardwalk because they didn't know any better.

It's normal. Routine.

You expected the same lour stagnancy that bleeds into everything else, dripping down in a steady trickle like the rainwater that leaks in from the cracks in the shingles your boss refuses to fix, pelting the bottom of the tin bucket perched beneath the hole until it's overflowing. Grey water trapped in a metal prison.

You've come to expect the sulphurous scent whenever you take your place behind the counter.

The most offbeat thing that happened today was your horoscope this morning said to be wary of sinkholes, a problem you haven't thought of since you were younger, and one you doubt you'd face in Virginia, of all places.

(It also said: love life? Tragic. Finances? Might improve sooner than you think. Social life? Could be better.)

Nothing unusual, really.

And then—

A flash from the corner of your eye. Two fingers jerking up once, flagging you down. The universal sign for hey, bartender, over here. You obey the command, painting an unnecessary smile on your face, one that rarely ever goes acknowledged. You turn to the man who waved you over, and—

Well.

He's massive. Different, but decidedly not out of place in a room that reeks of stale beer and lemon cleaner. He moulds to the shadows, sticking like glue to the crevasse in the corner.

Something about him prickles your skin. A break in the routine.

Your heart does this strange, off-rhythm beat when you walk up to him, taking stock of the way he barely fits on the rusted stool. His legs are too bulky, too broad, for both of them to fit together. One thigh spends nearly the entire length of the worn, flat cushion.

They are long enough that he has to bend at the knee to keep his foot flush with the floor.

But it doesn't matter. Not really. Except the strange lurch doesn't settle when it becomes apparent he isn't going to look away.

He keeps his gaze—cenote blue—fixed on you the whole time.

It's in his eyes where you find just how similar he is to some of the regulars:

Anger. Resentment. Bitterness.

A broken thing scraping the bottom of a bottle for something to abate the everpresent ache inside.

When you're close enough, he dips his chin. The thick auburn beard covering his face is rough and worn; it's unkempt, like his hair—moused, greasy—and his clothes—stained and wrinkled. He has a pock on his forehead, and a small scar. The silvery skin catches in the ugly fluorescent lighting above.

He's in a state of disarray. Chaotically unkempt, but the shadows under his eyes—tenebrism on breathing flesh—tell you, implicitly, that he does not care. A chiaroscuro in sabotage, he leaks ruin when you lean in with a tight, shaky smile.

No greeting. Just—

"Whisky. Two shots."

It's blunt. Unapologetic. A direct dismissal.

You're not his friend. You deserve no pleasantries in such a place, nor will you find any with him.

And, really—

You're used to men like him sidling up to the bar, barking out their drink of choice without so much as a hello, lovely evening for it. This is no different from anyone else who sat on that same chair, ordered the same drink, and stank of the same corrosive rot.

Nothing different at all.

Yet, he leaks octane out of every pore of his body. The rust in his gaze is a warning sign: this is a man on the verge of collapse, and one less stable than Betelgeuse.

His eyes are murky blue. Stagnant water. It's a trap, though. There's a livewire buried under the velvet surface.

Your smile wobbles. "Sure."

He's dangerous. The hisses in your head say he's everything you should run from.

(Too bad for them, no one ever taught you how.)

It becomes a routine.

He shows up at the same time each week—six on the dot—takes the stool across from the entrance, and diagonal to the washrooms, the kitchen.

He looks around the room. Then reaches for his phone.

And he looks—

Miserable.

It's none of your business. None at all. It's not even something you should be noticing—like how his knuckles are always split apart or in some state of healing. How he turns his phone off as soon as he sits down, but always takes a moment to stare at the photo on his wallpaper—a woman, his wife, smiling at the camera. Something shudders over his expression. He turns it off, and slips it in his pocket.

In that singular moment, something switches.

He waves you over. Orders a drink. Stumbles out the door when it's time for closing like all the other frequent flyers looking to chase their demons away in amber.

A man like him shouldn't be here.

Military, Pete says; he spoke to him a few days after his first arrival but adds nothing more except a shake of his head, and a softly uttered poor fucking sod, which, coming from the man who is running himself bankrupt to feed an unquenchable addiction, it pacts a degree of potency that leaves you feeling numb.

You heard him utter something back in a low tone to a man who tried to drag him back a few weeks after he first took his seat, and never left.

God ain't here, is he? He wasn't there then, and he isn't here now. Leave me alone, Buddha. Just—take care of them. Take care of the team, the boys. Just do that for me, and find this son of—

There are no answers in the bunch of his shoulders, the low hang of his head. He grinds the heel of his palm into his left eye so hard, you sometimes wonder if he's trying to shatter his socket to finally alleviate the ache inside. The other hand always curled tight around a glass, half empty. Knuckles bloodied.

And that's how he spends his evening.

Chasing relief in whisky.

Oftentimes, he's alone.

Just himself and two empty stools beside him that whine when his broad thighs tap against the cushions, rusted metal grating together, and orders the same cheap booze.

Has the same haunted look in his eyes, the same shadows. Reeks of the same rot. A wound that never heals. It's just dulled in an easy, quick swallow out of a smeared shot glass until he's too drunk to keep his eyes open.

(You suppose it's hard to be chased by ghosts when they're drenched in formaldehyde.

Or cheap perfume—)

Sometimes, on very rare occasions, he isn't.

You'd be remiss not to notice. Even chasing an easy out at the end of a bottle, it's obvious he's an attractive man. Big. Broad.

Surly.

(Your type always seems to be carrying some weight.

Maybe that's why their shoulders are always so big.)

He's unshaven—face covered in thick bristles of burnt umber that curl at the ends; some grey leaks in around his temples, his jaw. You don't think he's washed his hair in a week much less his beard, and yet—

You wonder what it would feel like on your skin—

(Bad thoughts. Bad—)

He wears several Walmart brand Henleys in rotation, all the same ones you'd get from a pack for less than twenty dollars. Maybe even less than ten. Grey, charcoal blue, midnight blue, black, white. In that order. And jeans. Ones that barely fit around his thick thighs, his wide waist.

Black shoes—trousers never tucked in—and a—

It catches in the glow. The woman beside him glances down once, recognition bleeds in the draw of her brows, and you expect anger, reproach, scorn. You tense, waiting for it. For the proverbial comeuppance men like him are supposed to get. It's how it goes in the movies, right?

He's supposed to be the smarmy type who oozes sycophantic charm, women hanging off them as they dabble in hedonism without any feelings of regret. Men like him are followed by a thundercloud. A looming storm in the distance promises a torrential downpour.

You wonder if the deluge would soak you, too.

And—

Nothing.

Instead, her hand falls to the centre of his chest, placed right against his sternum. Eyes coy, glossy. One of her lashes clings to the bottom.

"What are you doing after this?"

She's curated perfection: sultry and alluring.

You can see his glazed eyes drift down to her open blouse—the brand on the button says Michael Kors, and probably costs triple your earnings for the night—and you know, then, that he'll leave with her.

None of the women he takes home is the type you'd find in a dive bar like this, but you suppose pickings are slim in a college town that likes to gossip. They run the risk of getting caught nestled too close together in the back by Tim the Vicar, and so they come here. Where the hardened, rugged alcoholics go to escape the prying eyes of their neighbours, and coworkers.

A sea of shady, drunk people.

In the corner near the exit, a man slides a bag into the awaiting hands of a businessman. A woman sits by herself in a booth for six, and you know her husband, a pastor who has been trying to raise funds to open a new church, runs the town's chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous. A man who stays until closing, drinking pint after pint on the opposite side of the stool will stand up, keys in hand, and go deliver the morning news at five AM.

The woman in Anne Klein trousers and a Michael Kors blouse who runs her nails down his cheap, stained Henley, eyes dark and full of promises for later, is someone you pass on the highway on your commute to this little cesspit outside of town.

She's always smiling brightly on a billboard next to her husband, a man running for mayor.

Maybe, you think, bringing your thumb up to your lips, teeth digging into the seam between your skin and nail as you watch them stumble out of the bar, they're a perfect match. Both drunk, both looking for cheap thrills drenched in sleaze, and—

Both wear gold bands around their ring finger.

(—to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part, according to God's holy law, in the presence of God I make this vow—)

You're eight and treading water. Your mum brings you to the local pool, eyes covered by bulky black sunglasses that hide her expression from you.

(No one ever taught you how to swim. You wonder if she knows this, but doubt it. She doesn't really know much about you at all.)

