My eyes met his from across the bar as I steadied my breathing, thinking back to the night I’d just shared with her, getting to know her better. “She’s great. Really great.”
“I figured. She’s really into you.”
My heartbeat sped up with his words. “How do you know?”
“I’m a bartender, which makes me an expert at reading body language. She likes you a lot. You like her too, but you already know that.”
Reaching for the discarded towel, I finished wiping down the table and moved on to the next. Of course I liked her. And I wasn’t an idiot. I knew she liked me too; I just enjoyed hearing it from someone else.
Ryan called my name. “Did you kiss her?”
“No,” I said a little too quickly.
“Did you want to?”
“Fuck yeah, I wanted to.”
Ryan let out a small laugh. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
God, I was so sick of those three fucking words—sick of feeling them, of saying them, of not having answers to fix the crazy-ass mess I’d gotten myself into.
“I’ve never been in this kind of situation before.” God, what a coward I was. I hated the way it made me feel, the way it forced me to see myself.
“Just be careful,” he warned as I finished wiping the last table.
I headed to the register. As I closed it
out and printed the night’s totals, I asked, “What would you do? Realistically, if you were me. How would you handle this?” I was desperate for some thoughtful feedback, needing something that would resonate with me, something that might help.
Ryan put away the last clean glass and turned his attention to the liquor bottles. He rearranged them, putting them back in their proper order and facing them the same way, cleaning the pourers as he went along. He didn’t say anything as he worked, which told me he was giving my question serious thought. It made me feel less inept that the answer wasn’t something simple.
He stopped and turned to face me, nodding as if he was having a silent conversation with himself. I clipped the receipts together and put them down, hoping some pearl of wisdom would fall from Cinderella’s lips.
“I know you’re in a bad position,” he said slowly. “Or, at least, you feel like you’re in a bad position. You feel like you have no real say in the matter, but the matter we’re discussing is your life, Frank. So, in essence, you feel like you have no choice when it comes to your own life anymore.”
I cleared my throat, determined to argue because my natural reaction was to get defensive and stand up for myself whenever someone challenged me, but Ryan saw it coming from a mile away and tossed his hand in the air to stop me.
“Just hear me out. Somewhere along the line, and we can probably narrow it down to Shelby’s dad passing away and the promise you made to him, you stopped being the driver of your life. In that moment, you became the passenger, and I get it. Trust me, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. I know you feel guilty. I know you feel obligated. But it’s not right. Hell, you were just a kid. You had no right making a promise like that to anyone. And to be honest, he had no right asking you to make it.”
Those last two sentences stabbed me in the gut, and my stomach twisted painfully.
Fuck. I’d never thought of it so bluntly before, but Ryan was right. I had no business agreeing to that kind of thing, but it had seemed so right at the time.
Before I could roll that thought around further, Ryan said, “I know that none of this makes it any easier. I can only imagine that trying to end a relationship that you’ve been in for years isn’t simple, or you would’ve already done it. Leaving is the right thing to do, the hard thing to do. It’s easier to stay, even if you’re miserable. But, what if there’s something real between you and Claudia, and you miss out on it?”
I bristled, and he noticed. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him bringing up her name, it was that I’d already thought about that fact more than once. What if I missed my chance with Claudia? What if this thing between us was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I let it go?
I’d struggled with those thoughts because I didn’t want how I felt about Shelby and our relationship to have anything to do with Claudia. None of this was truly about her. How I felt about Shelby—my unhappiness, my feelings of obligation and guilt—none of it had anything to do with any other woman, and the last thing I wanted was for it to. I truly needed to keep a clear head, but the second Ryan brought Claudia up, my brain fogged up like a bathroom mirror.
“You invited her to the bar tonight,” he said, his tone almost incredulous. “You’re in no position to be doing things like that, but you did it anyway. I’m not judging you, because I want you to be happy, but I think this might get out of control if you’re not careful. And then instead of no one getting hurt, everyone is going to.”
I chewed on my bottom lip, letting his words swim around in my head, wondering why the hell I felt so stuck.
“Why can’t I just break up with her? It’s not like we’re married or have kids. I mean, I look at her sometimes and I’m just sitting there staring at her, willing my mouth to say the things my mind is thinking, but the words never come out,” I admitted, my frustration only growing.
“What is it thinking?” Ryan asked, and I shot him a confused glare. “You said you wanted to say what your mind was thinking.”