Where was everyone?
The thought itched in the back of her head that if the Narmans hadn’t been having a noisy party tonight, she would have sat all cozy at home the whole evening and never realized that her Christmas Eve was too solitary, that everyone else, friends and casual acquaintances, had other plans tonight.
She went up to the bar and ordered a light beer and a bowl of spicy wings with sour cream, and when the guy behind the bar offered her one of those buzzer thingies that started hopping around on the table and flashing red lights when your order was ready, she shook her head and said, “Nah, I’ll wait for it here, thanks.”
He looked vaguely familiar, one of the seasonal staff who she’d maybe seen on the slopes, maybe even taught to ski. If they got chatting, she could just stay and eat her wings and drink her beer right here at the bar.
But he was too busy, she soon saw, and he was only about twenty-two. For chatting purposes, he was all about the nineteen-year-old snow bunnies or rich women looking for a short-term good time, with no interest in a hardworking local woman in her thirties who was more athletic than feminine, more striking than pretty.
For the first time in a long while, Lee was suddenly conscious of the nearly eleven-year-old burn scarring on her neck and jaw. She didn’t often wear neck-baring clothes, but the Christmas top had been pretty and silly, and she hadn’t been able to resist.
The friends she was going to join for dinner tomorrow had seen her scars before, so that was no big deal. They were faded now. Her skin was pale and sort of melty-looking from just above her left jawline to just below her collarbone and out to her shoulder. She’d gotten splashed with hot oil in the kitchen of the restaurant at Spruce Bay when she was around the same age as this barman here, and had spent some time in hospital, dealing with pain and infection and skin grafts.
Old news.
Irrelevant, for a woman who spent most of her time in ski jackets or collared hiking shirts.
It unsettled her to be thinking about it as if it mattered, because it didn’t. It really didn’t. She liked this top. It was fun. If anyone noticed the scarring, and disapproved of her showing it, that was their problem, not hers.
She sat up straighter and wiggled her head a little so that she could feel the tickle of the spangly red-gold-and-green Christmas trees dangling from her ears. The youthful barman delivered her beer and she drawled, “Thanks,” and dismissed him from her mind.
“Nice earrings,” someone said, close by.
She turned to find an unfamiliar male in a black T-shirt seated on the bar stool beside her. “Oh. Thanks.”
He was grinning at her. “If you’re wondering how much they caught the light just now, the answer is a lot. I still have spots before my eyes.”
“You got me,” she said, grinning back. “I did it on purpose. Love dazzling people till they can’t see.”
“No point in wearing Christmas trees if nobody notices, right?”
“Right.”
The twenty-two-year-old thumped two bowls of wings down on the bar, one in front of Lee and one in front of the earring admirer, then reached back to the serving window again and brought out two matching bowls of sour cream. “Snap,” said the stranger.
“It’s an astonishing coincidence,” she agreed in a drawl, since the bar menu at this place had only about three items on it. If you wanted anything more sophisticated than wings, nachos or fries, you had to go through into the section where the tables and booths had actual placemats.
“Not everyone goes for the sour cream,” he pointed out. “Right there, that cuts our odds of a match down to about six to one. And when you add in the beer...”
She hadn’t noticed the beer until now, but, yes, she discovered, they were drinking the same brand, a local Colorado microbrew. That was the biggest coincidence yet, given that Waterstreet proudly offered something like fifty-six different kinds.
And speaking of coincidences, he might not be familiar, but his red ski jacket was. It hung over the low back of the bar stool, exactly the same as the one she had at home, with its resort and designer logos. “You work here,” she said, feeling a ridiculous wash of relief that at last here was a comrade-at-arms, a fellow instructor, roughly her own age.
“Since three days ago, yes.” He had the jacket, but at some point he’d changed from ski pants and boots into jeans and running shoes, new looking and chunky.
“Me, too,” she told him. “Ski school. But seven years, not three days.”
“So I’ve come to the right bar.”
It was a statement, not a question, and she didn’t quite follow the logic. “Depends what bar you were looking for.”
“I meant, if you’ve lived here seven years and you’ve chosen this bar, it can’t be a pure tourist trap.”
“Oh, right, sorry, yeah. Waterstreet isn’t upmarket enough for a lot of visitors.”
“I like it. Nice crowd.”
But he wasn’t looking at the crowd. He was looking at her.
Something kicked between them. Something Lee hadn’t felt in a long time but recognized anyhow. It shocked her that it was this fast and strong and instinctive, and her first reaction was to seek a way to pull back, mentally skidding on her heels in panic and getting nowhere, like a character in a cartoon.
She asked carefully, “You’re new and no one is showing you around?” Because he was clearly here on his own.
“I had a late finish today. Someone in the group had a fall and lost confidence at the top of the mountain, and it took me forty-five minutes to get her down. Someone else...Everard—”
“He’s a nice guy,” she interjected. She worked with him on junior squad coaching.
“He is. He took the rest of my class back down the mountain for me, but by the time I arrived, everyone but him had gone for the day. He’s married, wanted to get home. My nervous lady wanted to take me for a drink—we both needed it—but her choice of bar wasn’t mine. After she, uh, left, I came looking for somewhere I liked better.”
“And you found it.”
“And I found it.”
The thing kicked again, and robbed Lee of speech. Imagination? She didn’t think so. He didn’t seem in a hurry to fill the sudden silence. Well, it was filled already, just not with words. He took a pull on his beer and looked at her over the top of the foam, his eyes very dark in contrast to the frothy white.
Am I really going to do this?
It was too fast. She never did anything like this. She hadn’t dated anyone in three years, and that had lasted only a couple of months. Before that... What, another two years? Was it really possible she’d had only two boyfriends in five years? Two pretty lame, tame boyfriends, and lame, tame relationships that hadn’t ever looked to be going anywhere, and hadn’t been all that successful even as short-term flings.
This one, though...
Really?