You cling to the wet ledge, cement digging into your skin as you struggle to stay above the waves that lap at you, pooling inside of your ears. It's warbled. Distorted.

"...For another woman, can you believe it? God, he just—he makes me so fucking sick. Can't he see what he's doing to me? Pathetic, is what he is."

Your grip slips, and you plunge under the surface, knees scratching the sides. You can still hear her—a garbled tangent. Leaving us. Won't even try to make it work. How am I supposed to take care of a kid all on my own? How am I supposed to—

It's a kaleidoscope in shades of blue. The water is warm at the surface, but as you sink to the bottom, eyes catching on a pair of yellow goggles, it gets cold. A sudden chill.

No one taught you how to swim, and despite the instinct inside of you to gasp for air that isn't there, to flail, you don't. You—

Drift.

It's a baptism in chlorine.

It's both louder and quieter than anything you'd ever experienced before.

Pathetic. Stupid, selfish man. Leaving me like this with you, all for some cheap floozy—

Serene. Everything is static underwater. Your burning eyes fix themselves on the hazy yellow wavering at the bottom of the endless blue, and slowly, slowly slip shut.

You think you'd like to stay down here forever.

But you're not quite as lucky as you wish you were. Buoyancy spits you back out.

You surface gasping, gagging, coughing out the water that you'd swallowed on your quick ascent, something to fill your belly up and keep you grounded, an anchor. It didn't work. Your stomach churns with the briny water you gulped down.

Your hands claw at the side of the pool, knuckles shredding against the harsh stucco that covers the concrete ledge. It bites into your skin until it bleeds.

But you're okay. You breathe, and breathe, and—

"It's madness to think I can do it alone. And what are you doing? Stop playing around! You're causing a scene—"

Chlorine on your tongue, spuming inside of your lungs; the taste is familiar. Bitter. Acrid.

It's poison inside of you.

(A sickness.)

He forms a habit with each visit.

But he isn't the only one.

He talks to you— sometimes —and you're distinctly aware of every my bartender is my therapist joke that had ever been conceived, but it's different.

No, really. It is.

He tells you about things. He's a SEAL— former —and even cracks a facsimile of a smile when you ask if he'd have to kill you now or later for leaking such covert information. It's a dumb joke. It's not even funny, but his lips twitch beneath his thick beard, eyes crinkle.

He even huffs at you when you ask when he's going to shave it.

Maybe next year, kid.

Kid. It's what he calls you. Never your name. Nothing to make you a real, living person to him. Just a hazy object in the ethanol gossamer that clouds the blue of his eyes until he's squinting at you, and saying bring me a whisky, kid.

Impartial. Distant.

He never goes out of his way to start the conversion, or to invite you over, but he never really tells you to knock it off, leave him alone, either.

Sometimes, you say something stupid, like shouldn't you be training or something instead of giving yourself cirrhosis? and you can see him shut down. Retreat. His shoulders unfurl, spine straightened, and his eyes harden. A veil of moondust white plumes between you, dislodged when the crater forms.

A chasm resides in the echoes of camaraderie and you wish you could just eat your words or swallow your tongue.

It never lasts too long.

A visit later, two. Then, when you pluck up the courage to talk to him again, he eases into it with slurred words, and a little drunk grin twisting on his lips at the dumb (safe) things you say.

It doesn't count as a smile. You tell him this during the end of surf season. I've never seen you smile. You grin when you're drunk, but. Who doesn't?

And he says, got nothing to smile about, kid.

You hate the way your fingers itch.

He's broken pieces that are too shattered, too splintered to fit back together. Kintsugi isn't enough to seal the cracks, and you should leave him alone to his own ruinous devices. Let him rot—like all the others you ignore, content to refill their glass whenever they wander up.

But he's different.

(Or maybe you're just broken, too.

A fixer. Stupid. There is nothing in this to fix.)

You keep at it without really knowing what it is. There is no end goal. No greater purpose.

(Maybe, it's the reek of loneliness that wafts off of him. The same scent you wake up to, clinging to your pillow. The one that gnarls behind your ribs like a mouldering infestation.

Maybe, it's because out of all the men who wander in, he's the only one who looks like he's already too far gone, and you've always liked the taste of crushing disappointment.)

It becomes something. An ebb and flow.

He sits on the same stool every week while you paddle on, a soliloquy about the inanities of your life to an audience who is too big to drown himself at the end of the glass, but sometimes stares down at it like he wishes he could.

It pays off in slow, small ways.

One month in, you start a game.

It's this silly thing you play in the safe haven of your head; a way to pass the time when the seconds (minutes, hours) tick by pokily, and the stench of cheap malt makes your head swim.

You don't know why you tell him this little secret of yours—maybe, it's the way he holds his glass, clutched between bloodied knuckles, the scabs from last week ripped off and leaking ichor over the cracks in his skin.

Or how distant he feels, like he's further away than ever before. A chasm. It crackles in the air when he orders, words muted. A clicking grumble out of his throat, mouth barely opening.

It's uttered through clenched teeth, but there is no anger. No bitterness. Just—

Defeat.

So, you talk.

(Empty words. No meaning. It's what you're best at, isn't it?

Filling space.)

The door opens, and you tell him out of the corner of your mouth that the man will order a cocktail.

He barely looks up. Says nothing, but his eyes follow yours, locking on to the man who wanders up to the counter. His Hawaiian shirt sticks out like a sore thumb.

He huffs, shoulders shaking.

"A tourist," is all he says, but he waits. Watches.

It feels a bit like satisfaction when the man grins wide, and asks for whisky sour. Says he's from out of town.

You catch the way his brows bounce from the corner of your eye. The soft, golden light casts shadows in the valleys of his forehead. They carry the colour of victory, and you tuck the hue in your chest, in the locked box where everything else goes.

(Three weeks later, he joins in. Adds his own commentary to each drink order.

Social smoker, he says after a moment when you tell him he'll order something hard first—tequila, a whisky—and then mixed drinks. Vodka cranberry. Rum and coke. He doesn't usually smoke, but when the boys go outside for one, he'll join.

He orders a shot of bourbon. Bear tucks his lips behind his own glass of whisky, and you mourn the loss of seeing his smile before you have to hide your own when he comes back and asks for a tall gin and tonic.

You catch his eye when the man leaves, trailing behind a group playing poker in the corner, and it feels a little bit like satisfaction when the chasm feels less imposing than it did before.)

Two, and you get his name.

Joe Graves.

It's so normal compared to the walking travesty sitting to your right, that you almost think he's lying. Almost. But then he adds, elbow knocking on the table, a glass tucked into the palm of his other hand that somehow looks two sizes too small in his massive paw: they call me… used to call me Bear.

Bear. You hate the thrill that runs through you. The ache that splits inside your chest.

And the question that looms over the lapse. The brief silence that felt poignant and stifling between call me and the bitter amendment to used to.

Military man, you think.

You take to calling him Bear just to see the way his eyebrows tick on his forehead, brow wrinkling in rucks of five deep lines. Amusement simmers in geyser blue; an undercurrent of appeasement, as if he's been longing to hear that name again.

(You tuck that away, too.)

Four, you get a flash of teeth when he grins, brief, fleeting, at your one-sided monologue about the perfect way to pour Guinness and this Instagram page some lad made about the worst pours in London.

He tucks it behind the rim of the glass as if it's illegal, wrong. Shameful. But you catch it, anyway. You catch it because you're always looking, always watching.

"In case you haven't noticed, we're in America," is all he says when you show him some of the atrocities committed, brows knotting together in the middle.

You huff. "They're awful. Look at them."

"Huh." His eyes narrow, squinting at the picture. His mouth curls to the side. "Kinda looks like yours."

"Oh, shut up, Bear. It does not!"

His hands raise in mock surrender. "It's just… I didn't know it was supposed to go flat so fast. You learn something new, right?"

You spend the rest of the evening working on your pour, nails stinging when you chew them down to the wick as you concentrate on getting the perfect patio right. All the while, he scrolls through the page with a thick finger, leading smudges on your screen, and adding in his own commentary (usually just a huff, a harsh exhale out the nose, or a scoff) to each one.

"Look," he holds your phone up, forehead creasing in jest, and then motions to the pint you slammed down in front of him a few moments ago. "They copied your technique."

He's pretty when he smiles, you think, sundrunk and blistered, dazed from the gleam of white. The jagged ends of your nails catch on the skin of your palm when you squeeze your hands into fists by your side. Something wet, sticky, pools in your laugh line until it's a bloodied leat.

