Total pages in book: 19
Estimated words: 17988 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 90(@200wpm)___ 72(@250wpm)___ 60(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 17988 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 90(@200wpm)___ 72(@250wpm)___ 60(@300wpm)
Zero!
Then Tate Morgan shows up next door, and suddenly, I can’t think straight.
She’s a menace and a headache.
Parks wherever she wants.
Butters up to the most unfriendly neighbors on the block, including the f**king stray cat.
Files a complaint against me and frames it where I can see it.
She’s petty.
But, she pisses me off.
She takes up so much real estate in my head, and that pisses me off.
When I ask what business she’s opening, she says it’s ‘just a dive bar’.
Then adds, like mine — like Sullivans?
I don’t think so.
I hate her.
But … my body doesn’t get the memo.
Her legs in those shorts make me grip the bar until my knuckles go white.
I watch her through my window more than I watch my own customers.
In all the ways that matter, Tate is my rival.
But rivals aren’t this obsessive. Are they?
Don’t yearn for glimpses of the other. Do they?
Or get hard at the sight of them.
She’s the bane of my existence.
I just know I’ll never get a good night’s sleep.
As long as she’s around
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
1
TOM
Ever since that woman arrived, I’ve not had one good night's sleep.
Two weeks, and I still haven't worked out how to make myself stop listening for her laugh, which is its own specific humiliation.
It's not like I'm doing it on purpose. It just … happens. She laughs, and whatever part of my brain is supposedly dedicated to running a bar goes briefly offline. My hand forgets it's holding a glass, and I stand there with a clean rag and a bar top I've cleaned twice already. Nothing to show for the last ten minutes except an awareness of the exact pitch and rhythm of a woman I have actively decided not to think about.
The bar top is sticky despite my best efforts. Decades of spilled beer ground into the grain, something I accepted five years ago when I inherited this place. I keep trying to fix it anyway, like I'm new here and don't know better.
Our regular, Eddie, sits at the end of the bar with his usual sandwich reduced to crumbs and his eyes on the TV showing a game I haven't kept score of all afternoon. The Ramones are playing low on the jukebox—"I Wanna Be Sedated"—which I put on myself and am now finding too on-the-nose to enjoy.
Through the front window, past the grimy glass and the Budweiser neon sign cutting a red stripe across my view, her door is propped open again. I catch myself watching and redirect my attention to the glass in my hand, which is so clean at this point it could go straight into a surgery, so I wipe the bar top … again.
"If you wipe that spot any harder, you're going to sand through to the subflooring."
I don't look up. Jason's been watching me not-watch the window, and I know exactly what expression he's wearing without needing visual confirmation. "Don't you have limes to cut? I don't pay you to watch me."
"Cut them already." We've known each other for so long, I just know he's in the mood to push. He doesn't even care that I could fire him right this instant. "While you were polishing that glass into a higher dimension."
"It's a busy day."
"Right. Super busy. That's why Eddie's been nursing the same beer for an hour, and you've served exactly no one else." Jason picks up a lime wedge and examines it. "She asked about you yesterday."
My hand stills on the glass, but I force it to keep moving. "Yeah, I don't really care."
"She asked if you were always this warm and approachable or if she caught you on an off day. When she waved, you apparently ignored it and walked the other way." He quarters the lime with one clean cut, not looking at me. "Apparently, mind. Not definitely. So, I told her you're an acquired taste.” Some juice squirts up to his eye, and he scrunches it closed. “ Like something that grows on people slowly and takes a while to appreciate."
"What the fuck does that even mean?"
"Mold, mostly. I was thinking mold."
I set down the glass hard enough that Eddie glances over, mildly interested in whether there's going to be entertainment. There's not. I'm not giving Jason the satisfaction.
"Tate is nice, you know. Pretty funny and friendly. You just need to get to know her, Tom."
Friendly. That's the word everyone uses, and it's accurate in the way that calling a hurricane "breezy" is accurate.
The thing about Jason is that he's chatty, but he's not an open book. It took him eight months to mention his dad had retired, and two years before I met his wife, Sarah.
Meanwhile, Tate got his mother's teaching credentials, the lake house they use for Thanksgiving, Sarah's current pregnancy status, and the entire shortlist of baby names they're considering in under twenty minutes. Twenty!
Jason came back from that introduction smiling like she'd given him something instead of extracted everything, and he told me all of it without me asking, with the slightly dazed expression of someone who's just been very pleasantly robbed. Tate apparently has this quality where people feel heard. Genuinely listened to. Jason described it that way, trying to pin down what had just happened to him, and I nodded and made a mental note to avoid whatever the hell that was.
She would be so useful to the FBI, for sure.
Since Tate moved next door, I’ve arrived at one conclusion. She's a menace. A friendly, blue-eyed menace who knows my best friend's family vacation schedule better than I do.
The evidence extends beyond Jason, too. Sixty-year-old Beth from the bakery two doors down. For years, I've bought bread from her every Sunday morning, and in that time, I have received, in total, approximately forty nods of acknowledgment and zero words.
Last week, I watched through this same window as Beth appeared at Tate's door with a tray of fresh bread. It took me a few seconds to reconcile the smiling woman with the one who always seemed pissed off that I dared to buy croissants from her.