Page 41 of Handful

I’d taken the night off for this — a Saturday, which was the night Velvet filled up and stayed that way until last call. He’d asked. I hadn’t hesitated.

What I couldn’t do was turn off the habit. I’d been clocking the room since we walked in. Who was on their third beer. Who was pacing themselves. Every man in here was on beer — no one had ordered a cocktail, probably no one would. Maybe the bar didn’t even do cocktails. Not my usual Saturday night in any sense.

Every couple in this club had their own gravity. I’d been watching it for months — the hands found in a crowd, the private looks, the small adjustments. It was the thing I wanted. Not the club, not the bikes. Just that.

Tyler had it when he was with me. The question was whether it held when the room was loud.

It was around ten when I started noticing.

Nothing dramatic. Nothing I could have pointed to and said there — not a single moment, not a line, not an act. Just a series of small things that added up the way small things do when you’ve spent your professional life reading rooms.

Tyler was looser. That was the first thing. He’d been at the party for three hours and he’d had three or four beers — not a lot by clubhouse standards — and the looseness wasn’t drunkenness. It was comfort. He was in the room where he’d spent years not having to think about anything.

I saw it first in the way he complimented my dress when I came back from the bathroom. “Fuck, that dress,” he said, pulling me close, his hand on my waist. And his eyes were on me — mostly. Mostly. But the mostly was the thing. There was a fraction of a second where they weren’t, where they tracked something past my shoulder, and by the time I’d turned to see what it was, he was looking at me again and the moment was gone.

It could have been nothing. A light. A sound. A person walking past in his peripheral vision.

But I’d spent years behind a bar watching men’s eyes, and I knew what nothing looked like and I knew what something looked like. This was in the space between the two where I couldn’t be sure but…

The second thing was Tanya.

She appeared the way she always appeared — from somewhere inside the party, drawn to Tyler. Old proximity. The magnetic memory of a body that used to be welcome. She was laughing at something someone else had said, drink in hand, and she crossed Tyler’s path near the bar and stopped.

“Hey, Handful.” She put her hand on his arm and ran it up toward his shoulder, slow, familiar. The gesture of a woman who’d done it a hundred times and expected to do it a hundred more.

Tyler didn’t step back.

He didn’t lean in either. He didn’t flirt — not the way he’d flirted at the wedding, not the way he’d flirted at the birthday party where he’d talked to my chest. He just stayed where he was. Her hand on his arm, his beer in his hand, the two-second delay between her touch landing and his body responding to it that told me the step-back wasn’t automatic yet. He had to think about it.

“Tanya,” he said. Then he turned toward me, the way he’d done on the porch at Sunday dinner, introducing, redirecting. “You remember Austen.”

“Of course.” Tanya smiled at me. The recalibration smile — the one I’d seen at the dinner. “Still going strong, you two.”

She moved on. Tyler’s hand came back to my waist. His attention was back on me again. But the two seconds had happened. The old Handful had hesitated before my Tyler caught up. And I’d seen it.

The third thing was the dance floor.

Somebody had pushed the pool tables back and the space in the center of the common room had become a dance floor. At some point Tyler pulled me in. His arms around me. My hands on his shoulders. We moved to something slow from the jukebox, his forehead against mine.

“You’re clocking the room,” he said. “I can feel you doing it.”

“I’m not.”

“You are. You’ve counted every exit and you know who’s drunk.” His hands settled lower on my back. “Stop working. You’re off tonight.”

“I don’t know how to be off.”

“I’ll teach you.” He said it into my hair, certain, like it was a thing he’d already decided to spend years doing.

For a while everything else fell away and it was just us. His arms around me like he couldn’t stand to let go, his eyes moving over me, taking me in, and when they weren’t he was pressing kisses along my neck.

I told him I needed a drink and slipped away.

The bar was busy. I waited, got a water, took my time. When I turned back toward the dance floor, Tyler was still there.

With someone else.

I didn’t know her name. His hands were on her hips. Low. Easy. The same position, the same loose comfort, the hands of a man who wasn’t thinking about where they were because he’d never had to. Then she pressed closer — her body flush against his, her chest against his — and his hands slid to her ass. No hesitation.