(It takes two weeks to clear the image from your head, and another to pretend you haven't tucked it somewhere inside of your chest for safekeeping.)

You prod at him just to see it again. Empty words. No meaning.

What's your star sign? You ask, tapping the screen of your phone as you read your horoscope. You think, distantly, about painting your nails. Maybe, once and for all, kicking your habit of chewing them down to jagged edges as close to the line of your skin as possible.

Anne Klein, the second woman he took home, wore her nails in blue.

No good deed goes unpunished with your moon where it's at. Love life? Abysmal. Finances? Could be worse. Social life? Sorry—what's that again?

His brows bunch together in a series of five rings. You count them all. My what?

You know. When were you born?

Give me a goddamn break.

Ahhh, I bet you're a Taurus.

Now that is covert information.

Yep, totally a Taurus.

(He cracks a small smile at that, crooked and shaky, like he forgot how it's supposed to be done.)

He falls asleep at the bar five months in. Another habit is born.

Exhaustion seeped into every pore when he wandered in a few hours ago with a wrinkled plaid half-sleeve and gingham coat.

You'd pointed out that the buttons at the bottom didn't line up when he sat, and watched as he seemed to fluster a little at that. As if the stench of rot and sleep didn't cling to him like an addiction; like he didn't have stains on his collar, or oozing scabs on his knuckles, and his biggest worry right now was his button not aligning.

He looks more put together tonight than he does any others, but the two women who approached (Friday night—the poster on the door says it's singles night) were turned down.

(A trend, lately.)

It's none of your business—you're not even a therapist, you're just the one bringing the bottle—but you soak everything up like a greedy sponge, and try to ignore the elation churning in your chest when he says, no, I'm, uh. I'm not interested.

So, you babble. You turn your head away from him so he doesn't catch the grin on your lips, and take to wiping down the counter as you fall into your normal, one-sided tangent.

You get about halfway through your vague retelling of the Incident at the coffee shop when a soft grumble reaches your ears.

You turn, fingers clenching around the nozzle of the trap—local; the hinges squeak from disuse—and—

Head dropped, chin tucked into the lapels of his wrinkled shirt. They're upturned at the ends, pressing into his cheek. His arms are folded, hands tucked under his biceps.

The only thing saving him from toppling backwards is the wall he's leaning against.

You don't realise you had been staring until cold foam sloshes over the top of the pint. You fluster, eyes darting back to him, checking to see if he'd noticed, but his eyes are still closed, his mouth slightly parted.

It's—

Cute.

He looks younger, softer when he sleeps. The weight of it all bleeding out under the heavy pressure of somnolence. Fatigue.

He's typically pitched inside the shadows, leaning back into the tenebrous of the dimly lit room behind him. This is the first time he's slumped forward fully, and with an amber glow highlighting the valleys of his face, the definition of his long, broad nose, the sloping hills of his eyes, the full pink mouth hidden behind unkempt curls that lighten to ash at the ends, you're hit with the realisation of how truly fucked you are.

He's attractive. Ruggedly handsome with his kind-shaped eyes, and his crooked grin, but distinct. There is nothing innocuous about the way he looks, and yet—

You feel assured in his presence. Calmed. He's quiet, and never speaks louder than the muted scratch of a glass bottom dragging across the tabletop. His bulk should be intimidating, but he's always sitting, hunching his shoulders in on himself as if he's clutching a grenade tight to his chest.

It feels wrong to stare at a customer so blatantly like this, but your eyes keep skirting back to him in this moment of peace.

But it's brief.

A small window where he can slip into full relaxation, hiding from the phantoms that grasp at his soft tissue during the day, raking their nails over the gummy lining of his mind until he's forced to reconcile the pain with cheap whisky in a bottle.

They find him in his dreams, too. His brow twitches. Hands jerking, fingers tensing.

You want to reach over, soothe the valley between his brow, but it's not your place. So, you leave him. You leave him, and hope that despite the restlessness, he does get something from this. Much needed rest. Sleep. Anything.

The night dwindles. Most of your time lately is spent chatting away at the stonewall of a man to your right, and with that avenue snoring, you pull your textbook from beneath the counter, and let your eyes trace over the words meant to define your forever.

His soft, rough snores fill the static between you and the rest of the bar, and you let him sleep until the sparse room thins. Until the chairs are hiked over the tables you wiped down, scouring out the stickiness that catches the ends of the cloth. Until the bottles were restacked, the glasses ran through the dishwasher.

The cook pokes his head out, and bids you goodnight. You wave him off and try to ignore the look on his face when he catches sight of Bear still slouched on the stool. He says nothing more, but he never does. Never gets involved with anything outside of the kitchen.

(A smarter man than you.)

When the clock strikes well past closing, you finally sidle up to him, reaching out over the counter to knock your knuckles on the wall over his head.

(And if you're a little too close, catching the ends of his hair on your palm, then that's your secret to keep.)

"Times up, Bear."

He jerks awake, blinking at you sluggishly, and quickly brings his hands to his chest before he's even fully cognizant. He pats himself down in a way that is too purposeful to be anything but intentional, practised.

When he's settled, when whatever he was looking for is either gone or confirmed, he sniffs, clears his throat, and drags his glossy eyes up to meet yours.

"Times what?"

"Up," you punctuate the word by raising your brows, jerking your thumb to the clock on the wall that's always three minutes too late. "It's time to head home."

His eyes squint when he takes in the time, and then groans. His hand reaches up, carting through his messy hair (soft, a little greasy at the ends), before he rubs his index finger and thumb over his forehead, dragging the skin up and down.

Your hand jerks, and you bring your thumb to your mouth, teeth catching on your nail. All you taste is malt.

"Sorry," you murmur, soft, quiet; words muffled by your finger. "I should have woken you up sooner."

"No, it's—," he stops, takes a deep breath, and then runs his hand down his face until his palm covers his mouth and chin. He blinks up at you. "When did I fall asleep?"

You shrug, dropping your hand to the pocket of your apron. "A little bit after you got here."

"Jesus…" he presses his hand into his jaw, eyes glancing toward the wall. The word is laced with a tinge of surprise. Maybe, a little uncertainty.

"You looked like you needed it."

The moment the words leave your mouth, you wince. Stupid. You could have said something else— anything else—instead of that. It was busy. You didn't even notice. It's not your job to babysit grown men with marital issues and poor decisions. It's not—

But he cracks his neck, cutting off the words wanting to disembogue, and when he turns back to you, his eyes look clear—clear blue.

"This is the longest I'd slept in—"

He doesn't finish, but he doesn't have to.

The way he stares at you itches under your skin. Abrasive. Stark. It lacks the usual glaze of alcohol-suppressed thoughts, ones numbed in malt, and you aren't sure what to make of the way his pupils dilate. Sapphire-lined black. The way his eyes widen slightly, mouth parting, as if he's only just noticing you for the first time. As if you'd always been this hazy mirage that aids in suppression, and deals out crutches in pints.

A frisson passes through the canyons in his gaze. A dawning sun cast shadows over the rolling landscape.

You don't know what to make of it, so you don't. At all.

A tight smile. "It's time for me to, um. Lock up."

He blinks, as if coming out of a stupor. Rapid clicks, shutters. He shakes his head a little, as if dislodging the colluvium from his thoughts.

"Right."

"Unless you wanted to sleep here for the night?"

It gets a soft chuckle. Three lines on his cheek. Two in his brow. Three on the corner of his eye. You map them all, each dip and valley until they're cemented in your head.

He's more open like this. Sobriety looks better on him than—

His bruised knuckles rasp over the countertop.

"Lemme walk you to your car."

You blink, heart lurching in your chest. "You don't have to."

"Yeah," he shrugs, and you think he might even try to grin but looks more like a grimace. A wince. "But I want to."

It's a dangerous escarpment; a treacherous climb up an alluvial fan. Your fingers dig into the loose sediment that rains down around you, pelting you with small grains of dirt and rock. Each hit pocks your skin: a little divot where flesh once sat, but now is karst; split and cracked with caverns that run deep. The splinters crumble that brassbound resolve you've held tight in your fingers until your joints ached, and palms split. Don't be the other woman, your mother warned you. Don't.

It'll be a crater soon, or maybe a blue hole. Aquifer polluting the bottom. Everything gone. Eroded. Swallowed whole in the sinkhole that forms.

(Beware of sinkholes. Don't be the other woman.)

