All In (Firsts and Forever 2)

“Were you actually interested in him?” my coworker asked, as he poured a steady stream of salt into a little glass shaker with a flourish.

I shrugged noncommittally. Even though the answer to that question was a resounding yes.

Dante Dombruso was exactly what I needed to get over Jamie. He was six feet, four inches of raw temptation and hard Italian muscle, wrapped in an expensive suit. Whatever my personal hang-ups were, they somehow didn’t matter when I was near him. My body responded to him on a primal level, and my brain just went along for the ride.

I’d been sure of two things: Dante Dombruso wanted to fuck me, and I wanted to let him. It was so straightforward, so uncomplicated. The perfect rebound fling.

But then he broke two dates with me. And that threw off the straightforward and uncomplicated part a bit.

Cole studied me for a long moment. I’d been working here only a week, but I’d known him for a while. I’d been a regular at this establishment since turning twenty-one two years ago, and he’d worked here about that long. Only back when I was a customer here it was called Flannigan’s, it wasn’t owned by my ex, and my life hadn’t totally been in the crapper. He said, “So, you know, maybe Dombruso cancelling on you is a sign. Maybe the universe is trying to intervene and keep you from making a big mistake.”

“Since when does the universe care about me making mistakes?”

Speaking of which, here came my ex, looking adorably tousled and a little flushed. God. “Hi guys,” he said to Cole and me as he crossed the room to unlock the front door and flip on the neon sign that declared the bar and grill open.

“Hey,” I mumbled, turning my back to him as I got really interested in the pepper shakers.

I felt a light touch on my arm and glanced at Jamie. Concern was evident in his sky blue eyes as he asked, “How are you, Charlie?”

Depressed. Lonely. Missing you like crazy. “Fine,” I said, looking away again and screwing the lid back on a pepper shaker.

He hadn’t removed his hand from my arm. “How are you really?” he asked gently.

I hated this, I hated the be-nice-to poor-fucked-up-Charlie routine. It made me feel even more pathetic than I already did. I met his gaze and said steadily, “I’m fine, thanks.”

Instead of removing his hand, he rubbed my upper arm. His touch was so sweet and tender that he might as well have just gone ahead and punched me in the face – it was that painful a reminder of all I’d lost. “You know you can talk to me, right?” he said. “You’re going through a lot right now, and I want you to know I’m here for you.”

He didn’t mean our break-up. Last week, I’d finally come out to my parents. And as a result, I’d gotten kicked out of the house I grew up in. I was now subletting a kind of depressing empty apartment Jamie had recently vacated.

“I know. And I appreciate it, Jamie.” I broke eye contact again. He was so close to me that I breathed in his scent. Jamie always smelled a little like the ocean and like clean cotton. And now he also smelled faintly of his new husband’s expensive cologne, which made me feel like whacking my head against a wall. “I’ve got to finish setting up my station. I’ll talk to you later, ok?” I turned my back to him and pulled a dish towel from my apron, wiping up some of the pepper that I’d spilled.

“Ok, Charlie.” He paused a moment before finally going back to his office.

As soon as he was out of sight, I bent over and thunked my head against the table in front of me. And I just stayed there for a while, wrapping my arms around my head.

Working here was such a stupid idea. Jamie, in his ongoing effort to save me from myself, had offered me the job so I could end the nightmare of working for my uncle’s exterminator business. But taking this job had been a mistake. It was a great bar, but God, the Jamie factor was just so hard to take.

Being here was somewhat bearable when the place was busy and I had less time to wallow. But Jamie was trying out something new, opening the bar for lunch, and these daytime shifts had been so quiet you could hear crickets chirping. It would probably pick up when word got out that we were open this time of day, but that hadn’t happened yet.

Besides this not entirely successful lunchtime experiment, the bar and grill biz was going great for my ex and his husband – nights and weekends were hopping. They’d started running this place just a few weeks ago, and the change in ownership had made it more popular than ever. I wouldn’t have predicted that. Even a city as famously liberal as San Francisco still had a conservative element, and I hadn’t expected the patrons of an Irish sports bar to stick around when the place was taken over by a gay ex-cop and his ex-mafia husband. But not only had the blue collars stayed, they’d slid over and made room for the influx of young urban hipsters that suddenly found something appealing about this place – ever since locally famous former gangster and former nightclub owner Dmitri Teplov became associated with it.