AllFreeNovel
Share Us
One
Marigold
The bar is quieter than usual tonight. Music thrums from the speakers on the wall: a mellow country tune to suit the rain pattering outside. Locals huddle in a few booths, chatting and laughing while one group deals out cards, but the atmosphere tonight is laid back. Warm and lazy.
That’s fine by me.
Sometimes, when the sun has blazed hot all day against the mountainside, it can get real wild in here. I’m talking smashed glasses and folks yelling loud enough to make your ears ring; boots thudding against wood as people dance on tables. Nights like that, it’s so electric in here that my hair prickles against my scalp, but I still jam myself in a corner and keep sketching, trying my best to be a fly on the wall.
Not tonight, though. Tonight I’m perched on a stool right by the center of the bar, my sketchbook spread out on the scratched wood, luxuriating in all this elbow room. One of the bartenders, Jana, smiles at me as she slips out to collect empty glasses from the booths, and I smile back as my pencil swoops across the page.
This is my Flint’s sketchbook. It’s a project idea I had—a whole summer drawing one location. Focusing in on the patrons, the workers, the furniture, the vibe, soaking it all up and working on my art. A cool idea, if I say so myself.
Except summer’s been and gone and I’m still here, walking through town to Flint’s each night to sketch. I guess something keeps pulling me back.
Or someone.
“He’s in his office,” Jana says to me as she returns to the bar, two fistfuls of empty glasses clutched expertly in her hands. How on earth does she carry so many without dropping them? “But he’ll come out and check on us soon.”
I nod, chewing on the end of my pencil. There’s no point pretending I don’t know who she means. That ship sailed weeks ago.
Because Jana’s not dumb, and she’s peeked over my shoulder plenty of times in the last few months, checking out my sketches. She knows that I draw one person way more than anyone else, his handsome face glowering from page after page of my sketchbook.
I can’t help it, okay? There’s something about that man…
Well, every time I lay eyes on him, my fingers itch for a pencil and blank sheet of paper. Let’s just say that.
“Huh.” Jana props her elbows on the bar a few minutes later, leaning over to get a better look. The dishwasher rumbles through its cycle down by her legs, the vibrations tickling my shins. “You have a real good memory, Marigold. That’s the boss exactly.”
Yup.
Chewing the inside of my lip, I shade my subject’s earlobe. And Jana’s right—it probably is weird that I know the exact slope of this man’s nose by heart; that I can close my eyes and recall the fine lines on his forehead, the flecks of silver at his temples, the angular shape of his jaw. Probably strange that he lives rent-free in my brain like this, in perfect HD.
Especially when he’s said maybe three words to me all summer.
Now the weather has turned, the nights have grown darker, and there’s a glittering layer of frost on the ground when I first step outside each morning. And still I’m here, sketching the gruff older man who owns this bar, my body heating each night as my pencil shades the strong column of his throat. Heating until I squirm on my bar stool, pressing my thighs together.
Flint.
I’m a mess.
“Have you had a good day?” I ask my onlooker. Jana brightens, rocking back on her heels to chat about the baked oatmeal recipe she tried for breakfast, some pushy customer she had two hours ago, and the wedding planning she’s doing at the moment with her adventurer fiance. I do my best to nod and smile and make encouraging noises in all the right places, because I’m not great at small talk—but I like Jana, so I try to make the effort.
She rattles out jokes and wild stories, a skilled enough conversationalist for the both of us, all while snatching up a cloth to scrub down the bar. Even though it’s frosty outside tonight, it’s hot and humid enough in here that her short black pixie cut is all ruffled, sticking straight up at the back.
A door clicks shut across the room behind me, the sound nearly lost beneath the music and hum of conversation. I’d never hear it if I weren’t so freaking attuned, my ears constantly straining for him.
My heartbeat trips—then restarts at double-time.
My grip tightens on my pencil.
“Red alert,” Jana breaks off to say, her eyes widening and flicking over my shoulder. “Mayday, mayday.”
Lips pursed, I nod and flick my sketchbook to another page. An innocent page, with a sketch I did earlier of two regulars sharing a smoke just outside the bar doorway, their hands cupped against the wind.
Nothing to see here. No weirdly loving sketches of a man I’ve barely met; a man who must be twenty years older than me, with the fine lines and silver flecks to prove it. No, sir.
“Okay?” Flint mutters as he slides behind the bar, his dark eyes flicking to me before settling on his employee. Jana nods furiously, scrubbing at the bar top harder than before, the cloth squeezed tight in her hand.