You know better than anyone what they say about expectations, and yet—

"Okay."

(He takes to walking you to your car every night, hands always shoved deep in his pockets or under his arms, shoulders hunched.

You watch him stand in the parking lot until he fades from your rearview mirror.)

Seven you get a touch. His fingers ghost along the curve of your wrist, brushing your skin.

His eyes aren't kind when you turn to him, but they shine with something other than the cheap rye in his glass, the scattered shots of tequila that spill around him.

It's fixed and heavy. Unwavering.

You try to smile, to shrug it off. "It's nothing."

The lie doesn't fit between your teeth, and you think he senses this, too, but he doesn't pry. You're surprised he even went out of his way to acknowledge your lour disposition—a string of weeks that coalesced into unease, into stress. One mediocre day after the other.

Rent was late. Bills pile up. The books tucked beneath the counter, saved for slow days (read: every day), and for the eventuality of when you can finally toss this ramshackle dive bar aside for something better. Greater.

And what that something is?

Well. Who knows.

But you're supposed to, aren't you? Know, that is. Have everything figured out and ready-made to fit neatly inside the margins of forever and the rest of your life.

The rest of your life was four walls and a roof.

Stuck in Virginia Beach on minimum wage that barely got you through college (thank you, inheritance), and no prospects outside of real estate.

You think about moving but have no idea where to go. What to do.

Stagnancy. It bleeds from your marrow into your bloodstream. A poison.

You shrug when his forehead creases, brows raising as he waits for you to spit out whatever inane thing that could possibly be wrong.

"Life, I guess," you huff, aiming for distant, blasè humour but it misses the mark by a solid kilometre and a half.

"Yeah," he mumbles. He always mumbles. Words sticking together like glue. "I know that feeling."

You let it drop, nodding.

(Four walls and a roof. That's the goal, then. That's always been the goal.)

You turn to him, forcing something that might, in a distant life, have been kin to a smile.

"I bet he'll order a pint."

He takes it. "He's married, but takes his ring off. The skin on his finger is pale."

He stutters over the word married.

(Four walls, you think.)

"Huh," you huff. Foam spills from the lip of the glass, drenching your fingers in malt. "My dad always kept his on."

From the corner of your eye, you see his hand tighten around the pint. His ring makes a small noise when it hits the glass.

Eight, a laugh. A low, rasping chuckle still wet from the swallow of rye he'd taken before you said something stupid like what's a man like you doing in a place like this, anyway?

It's drenched in bitter disbelief as if he isn't quite sure how you don't know. How you can't see that he fits between the waterlogged panels of the wooden floor, stained with grime and dyed with ethanol in patches around the tap. The pock marks in the counter, rubbed raw and scrubbed down to the cheap wood beneath, now jaundiced and discoloured from age. Or how he leaks the same desolate miasma of resignation, rage, and apathy as everyone else.

He belongs, his derisive laugh says. Why don't you see it, too?

It startles him, and you can see it happening as he takes in the neat, blunt cut of your eyes as you gaze at him, naked and honest.

He retreats into himself as if allowing anyone to see him plain-faced and worthy is wrong. As if he is no different to the men who wobble in their chairs, eyes rimmed red and glazed as they run from the demons in their minds, and their lives, and seek salvation at the bottom of the bottle. The ones entirely aware, and unaware, that the bottle is elk, kin, the things they flee from. A juxtaposition in a man-made disaster.

He pretends he fits in with them. You pretend you see it, too, if only so he doesn't run away.

(Stupid, stupid, stupid—)

You count down the days until he shows up, and hate yourself a little bit more for the happiness that gnarls inside your chest each time you see him appear in the doorway.

(A sickness.)

Nine brings a man from the church in town, someone from his past. And everything quickly unravels after that.

He shows up before opening, carrying a stack of papers for some big event in the summer. An opening. A new church, he says, and jogs the stack on the counter.

(You hide a smile, tucking it into your shoulder as discomfort bleeds into the placidity of his expression when some of the pages stick.)

He looks like every priest, every vicar, you'd ever seen before. Draped in black with a stark white collar; clean-shaven, and void of shadows.

This isn't a place he should be. A place he belongs. He stands out amongst the grit, the hazy gossamer of smuggled cigarettes lit in the dingy washroom, and leaking nicotine yellow into the faded wood of the walls. The chipped, pocked tables, were picked at and worn down to soot-stained white.

He doesn't belong, but he stays, anyway. In spite of the massive chasm that split between him and everyone, everything else, he sticks it out.

And sticks out.

Bear falters when he sees him, hands shoved deep in the pockets of his coat when he wanders inside. His shoulders draw up to his chin, arms straight lines against his body.

He looks like he might run. Flee. You almost expect him to.

He doesn't.

He says nothing when takes his usual spot, but his eyes are thunderclouds, brow drawn taut. A rubber band being stretched too far.

(God ain't here, is he, Buddha?)

The priest doesn't notice the discomfiture that passes over Bear's expression, or the wan, agitated way he glares at the red stain (nail polish, you think) on the counter. He grins wide, happy, and tells you about the church they built. One raised from the funds of the community.

"...And we're, of course, happy to accept new members to our congregation when it opens."

You nod, dragging your gaze away from the calamity in blue, offering little more than a smile in return.

"I don't," you hesitate, hands smoothing over the front of your worn apron. Going to church reminds you too much of baptism. Of water. Of sinking below the waves in a world of blue, and never surfacing again. Of—

Patronisation.

You'd been to church three times in your life: to watch your mother remarry (twice), and to say goodbye to your father.

(None of them were happy memories.)

"I don't go to church much."

He smiles, placidly, eyes warm and welcoming. "Never too late to start."

You guess they have an answer ready for everything. He might have been a great salesman in a different life.

You don't want to commit, or lie—least of all to a man of faith—so, you talk. Fill space.

"Want a drink?"

His brows buoy in surprise. You wonder if anyone has ever offered a priest a pint before.

"No, I, uh—"

He's cut off by a gruff bark, a low husk of laughter. "Don't think they drink much, kid."

You blink, chin jerking toward Bear. "Oh, no?"

The priest offers an indulgent smile when you catch his eye. "Well, it's not outright forbidden but we tend to stay away from vices."

"Is it a sin?"

"No, it's not. Too much is a crutch, but all sins can be forgiven."

He opens his mouth like he's going to say more, but a low scoff from Bear cuts him off once again.

The sound draws you back to him. Sober, still. He's only just arrived, and hasn't even ordered a drink yet, and the shadows are vibrant in his geyser gaze. The moussed hair, slightly greasy and bedraggled; the stains on his shirt that stretched taut over his broad shoulders, creasing between his pecs. The wrinkles in his forehead, the condescending lilt to his grin, left cheek pulled up in a facsimile of a smile.

You've never seen him like this before. His thumb swipes across the tip of his nose as he settles on the too-small stool, eyes burning. Darkening.

"That's not true, is it, Father?" He sniffs, hands dropping as he leans forward. Even sitting he's still so—

Massive. Intimidating.

The priest looks slightly perturbed, but recognition bleeds in the cut of his brow. You wonder how many times people refute him when he preaches his sermons.

"Ah," he says, shaking his head. There is sadness in his smile when he forces it. "It is true. All sins can be forgiven by God."

"All of them?" Bear questions, unkind, biting. His fingers spread over the counter, knuckles covered with deep indigo scabs sealed in congealed blood.

"All have sinned, and all their futile attempts to reach God in His glory fail. Yet they are now saved and set right by His free gift of grace through the redemption available only in Jesus the Anointed."

Bear is quiet for a moment, eyes downcast. Then: "Romans: chapter three, verse twenty-two to twenty-five."

"You know your verses."

When his head lifts, there is an aching sense of clarity in gyre blue. His is brassy, hushed, when he speaks. "All of them."

"Then you know that forgiveness is—"

"Isaiah chapter sixty-four, verse six."

The priest falters momentarily, eyes swinging like a pendulum between Bear, and the bloodied knuckles he leaves on display. His eyes flash again, but adds: "Psalm chapter one hundred and thirty, verse three to five."

A flash of teeth beneath curled, wry burnt umber. He leans forward, forearms resting on the sticky surface. There is a storm in his gaze. Clouded blue. He spits the verse out like a curse. "Matthew chapter six, verse fourteen to fifteen."

It feels like being pitched in the middle of a movie. There is a thin vein of cognisance: you understand the characters, and the current tension, but everything else is murky. Unknown. You don't know what the meaning behind the verses bouncing between each other is, but there's a struggle. Bear is angry. The pastor is—

Sad.

