I slid off the stool, my heels finding the floor, my hand catching the bar. “Sure.” I smiled, the man’s face unchanging, his delight at gaining a seat hidden by scruff and dirt and tough.
“Sit back down.” A growl of a statement from Lee, who lifted his head high enough to catch my gaze. Stared at me with an order in his eyes.
“I should be leaving anyway,” I said, my voice low enough not to carry. God, I didn’t need this. Drunk Lee, who’s already bloody from one stupid fight, defending my honor in a place I should have been intelligent enough to avoid.
Lee lurched to his feet, swaying slightly as he turned to face the man behind me. A man who, unfortunately, hadn’t budged, still only a step away, girlfriend still suction-cupped to his side. “What the fuck’s your problem?”
I pulled on his arm. “Lee.” A word that earned me a moment, a glance in which everything froze and he looked at me and I saw everything he couldn’t say in that one moment.
He couldn’t buy me cars. Couldn’t drown me in diamonds and buildings and trips to Dubai. Couldn’t even pay for the beers filling his stomach. But this, this was one thing he could do. He could stand, fight, bleed for me. This, something that Brant would never do. A situation our alternative life would have never put ourselves in. This was Lee’s world. Here he was king. Here he would slay the tattooed dragon and be my hero. His eyes burned the air between us and I let out a shaky breath. Released his arm and sank back onto the highly contested stool.
“You guys ain’t drinking. Make room for someone who is.” In two sentences I saw yellowed teeth, a sneer I would cross the street to avoid, and a tightening of Lee’s entire body. I saw his punch telegraphed a million ways from Sunday. Had a moment of admiration at the flex of his back muscles when he lunged forward, a right hook missing my insulter by a good two feet, the man leaning back and easily avoiding the punch.
I closed my eyes. Couldn’t see any more. Pushed off the stool as the smack of fist against flesh sounded in the loud space. A space that suddenly fell silent, the push of the crowd inward as a dozen bodies quieted and strained for a better view. I opened my eyes in time to see Lee stagger forward and land a punch, the man’s head snapping back in an unnatural fashion. I surged forward, plowing between the two, my eyes catching ahold of the other woman in this equation. She snapped a wad of gum and looked away, bee lining for my open stool, her concern for these men nonexistent as long as her seat was secure.
“Stop, Stop!” I screamed the words into Lee’s face, his pause long enough for me to shove him back into the crowd, the sea of bodies swallowing the two of us whole, the bar not big enough to accommodate a crowd shift without relocating the population, the swell cutting us off from the offending party. I linked my arm through his and pulled, dragging him to the door and out to the street.
I expected curses, exclamations of male power, an attempt to return inside, but he only stumbled. Once forward, once backward, then sat, his knees buckling in such a fashion that his descent to the ground was almost graceful, a plié leading to his seat, on the dirty curb, his arms resting, folded, on his knees, his head falling to his forearms.
I sat next to him, as carefully as I could. Aware, as my butt hit the concrete, that I was condemning my linen pants to an early death sentence.
Silence. I was at ease in the silence. It fit in this moment in time, reminded me of other times, other places. A reprieve from the insanity of tonight. I hung my head and wondered what I was doing. I should be at home. In my quiet home, neck-deep in a bubble bath, a book in hand. Or curled in the hammock on my back deck. Listening to the ocean until I fell asleep.
“You’ll never do it.” His words were a slur of depression, thickened by alcohol and desperation.
“Do what?” I kept my head down, eyes closed. I didn’t want to see the face that accompanied that statement. Didn’t really want to know the answer to the question I had just asked.
“Leave him.” A long silence, broken somewhere in the darkness by the crunch of glass and a curse. “You won’t, will you?” I felt his eyes on me, forced myself to lift my head and give him the respect of eye contact.
A destroyed man sat before me, his arms around his knees, a shiver against my soul. I had seen this man in so many different lights, but this was the weakest. This is the one that touched me deepest and hurt me the most. The one that I, in some ways, loved the most.
I stared at him and said the only thing I could. “No, I won’t. I won’t ever leave him.”
He broke the contact, rested his head back on his hands, and silence fell back over the street.
Then, with a forward heave and strangled cry, he tipped forward and vomited onto dirty asphalt.