she didn’t really see him. She shook her head, that gorgeous hair falling over her shoulders and half covering her face. It was the first time he’d seen it worn down, and he wanted to fist his hands in it. Tip her head back. Find her mouth with his.
Jesse had known he had a crush on her, but this was getting out of hand.
“I should go,” she said again. And then, incredibly, she did something she’d never done before in all the months he’d been working Thursday nights. She picked up the glass of whiskey, and she drank it. She wiped her mouth with slightly shaking fingers. “I should go.”
“No,” Jesse told her. “Stay.”
* * *
Uptight, controlling bitch.
The words echoed in Colleen’s head, over and over. Steve’s words. She’d heard them a thousand times before and had convinced herself they no longer stung. That he could no longer control her, no longer hurt her. Somehow, that self-delusion had made it worse.
You can’t make it without me, can’t make a decision, can’t take care of anything, without me. I have to do it all for you, Colleen. You need me.
You need me.
Colleen swallowed against the smoky flare of the whiskey. It had gone down a little rough, but now warmth spread through her. She looked at Jesse. “Stay?”
“What else are you going to do? Go out into the cold? Not just yet,” he told her with that smile, that damn smile she’d been trying to ignore all these nights when she came in to prove a point to herself.
A point she’d failed to make tonight. Or maybe it was the opposite. Maybe tonight was the first time anything she’d done had made sense.
She didn’t need Steve, and hadn’t for a long time. She never would again. She wouldn’t need anyone again, she thought, finally looking at Jesse. Really looking at him, that smile, that earnest look. No more need, she told herself.
But she could want.
Colleen let her tongue dent her lower lip, where the whiskey flavor still lingered. It was not her imagination, was it, that Jesse watched her do it? Or that something in his gaze flared? Embers that had been banked so long inside her she’d have sworn they’d gone cold kindled at the sight of his look.
“You don’t have to get home?” she asked him, pausing. Thinking. “Your kid?”
“She’s with her mother. School’s canceled tomorrow. So’s her mom’s work. They’re all set.” He put both hands on the counter and leaned a little closer with a head tilt that made everything inside her tumble and twist. “Can I get you another drink?”
The one she’d had was already softening the edges of everything. How long had it been since she’d had liquor? “Four years. Eleven months.”
“Hmm?”
She looked at him. “The last time I had a drink was the night I finally decided to leave my husband. He goaded me into it. Both the drink and the leaving.”
“What about tonight?” Jesse asked quietly.
“That,” she said, “was him, too.”
Without a word, Jesse pulled out a squat glass and poured a shot of Jameson into it, then another into her empty glass. He lifted his.
After a moment, she did, too.
It went down smoother this time. And somehow sweeter. Colleen shivered, not from the alcohol’s burn but at the way Jesse was looking at her.
“He used to tell me all the time that I needed to loosen up. Lighten up. That I didn’t know how to have a good time. That because I liked things a certain...way...” She paused, swallowing, not sure why she was telling him this. Only that she needed to tell someone. “He said I was a pain in the ass to live with. No fun. I was a boring, nagging bitch who had to control everything, but that I was incapable of doing anything on my own. He made me feel constantly incompetent. Oh. And, according to him, I was frigid, too.”
Jesse coughed lightly.
Colleen laughed. Low at first, then louder, letting her head fall back. The sound was harsh, very little humor in it. She closed her eyes for a second, memories unfurling like a ribbon inside her head, before she opened them to focus on Jesse.
“I’m not,” she said. “I just didn’t like fucking him.”
It was Jesse’s turn to laugh, the sound sweet as honey and just as thick. He leaned on the bar, hands shoulder-width apart. Fingers slightly spread. “He sounds like an asshole.”
“He was.” She licked her lips, watching again as his eyes followed the movement of her tongue. His gaze warmed her more than the booze had; Jesse looked at her as though he wanted to eat her up.
It had been a long time since a man had given her that stare. No, that wasn’t true. It had been a long time since she’d paid attention to a man giving her that look and wanted to return it. Colleen let her fingertips trace a circle of damp left behind on the bar by her now empty glass. She glanced out the front plate-glass windows to the cobblestone street outside. A few people walked past, laughing and tossing snow at each other. Night had fallen, hard and dark and deep.
“It’s still snowing,” she murmured.
“Good thing we don’t have any place to go, huh?”
“Why did you let me stay, Jesse?”
His smile faded for a moment, just long enough for him to blink. Then he leaned a little closer. “Because...I thought you needed to.”
She remembered him giving her the chocolate mousse, and how it had rubbed her the wrong way. Yet he’d done so many things for her over the past few months since he’d started here at The Fallen Angel. He’d come to know her preferences so easily and had made it so easy for her to come back, week after week.
“I told you how I feel about people assuming they know what I need.”
He nodded and turned to press a button on the small remote that controlled the pub’s sound system. In seconds the slow, distinctive beat of “Cry to Me” filtered through the speakers. It had been one of her favorites for years, first as a cut on a vinyl album she’d found as a teenager scouring thrift stores and then later, as an adult, an iTunes track. How had he known?
Like the whiskey and onion rings and mousse and everything else, Colleen thought, he just had.
Chapter Four
Jesse moved before he could second-guess himself. He went around the bar, one hand out. He didn’t ask her to dance. He waited for her to take his hand.
She waited long enough that he was certain she wasn’t going to, but then her fingers eased into his and squeezed. Colleen slipped off the stool, a little unsteady but catching herself so that she didn’t stumble. She was in his arms half a minute after that, the two of them pressed close on the splintery wooden floor that wasn’t really meant for dancing. On one of The Fallen Angel’s good nights, when the crowds of Fell’s Point filled this bar cheek to cheek and