You don't understand. Never will, maybe, but you quietly duck your head, wiping down pint glasses as if you weren't watching a husk of a man spit out bible verses at a priest.

"Hopefully, you remember this verse one day," he says, eyes only for Bear, and achingly sad. "Ephesians chapter four, verse thirty-two."

Bear says nothing more. He falls silent, glaring at the patchwork of stains smeared over the counter. Defeat, maybe. A battle lost. A stalemate. You don't know the meaning of the words—verses and chapters, and sin—but it makes Bear sullen, angry. Nearly apoplectic. His shoulders shake when he clenches his fist, squeezing hard enough to crack the scab on his middle finger until it lifts from his wound, and bleeds.

The priest slides two flyers out—one for you, one for Bear—and flashes one last parting glance at him before he leaves.

You tuck the flyer into your pocket.

You don't know what he does with his, but it's gone when you come back from kitchens.

Bear says nothing for the rest of the evening. His jaw clenches, eyes dip.

He orders a shot of tequila but doesn't finish it.

He's quiet when he walks you to your car. Declines your offer for a ride with a tight smile that's a touch too wobbly around the edges, like a bad secret or a sour taste in his mouth.

You wonder why he even stayed at all.

(You toss the flyer into your glovebox, and can't stop thinking about what might have happened to make him this way as you watch him fade from your rearview mirror.)

When you go home, you try to remember the verses they spat at each other, but only one sticks:

Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

You hand him a box of chocolates for the holidays and watch as he blinks down at the shoddily wrapped gift.

"What's this?"

You huff. It's not wrapped terribly. You spent nearly two hours before your shift making sure the edges looked professional and neat (a clean line, the lady on the YouTube video said, shows care, and dedication), and—

Stupid, of course.

But you never said you weren't, and you're only just passing through your college classes, so. It's all particularly on brand, you think. Very you. Very—

Messy. Dumb. Stupid.

"Something for a friend," you say, and then wince. A friend. How juvenile.

You watch his throat bob, trepidation etching into your joints when he swallows, eyes creasing at the corners. His voice is gritty, sandpaper rough when he speaks: "is that what we are?"

It's not relief that floods you, but it's something. His tone is hedging. Cautious, as if he's never even uttered the word in years, and now he's faced with someone who spent thirty minutes comparing clichè Holiday designs sketched into glossy paper, and another twenty trying to decide which bow matched better.

All for a dumb box of chocolates.

The most expensive box, of course, but still very dumb. Who gives someone who routinely tries to drown themselves in amber chocolate?

(Or anything at all for that matter.)

You swallow thickly and shake your head with something that might be a grin. Maybe. Sort of.

You just—

Fill space.

"Nah, we're best friends. Thought about getting us matching necklaces, and everything to really complete the look, you know—;" the morose expression falters, eases into something that almost feels like contentment. Peace. His lips quirk, and the sight of his crooked smile makes your chest flutter. Stupid. Stupid.

"But I didn't because I wasn't about to fight a behemoth—;" this makes his brows bounce up, mouth twitching as he fights, fights, off a smile, and you feel your heart take flight, soaring through the aether. "—For Best and then have to tell everyone I lost my first fight, ever, over some cheap sterling silver. So, I guess we'll just have to get, like, matching tattoos, or whatever…"

His brows raise again—in stupefaction, bemusement, exasperation; all of the above—and he shakes his head, huffing.

"You talk a lot."

You fight a wince, and cover it up with a shrug. It doesn't hurt. You hear it all the time. Just grin. Bear it.

"Someones gotta do it or we'll be sitting in awkward silence all night."

"It's a comfortable silence."

Comfortable. He thinks it's comfortable.

Your fingers prickle. You run your index finger over the jagged line of your thumbnail, and try to resist the urge to bite it down to nothing.

"Is that what it is?"

"It would be, but you keep talking."

"File a complaint."

His brows raise, lips curling. "Alright."

You huff, then, mocking and dry, but you wear your heart on your sleeves, and the smile that twitches on your lips gives you away.

It's silly. Dumb. You feel like an idiot when you reach for the tip jar, a cardboard box with a slit cut at the top, patched up over the years with duct tape, and drag it closer.

He watches you, making a small noise of question in the back of his throat when you paw around for the marker behind the counter, but you don't answer. Can't, or you'll give your grand idea away.

You make a small noise of satisfaction when you find it. You wave it around once before bringing it to your mouth, and sink your teeth into the plastic cap, holding it steady.

His hand jerks. "What are you—"

You pull the marker from the cap, and hold the box steady, eyes lifting to catch his gaze. Something simmers in those ocean blues, pools of glossy cerulean, and you might almost call it amusement if he was anyone else, and you weren't you, but it's soft. Curious.

Your chin drops, smile turning wobbly around the cap still caught between your lips, and you bring the felt tip of the marker to the box. You cross out TIPS and write: file a complaint - only $5.

You take a moment to admire your work before you turn it toward him with a grin.

His eyes drop from yours to the box, and you see his mouth spasm in something that feels too genuine to be anything other than your first real smile.

A flash of teeth. Lines in his cheeks. Your heart thuds, palms grow damp.

"Got it all figured out, do you?"

"Aside from who gets Best or if we get matching tattoos, yes."

"I'm not getting a tattoo." He leans over the counter, brows creasing as he stares at you in mock severity. "But I will fight you for Best. And win."

Another skip. Deeper into the whole. "I thought so."

He grabs the box from your hands, and scribbles talks too much on a napkin before shoving it, and a crumbled five-dollar bill, into the slot.

"C'mon, I'll walk you to your car. Get you outta here so you can see your family."

You hide a grin behind your hand. "What family? But I guess yours is missing you, too."

He shoves his arms inside the sleeves of his wool jacket, gaze dropping to the worn counter.

"What family?"

It's sombre. Mood broken, yet again, by your inability to shut up.

You don't know how to salvage the pieces. The fractured remains of what might have been a good time.

But it's just—

Bear.

(And you.)

Best friends. A silly little notion he entertained when he could have told you to sod off ages ago.

You nudge his side, and have to remind yourself to pull away from him. That this is just casual. Best friends but not really. Not even close. "Hungry? I know a place that's always open and makes the best burgers."

He flashes a facsimile of a smile, wan and thin around the edges. "You should head home, kid. Not much for company tonight."

"Suit yourself," you murmur, slipping your hands into your pockets. You shuffle, rocking back on your heels. The silence is stifling. You wonder what part of this he finds comfortable. It lapses, and you

Fill it.

"I think you're pretty great company, for what it's worth."

He says nothing.

It's as close to outright rejection as you can bear.

You press your hands into the seam of your pocket, pulling your jacket open. "Well, happy holidays, and all—"

"Best burgers in town, huh?"

A smile creeps across your face, heart thudding in your chest. It sounds like the distant roar of the ocean, the waves crashing on the shore.

"Yep," you pop the p and wriggle your brows. "Their secret menu item is the peanut butter bacon burger, and—"

"Peanut butter and bacon?" He says it like it's a crime. Like you've committed an act of treason, and spat in his face.

Your grin widens. "It's disgustingly good."

"Disgusting, huh."

"No, no—it's salty, sweet, and savoury. It's the best combination ever made. And the sweet potato fries with Chipotle mayo? Heaven sent."

"And you've lost me."

"Did I ever even have you to begin with, or—"

The words cut a little too close to the truth, to vulnerability, and you feel heat pool under your cheeks. Embarrassment over your unintended slip-up. Your stupidity. Your inability to accept what you've been given, and stop trying to overcompensate for more, more, more—

Stop acting up; you're causing a scene!

He steps closer, hand reaching out behind you to push the old iron door open.

There is something in his gaze you can't decipher. The shadows on his brow make you think of craters, and mountains made of lunar rock.

"Yeah, you do," he rasps, words starchy and thick in his throat, but all you can hear is you do, you do, you do. "I need to try this disgusting burger of yours."

"Disgustingly good," you snipe back, if only because it's easier to fall into some facsimile of a rhythm where you always, always get the last word than it is to let the silence simmer.

(To give him a chance to see the way your hand shakes around your key, or the way you have to ask him what he said—twice—because you can't hear anything over the roaring in your ears when he fits inside your car like he belongs.)

Disgustingly good burgers with friends.

