One Last Time (Loveless Brothers 5)

When we park, I sit there for a moment, just looking at the sign. Last time I was here, it was cracked, peeling, and in an ugly faux-western font. These days it’s surprisingly classy: WHISKEY BARREL in a nice serif, lit from below.

“You know I’m banned for life from this place, right?” I ask.

Everyone but me opens their car door.

“That was eight years ago,” Levi says, extracting himself. “And they never did strike me as the sort of establishment that kept careful records.”

He’s right, of course. The inside of the Whiskey Barrel is also new, and now it’s the trendy kind of divey, instead of the divey kind of divey. The neon beer signs are gone, the carpet replaced with wood, the barstools faux-industrial instead of from the 1980s. There’s a craft beer selection, including our very own Southern Lights IPA on tap. I get something else.

I keep waiting for the familiarity to strike me, but it doesn’t. I’ve thought about that night a hundred times, maybe a thousand, but right now I’m back in the place where it happened and it just seems far away.

“It’s different in here,” I tell Levi, looking around as we walk to the pool tables in the back.

“Interesting,” he says. “I guess things change.”

It’s busy, but not crazy. We get a pool table with no problem. Eli immediately organizes some sort of tournament, the structure of which I don’t bother to follow, and informs Daniel and Levi that they’ll be playing each other while he, Caleb, and I drink beers and watch.

“How’s Thalia?” I ask, since I haven’t yet today.

“Good,” he says, and smiles like he can’t help it. “I mean, she’s going a little crazy, finishing her thesis and waiting to hear back from graduate programs, but she’s good.”

I still find it strange that he’s dating someone still in college, but I keep my mouth shut.

“And you?”

“I’m actually okay,” he says, taking a sip of beer, then putting it down on the table. “I’m getting a couple of recruiting calls a day from people who want to pay me way more than academia ever did.”

“Cyber security stuff?” Eli asks.

“Some of it,” Caleb says. “Apparently there’s more demand for mathematicians than just teaching other people how to be mathematicians.”

“So you’re really okay?” I ask, and he laughs.

“I really am,” he says. “I mean, I don’t have a job yet, and it won’t be the same, but my life didn’t implode the way I was afraid it might.”

“You sound surprised.”

“I jumped and didn’t know where I would land,” he admits, watching Daniel miss a shot by about six inches. “There were times when I was afraid I gave up too much, but now that I’m on the other side it feels kind of good. Whatever happens, it was the right thing.”

We all drink. Levi lines up a shot, takes it. Balls click together, but from his frown, I suspect that whatever he was hoping for didn’t happen.

“Relationships always have an element of diving into the unknown and praying for the best,” Caleb says, and gives me a look. It’s pretty similar to the look Levi gave me ten minutes ago. Almost as if they’re related or something.

I’m tempted to tell him that I know what happens. The same thing always happens and I wind up here, drinking with my brothers, wishing it hadn’t.

Except the bar’s changed. My brothers have changed. Daniel’s got two kids. Eli’s happily married to his old nemesis, Levi’s engaged to his best friend’s sister, and even Caleb has a girlfriend. It’s me who’s still stuck, holding onto old hurts like they’re a lifeline.

I’m not going to look over and see her with another man, his ring on her finger. That was a different bar, a different Delilah, a different time.

It’s a strange, slow shock when I realize the last thing: that was a different me.

Pool balls click. Daniel whoops and Levi laughs. Eli makes some sort of notation, and then grabs my shoulder.

“You,” he says, and points at the pool table.

We play. I don’t excel and I don’t embarrass myself, but I’m glad to have something to do with my hands, something to think about besides how time moves and we bend to it. Besides how the past echoes through everything but doesn’t have to shape it.

“Seth,” Eli says. I’m bending over the table, trying to line up a complicated shot that’s almost certainly going to fail.

“Eli,” I say back. I wonder if I need more of that blue chalk stuff. It always helps, right?

“She your soulmate?”

I take a deep breath, ignore his attempt at a psych-out, and take the shot. It doesn’t work the way it did in my head.

“What kind of question is that?” I ask. I gesture at the table, waiting for him to take his turn.

He doesn’t. He leans against it, the end of his pool cue on the floor, and spins it between his fingers.