“Nick?”
There was a pause in the fire, and the hoodie shifted my way. “Abby?” he said. A second later, he jumped down and landed in a sea of glass with a look of euphoric victory lighting up his face. “Abby, you came! We’re saved!”
I had no idea where to start, not a fucking clue. I simply stood there gawking at him, while he beamed back in drunken triumph.
He wasn’t exactly fighting in the trenches like Carl and the others, but he’d obviously taken the idea of urban warfare to a whole other level. The sides of his cheeks were smeared with what looked like charcoal soot, assumedly to help him blend into the darkness; in true Rambo fashion, his blond hair was tied back with a torn bandana I didn’t recognize; and unless I was mistaken, he’d been whittling a stolen pool stick into what looked like a harpoon.
After a second, he finally broke the silence between us. “Check out my moat! Cool, huh?”
“Cool is not the word I’m thinking of,” I said, clearly unimpressed. My eyes snapped shut as I repeatedly reminded myself of the punishment for homicide in the state of New York, a criminal mandate I’d memorized the first week I’d met Nick. Grinding my teeth together, I still managed to speak with a smile, “What are we into this time, Nick?”
It was the standard line, the one I’d thought I’d left permanently behind me when I put down my PR phones and found myself pregnant with his child.
He glanced around, the tips of his blond hair dipping down into his eyes. “What, this?”
It was a serious question only because he was seriously drunk, so drunk that he was having a hard time standing up straight and had to lean on the counter behind him for support.
My face softened, and my anger melted as I tried my very best to put myself in his shoes. He had just found out his girlfriend is pregnant. He’d been hit by a taxi, and the whole world thought he eloped to get married in Peru. Not only that, but after decades of abuse and tension, he’d just reconciled with his estranged father. They were not all bad things, but they were all traumatic, a lot for anyone to deal with. Yeah, I guess that earns him a drink or two...or twelve, I decided, taking pity on him and on myself since I couldn’t even have a sip.
“Honey,” I said, taking a deep breath and trying to steady my voice, “I guess you were feeling a little stressed out, huh? So you decided to play war games in a biker bar in Queens?”
“Games?” he scoffed, automatically ducking his head as what looked like a chrome hubcap sailed toward him at a lethal speed. “Abigail, I’ll have you know this is serious, and I got a few good punches in too. I even hired protection!”
“Yes, I spoke to Carl, and... Wait. You’ve been throwing punches?”
He lifted a hand to rub his right jaw. “I couldn’t just let that big bully catch me with a right hook! I had to nail him back.”
“How did this start?”
He ducked again, then answered, “We’re fighting for...”
I folded my arms across my chest and cocked my head to the side, waiting. “Yes?”
The tops of his high cheekbones flushed a moment as he tried to remember the mantra that had started the whole mess to begin with. “Well, for justice, I suppose.”
“How noble of you,” I said with a sigh, wrapping his arm around my neck. “C’mon. We’ve gotta get out of here.”
He looked surprised. “No, Abby, we can’t just leave. Besides, this isn’t my first bar fight.”
“You can’t count that college bar brawl.”
“You’re right. I mean, back then, no one bashed me in the head with a beer bottle. At least this one will be my most memorable.”
“I doubt that, considering how much you drank,” I mused.
“We need to see this through,” he argued. “I need to get back out there and back up my brothers. They’re still fighting the good fight, and—”
“See this through?” I tugged on his arm again, harder this time. “Nick, the cops are going to be here any minute. The last thing we need is to be associated with this so-called justice you’ve stirred up here.”
Drunk as he was, he didn’t budge an inch. No matter how hard I pulled, he simply stood there with an infuriatingly patient smile on his face, looking like the gorgeous extra in every war movie ever made, the one who would tragically blow up in the first two minutes, leaving every woman in the audience sobbing for hours.
“Abby, it’s natural to have doubts,” he said kindly, “but never fear, my love. The battle is ours. Any minute now, my friend Carl is going to—”
“Carl didn’t make it,” I blurted.
Nick stopped short as the two of us gazed out across the room at his drunken savior, who was currently lying in a pool of vinegar and beer, tracing the air above him with a dizzy grin on his sweaty face as his broken nose dripped a steady stream of blood onto the floor.
“Carl!” Nick’s face fell with genuine sadness as he pulled a bottle of rum off the shelf behind him and took a swig. “A true hero among men. We’ll never forget your years of service and dedication to the cause. You, my friend, are—”