(You pat yourself on the back for only managing to get into two accidents on the way, prompting a want me to drive from him, which immediately gets turned down; but you get to the burger shack safe and sound and watch the look on his face when he bites into a peanut butter bacon burger and sweet potato fries with Chipotle mayo like it's the best meal he's ever had in months, and—

And it's enough.)

You nudge him later when you drop him off at some dingy motel by the highway, well away from the city limits but so achingly close to the bar, and say: happy holidays, Bear.

He offers something that feels like a smile. In lieu, you think. A smile in lieu. Not quite there, but almost. Almost.

"Yeah, still think I'm pretty great company? "

"The best."

He says nothing when he gets out of the car, leftovers tucked under his arm, but he pauses before he shuts the door, and turns to you, eyes cerulean in the pale light of the morning gloam.

"Get home safe, kid."

You almost say you, too.

Instead, you bite your tongue so hard it bleeds.

He wanders in looking like he was ripped from the pages of Surfer Magazine. Dirty blond hair perpetually curled from the sea salt, and bleached at the ends from the iodine in the water. He has the cut of a man who looks like he'd feel more comfortable in a wetsuit than the jeans and stark white t-shirt he struts in wearing.

Your first thought is: surfer idiot.

The second is: Surfer Dude will order a shot of tequila. Blanco.

You lean over and whisper this to Bear, who dutifully offers an indulgent quirk of his lips, before turning to catch sight of the man you'd pointed out. Targeted, he told you. You're targeting them, kid.

When he does, you think of something funny to say but the words die on your tongue when Bear tenses, and goes completely silent. Stonewalled.

The man wanders up with a wide grin, all teeth and bleached sand. Nonchalant. Easy.

It's only when his eyes skirt to Bear, do you see the undercurrent of tension in his brow, resignation in the knuckles of his joints.

They know each other. There is a history in the way they sit apart—Bear, on the lonely barstool to your right, and Surfer standing beside the one in front of you. Cut off by an angle. By you.

You think about the man that tried before him—Buddha, the almost fight in the parking lot—and wonder how much success Surfer will have.

"Thought I'd find you here, man." He nods, shaggy curls bouncing over his shoulders. He turns to you, flashes a smile, and orders a shot of tequila.

You don't miss the way his eyes trail over you—your tight v-neck, the apron tied tight around your waist. The mascara and lipgloss you started putting on a week after it became clear Bear was a regular, the one you spent a considerable chunk of your paycheque on when the saleslady said it really made your eyes pop.

You wonder what he thinks, what he sees, when he drinks you in.

He. The man in your head with broad shoulders, brown hair. Bluest eyes you'd ever seen.

The thought makes heat pools under your cheeks, vermillion scorching through your flesh.

No. Him. Surfer. Of course. Not—

Not Bear.

(Stupid. Stupid.)

"Keeping some pretty nice company, too, I see," he leans over, forearm resting on the countertop, and flashes another toothy grin. "Got a name or do they just call you pretty thing?"

"I don't know, Pretty Boy," you snap back, brows raising.

"Pretty Boy, huh?" He cuts you off, gaze skirts to Bear. A smirk pulls on the corner of his mouth. "Hear that, Bear? Pretty Boy."

"Knock it off, Caulder."

Pretty Boy—Caulder—raises his hands in mock surrender. "I'm just chatting with a nice lady who thinks I'm a Pretty Boy—"

You turn away from him, shaking your head. "Not that pretty—"

"You already said I was, so," he shrugs, eyes crinkling around the corners. "No takebacks."

"We'll see."

"What do they call you, then?"

"What do you think they call me?"

"Let me see," he stands, hands curling over the ledge of the counter as he leans back, eyes playfully drinking you in. They linger on your chest, lip caught between white teeth. "Hmm…"

"Looking for a name tag?"

"No," he smirks, pulling himself forward until his torso is hunched over the sticky table. His eyes skirt down your body before flickering up, catching your gaze once more. "Just admiring the view."

He's attractive. Boyishly cute and—begrudgingly, you have to admit—charming with his big eyes, his sleepy grins, and the wry ashen curls slicked back by his goggles.

White teeth catch in the golden light, framed in half hearts of sun-dusted pink, and you find yourself mimicking the grin, softening under the bright gleam aimed at you. He's someone easy to get swept away with.

"There isn't much to admire," you murmur, brushing loose strands of hair off your shoulder. Your chin drops, unable to hold the stormy grey gaze fixed on you. Hiding.

"Oh, there is plenty to admire," he refutes, pulling his bottom lip into the seam between his teeth. He bends down, elbow dropping to the counter, and cups his cheek in the palm of his hand. "Plenty more underneath that, ahh—cute," his ashen brows raise teasingly when he stresses the word, buoying on his sunkissed forehead: "apron."

His eyes are dark, smouldering. Flirtatious.

"Right…"

Before you can say anything more, the clang of glass knocking against wood cuts you off.

The noise makes you jump, gaze darting to Bear.

He matches your stare, holds it for a second, but whatever lurks in glazed blue is hidden from you. Dulled in malt, and shrouded in shadows that leak from the crevasses.

Bear clears his throat again, drags his gaze to the man leaning on the counter.

"What are you doing here, Caulder?"

You can't place his tone, but there's a crackle in his voice. Laced with iciness; the same shade of glacial blue as his eyes.

Pretty Boy acknowledges the coldness, the simmering anger, in his tone with a crooked grin. A flash of white teeth behind tawny bristles.

He doesn't seem like the shy type—the ones who sit close to the tap, but not too close. Enough to watch you, enjoy the view, the company you offer, and (maybe) slot themselves in your line of view in the hopes that you notice them, too. That, maybe, you approach first.

He wandered up, tousled, bleached hair bobbing with his effortless, confident gait, goggles tucked behind his ears, and keeping his fringe from falling in his eyes. Everything about him screams an abundance of effortless self-confidence.

If he wanted to flirt with you, then he'd do it.

He would fully commit regardless of who was present, and maybe, he'd prefer if more people were around to see him succeed.

This isn't meant to pick you up—that might just be a convenient bonus should you show any interest in his ploy. You know this from the way he keeps glancing at Bear from the corner of his eye; clouded slate swinging like a pendulum from you—where he levels a series of weak pickup lines, and smarmy charm—and then immediately to the man sitting diagonally to where he stands.

He's gauging his reaction.

They know each other. This much is obvious from the greeting alone, but there is a tenuous history here, made evident by the tension, the palpable unease in the man's shoulders, and the way he gazes at Bear—warily, unsure. Testing the waters before making the jump.

"Besides trying to spend the night with a pretty bartender?"

He turns to you with a wink, a cheeky little grin on his lips, and then—he hesitates. There is a moment where he ducks his chin, expression clouding over with something stagnant, subdued. It lacks the playfulness of before. Sombreness taking shape, only briefly, before he tugs it back up like a mask. Fixes it back in place with the same palpable ease from before; the same slightly condescending jocose.

"Lookin' for you, man."

He slides his forearms across the counter, making a face when his skin catches on something sticky, but it's gone. Fleeting. He straightens up, brow knotting together in something that might be anticipation but the lines in his eyes read more like grit, and determination.

You move away from their end of the counter, giving them a modicum of privacy but that's meaningless when you can still hear their hushed conversation on the opposite side of the bar, where you pretend to busy yourself with repolishing clean glasses while they exchange awkward stilted greetings.

How…how have you been, man?

Why are you here Caulder?

Guess no one taught you the art of Socialisation, eh, Bear?

You can only infer meaning from their tones, their crackled demeanour around the other. Something runs deep between them—a noxious mix of bad blood, brotherhood, grudges, and familial concern—but you're no one to either of them, and privy to even less.

You pretend you can't hear them speak (Fish Bait is askin' for ya. You said you wouldn't leave him behind, but what is this? I mean, shit, man, you can't waste away in a damned shithole while we—), or that your guts aren't churning with concern, with worry, over the taut pull in Bear's shoulders, the wrinkles in his forehead, the gyre in his gaze. A storm looms.

But it has nothing to do with you.

So, you feign ignorance. You duck beneath the counter, and organise the glasses, straighten up the bottles, gather the thick layer of dust along the shelves on the tip of your finger.

It's wiped on your cute apron when you stand, and then reach for a cloth to wipe down the grimy countertop (I failed my exam. Head trauma. Brain injury. I can't—I mean, fuck, Bear. I can't go back. I can't. But you? What are you doin', bro? Why are you moping around here, gettin' a damned beer belly when you have men counting on you? When you can go back—).

You pour drinks (Buddha is running the team. They don't need me, you all made that clear enough—). Take tips (you told me you needed me, Bear; so, this is me telling you that we need you). You tell a stray tourist where to find the infamous seafood restaurant (I lost everything, Caulder. I can't go back—). You refill the bottles (you're not Rip, man. You need to let go of him. It's been two years. Two years. She'd want you to move on—)

"I don't know what she'd want because she's dead. She's—"

You flinch when Bear raises his voice, when it carries over to you, furious and aching, and full of rot.

"I can't bury it, Caulder. I can't—"

Working in a sleazy pub on the opposite end of a boardwalk usually brings in men like him—the ones who lean over the tacky countertop, and try their luck with glib lines meant to be suasive. Charming. It's nothing you are not used to by now, but there is a degree of difference in his mien, an insincerity that etches deep. His intrigue is surface level.

Years of watching misery unfold in orders for cheap shots and pint glasses have taught you many things. The most notable being, of course, how to measure someone. Pick apart their reaction, their tone.

How to target them.

And so, when Pretty Boy leans over the counter again after raising his hands in defeat, in surrender, to Bear, and wanders over to you, a wry grin twisting on the corner of his lips, you brace yourself for the inevitable, and—

"You and Bear, huh?"

And it's not what you expect.

"Me…and….?"

He jerks his chin toward the steaming behemoth in the shadows, gulping down whisky like it's water, eyes locked, firm and dark, on the two of you. You fight a shiver, fingers trembling around the hose.

She's gone. Dead.

All this time—

You thought he was just like your father. Just like the man who patted you awkwardly on the head on the rare occasion he was ever home, and said: I'll teach you how to swim when I get back, okay?

And then walked away. Walked out of your life, and—

"Um. He's… a customer. A friend." You wince, shoulders jerking. Juvenile. Stupid.

"A friend," he says the word like he doesn't believe you, and you get it.

You get it because why would he, anyway? Some strange bartender on the wrong side of town who claims to be his friend, and he's supposed to just accept it? It's laughable, considering.

The stupid tip box in the corner—now, formally known as the complaint box, an impromptu decision that has added an extra fifteen dollars to your nightly sum—catches your eye, and you think of friendship necklaces, and fights in the alley. Of burgers in your stupid car that made noises when you put it in reverse (ones that made his brows raise, his eyes—lidded and bright from booze—slide over to you as if to ask is this safe?), and smelled strongly of that dumb Michael Kors perfume you bought—a bottle you'd spent way too much money on because he leaned into the girl next to him when she sat down, glossy in Anne Klein, and mature, and a lawyer, and better, and said you smell good.

(He went home with her that night and you spent nearly three hundred on perfume he hadn't even noticed.)

It makes you think of the itch in your palm when he offered to check under the hood because he was good at fixing things, and softly, then even better at breaking them, as if he hadn't meant for you to hear it.

"Yeah," you say, firm, then, because you are friends. Or, you're something. But nothing doesn't wait until the very end of your shift, or walk you to your car, or eat burgers with you on Christmas when he should be with his wife, his family, or laugh (a little, barely. Kind of) at your dumb jokes. Or—

Or anything. Any of what he does.

It's something. A crutch, maybe. A kinship with the person serving him booze each time he comes until he stumbles outside, and then wanders off somewhere. A motel, maybe. Home, possibly.

And whatever it is, you cling to it. Hold it so tight in your grasp, your knuckles turn white from the strain, and tuck it into the folds of your heart for safekeeping.

"Huh," he gives you a look that's different from the one before it. Cautious, guarded, but—

Hopeful, maybe. Or—

Angry.

His eyes are stormy grey when he leans in, lips peeled back in a thin grin. "Bear needs that, but he won't let anyone else get close to him. Not right now. And we get it. We do, but," the geniality in his expression fades, tightens into something a bit more severe. "But he can't destroy himself like this. You'd know that, though, as his friend."

It punches the air from your lungs the same way the confession before did—dead, gone—and you try to stutter something into your lungs before you black out from the gnarled roots of hypoxia clotting inside your head, but all you taste is chlorine and sulphur.

You don't understand what he's saying. There is history and meaning behind his words that you can't ascertain, can't ever know; a dearth of Bear compared to a disembogue. Everything you don't know stacks up higher than the things you do, and it's a bold, blunt dressing down of your choices, failures. Inactions.

It's dumb. No one blames the bartender for feeding an addict, and yet—

It's different. Different because you made it that way. You call him your friend to a man who has known him longer than you have, and yet, you'll go back and pour him a drink if he asks.

A friend. How absurd.

"Look, I don't know what you want from me—"

He shoves his hand in his pocket, and then lifts it up. It's tucked out of sight from Bear—who hasn't looked away once since Pretty Boy wandered up to you, all blond hair, smiles, and blue eyes—and it makes your throat hurt.

A folded hundred dollar bill sits in the seam of his closed index and ring finger, one of the zeros clenched between his first knuckle.

His smile is tight, eyes full of ghosts and shadows that look achingly familiar in jasper. "He's a… he's a good man. Been through a lot. Doesn't need this right now, you know?"

"What… are you trying to bribe me?"

It's hidden from view. Strategically placed.

"Just. You know. Maybe, cut him off or something." His hand twitches, the cash waving in front of you.

"Yeah." You murmur, words quiet. Hushed. You don't take the bill.

His jaw clenches. "We need to straighten him up. Can't do that with him here all the time. He needs—"

His tongue pokes through the seam of his cheek when he turns, glancing at Bear. Something in his expression tightens. Worry, concern.

"Send him home, alright?"

You make no move to accept the proffered bill, and it's not due to any sense of pride, or anything like that. You're too numbed to move.

He gives you another look—one that is just as pitying as it is reproachful—and then shoves the folded bill into the box (file a complaint—only $5).

You feel the weight of it in your stomach like a whisky sour.

(Stupid, stupid—)

She's dead, you think, swallowing hard.

Months ago, you'd said, does your wife know you spend all evening with me?

And he'd said—

No. She doesn't.

(Can't bury it, can't—)

"You, and uh…," he motions vaguely toward the door, eyes sharp. Steel lines in brackish water. "You and Caulder seem close."

You think of the cash stuffed in the tip jar. A hundred dollars to send him back.

"Yeah." You murmur, glancing down at the dirty tiles under the ledge of the cupboard. The ones you always forget to mop. "Kinda, I guess. He's—;" you'd know that, though, as his friend. "Nice. Um…"

He says nothing more, just nods his head a few times too many to be natural. To be anything but perturbed, irritated. You don't know why—maybe, he doesn't want you meddling in his affairs, in his personal life.

But—

I will fight you for Best. And win.

You don't know what to think about any of this anymore. A man who tries to drown himself at the bottom of bottles as if the answer is in forty-proof, and still wears his wedding ring but leaves, sometimes, with women who aren't her. Who stares at the screen of his phone in something that tastes so bitterly like regret and anger and helplessness, and then turns it off. Tucks it out of sight. Waves you down.

(Who, despite the hints and the signals and the blatant way you regard him, has never, not once, taken you up on any of the subtle offers you aimed at him.)

Right. Okay.

"You alright?"

You shrug, pull away when he reaches out. "Yeah. Good."

He makes a noise, soft, questioning. A grumble from his chest. He makes a move to stand up, grounding out: "he say anything to you?"

"No," you shake your head. "Nothing."

Bear slumps back in his chair, knuckles turning white. The milky bones poking through his bruised skin makes you think of that verse the priest alluded to before he left.

Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.

You've never seen his hands healed, his eyes clear.

(No one blames the bartender, but they could a friend.)

"Oh, um. Bear?"

"Hmm?"

"You don't… you don't have to wait for me tonight."

"Okay," he knocks his split knuckles against the wood, smiling tight. "Okay. If that's what you want."

What you want is unattainable.

You mimic his taut smile. "Okay."

Ten, you realise that you've come to expect him nestled in the ramshackle ruins of your life. That he fits somewhere inside of these particular four walls and roof in a way that makes you ache.

You've had attractions before. Crushes. But this edges into strange, unfamiliar territory.

Your heart does weird things when he's around sometimes, but even curious things when he's not.

(Or, when he's leaving, and he isn't alone.)

You go to bite your nails but find broken stumps instead. The plate chewed down to nothing.

The nail on your ring finger bleeds.

You think of his busted knuckles, and wonder if this, too, is a crutch.

(Later, you look up how to stop chewing your nails. All of the results tell you to rub salt on them, or buy bitter nail polish, but you can't remember a time when you didn't taste the acrid burn of iodine or chlorine on your tongue already.)

Send him home, but don't—don't let him destroy himself like this.

So. You call it.

You hand him water, and watch as something that tasted of disappointment, resignation, flashes through hazy cobalt.

Before, you used to wonder where he went from here. A weekend spent in the clutch of another woman, in the throes of cheap beer and liquor, and then what? Home? His wife—pretty and lovely and doting—waiting for him at the door, greeting him after his extended business trip? Maybe a face peering out from between her legs, unsure of the man they're supposed to call dad who is rarely ever home, and on the off-chance that he is, reeks of malt and barley.

It always cut too close to home. Their house becomes the same shade as your own. The faceless figure lingering on the periphery takes your shape. Your mum in the doorway, arms crossed and eyes rimmed red from the tears that haven't stopped steaming down her raw, chafed cheeks since you were seven, and realised that the man who sometimes stopped by to visit was supposed to be your father.

You think of that little, faceless person, and then of yourself. Selfish. Detestable. Everything you said you wouldn't be, and yet—

You cut him off, watch him stumble out the door with a woman who isn't his wife. Watch him take a little piece of you with him.

Bear doesn't show.

Week one, two, three.

It doesn't matter, not really. He's just a customer who reeks of malt and bad choices, who has bags under his eyes, and wrinkles on his forehead. Who drowns himself in the corner each night as he tries to fight off the demons he keeps provoking.

Who's hands are always scabbed, torn. Like he spends his time punching the concrete, or ivory jaws just to feel something outside of his own anger.

He's a man on the verge of implosion.

Betelgeuse; a red giant.

Stay away from the man who stinks of nitroglycerin, and sparks a match too close to his dynamite-soaked skin.

You try to take his own advice—bury it—but you can't bury anything in muskeg.

You think of the man who had peanut stained on his beard when you finally convinced him to take a damned bite of his burger. Who told you he used to go to church every day when you asked him how he knew so much about bible verses, but he couldn't face his God right now with all this malice in his heart.

Who confessed that he didn't actually mind pop music when his teammate— Buck —used to play it on the compound just to piss them off, and added some of the songs to the playlist he made.

I'm not a dinosaur, he huffed when you asked if he still used Windows Media Player to listen to his songs. I use YouTube.

He gave you a taut smile, like he'd won something in that, and you tried to pretend you didn't want to kiss him senseless while Johnny Cash played in the background of the pub.

He hates tomatoes but doesn't mind ketchup. Likes, even, tomato soup. Used to run track in high school, and knew when he was seventeen that he was going to get married the moment he turned eighteen, have four kids and join the SEALs. He doesn't tell you how many of those came true.

He confessed to eating a whole box of pop tarts in one sitting when he came home from a mission. Can easily demolish half a pizza to himself, and actually enjoys the Bachelor whenever the girls would get together and watch it at his house.

He used to think about the men he lost every day, but now he doesn't. Not after Buck. He can't because then he'll never stop, and he won't be able to bring the men behind him home. Wouldn't, he amends it after a moment of silence. Wouldn't be able to bring them home.

Doesn't regret anything he never did. He says this with shadows in his eyes, and the ghost of something bitter in his tone. An old ache. An old wound.

He's funny—awkward, halting, as it is—and charming. Wandering this precarious line between severe, intimidating, and— dorky. Kind of. Under the glaze of alcohol, and when he smiled wide, full teeth, and his cheeks wrinkles. Or when you said something stupid, he'd tip his chin down, forehead creasing as he stared at you in mocking disapproval.

He's distant, standoffish; gruff and surly, and stubborn, too much of the All-American Dream wrapped up in machismo and vulnerability disguised as hyper-aggression but it fades into nothing when he laughs, and his throat clicks, wet and sticky. Almost a snort but not really.

Nuanced. Multifaceted.

You told him he was interesting once and there was pink on his cheeks, and a wry twist to his lips when he'd brought the bottle up to his mouth, hiding the soft snort that slipped past.

("You need to get out more if you think I'm interesting."

"I get out plenty."

"That so? With who? I'll call up my friends in NCIS and see if they have anything on them—"

"You're overprotective, too."

"Only to the ones I care about."

"And sweet."

"I'm not sweet."

"The sweetest."

"I'm not—")

The glimpse you've gotten is a small stream that bleeds into a river. One dammed by circumstances, and tragedy, and you want to cross it so badly that your fingers ache with the urge to pick at the logs that hide it from you.

You want to know what he looks like when he is loose and relaxed around family and friends. When he cheers for his dumb football team, and stumbles home late at night after hazing a new recruit into drinking beer from a bong, and carrying around a blowup doll ("it's tradition," is all he said when you blinked at him. "It's sacred;"). You want to know what he sounds like when he's trying to be funny without feeling the pinch of talons, grief and anger and resentment, digging into his flesh. Or what he sounds like completely sober.

You want to listen to Johnny Cash (gotta show you the good stuff, kid. The classics) in his truck, hold his stupid hand, and kiss him whenever you want because it's something you're allowed to do, something that isn't stuck in the confines of your yearning. You want him. Want all of him.

Want. Want. Want.

It's—

An infestation of rot, and idealism. You're making him into something he isn't, and thinking too much about what he's not.

But the bar feels emptier when he isn't here. The walks to the car are lonelier when you're by yourself at nearly four in the morning with nothing but the steady swell of the ocean, and your yearning to fill the barren silence that crushes you, but you've spent too long talking to yourself, and now that you had the taste of an audience, you can't go back what it was like before.

You should be happy. Happy for him, for Pretty Boy. This should mean that he's moved on, decided that stasis in whisky, and a dingy bar that even the health inspectors have given up on a long time ago is not what he needs in his life right now, and that he's getting better. That he's healing.

But you think of the look on his face when he stared at you from across the counter, eyes reflected in the clear glass of water, and you know—just like you think you know him—that he isn't. That this isn't the end. That he's found somewhere else to go, something else to mend the aches inside that never abate.

He didn't decide to move on. It wasn't his choice—it was yours, Caulders. It was the weight of the bill in something that used to be sacred, a place where Bear would pen things down in scratchy writing about your perceived failings— talks too much, shorts the shots all the damn time, can't pour a pint to save her life, has awful taste food, terrible taste in music —and you'd dump them into your rucksack at the end of the night, taking them home with you to lay out on a piece of construction paper as part of an ongoing project in yearning.

It wasn't his choice, and you know better than anyone else what that means, but still: you hope. You cling to that little piece of stupidity (your very brand) that tries to convince you everything is fine. That you're not complicit in watching a man moulder in grief and agony, and that this is somehow alright. That this tightly webbed knot, tangled and frayed, will somehow unspool itself despite knowing first hand that it won't.

Not until you tug the strings and unravel the weaved pain and loss on your own terms, and of your own volition.

But what else can you do?

No one held your hand when you lost your dad, but God, you wish they did. You wished someone was there to help you, but you also know that it wouldn't have mattered anyway.

You can force someone to let go by hammering their fingers until the bones shatter, and the tight grip they keep on it all releases because their fingers are pulpy mush.

You know better.

In the weeks that he's gone, absent, you oscillate between trying to convince yourself you made the right choice, and trying to pretend that he's still just a friend.

(It's when you wander out from the back of the pub and see someone sitting in his chair—elation, hope, and then the crushing sense of disappointment when the man is too small, too scrawny to be Bear—do you realise what it all means.

—a sickness.)

Eleven, you get a kiss. Blistering. Intense. Your head cracks against the brick when he pushes himself flush into your body, hand curved over your cheek, jaw.

(Three days later, you get heartbreak.

Two weeks, you shatter.)

You have other things to worry about than a man like him. Dangerous. Deadly. The kind that will suck you in like a riptide and drag you out into the open ocean without any care or concern for how you're supposed to tread the high seas.

He's poison in plaid. A bad decision in the scar tissue, and bloodied knuckles. The bags under his eyes are warning signs for you to stay away.

The ring on his finger. The women who are not his wife.

All of the bad, the ugly stacks up.

But—

Even his hideous crutches can't hide his goodness beneath the layer of resentment and grime.

It starts when he splits his knuckles on the teeth of a man who won't take no for an answer, and you see him find control, balance, and equilibrium, in violence.

It starts there. And it ends, too.

(But you're a glutton for pain, and you help him the only way you know how.)

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