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Trinity's eyes sparked. "Maybe that was part of the problem, Sam. It was like nothing ever touched you. Like you thought emotions were for mortals. I wish just once you would have lost your temper." Her face softened suddenly, which was the last thing Sam expected to see. "I loved it when you would express your feelings to me," she murmured, "but the worse it got, the more you froze over, until I was in the cold, too."
Sam's tongue swept his suddenly dry mouth, hunting for the words that had come so easily to him before, but they left him hanging now. Trinity held his eyes a moment longer, before pushing back from the bar and grabbing her purse. "Charge my drink to the company card," she said. "I consider this a work meeting. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a singles' night to get to."
Trinity glanced at her watch, and Sam's eyes fell to her wrist. He didn't recognize it. It certainly wasn't the one he had given her. Before he could remark on it, or even offer up a word of goodbye, Trinity turned and tunneled her way back into the crowd.
"Damn," a voice commented behind him. Sam turned, expecting to find the bartender, and instead found Eddie sitting in the stool Trinity had abandoned seconds before. Eddie arched a signature thick eyebrow at him. "You guys break up again?"
"Actually, I'm encouraged." He couldn't stop replaying the moment that Trinity's face had softened in his head. "Not that it's any of your business." Sam leaned his elbow against the bar and signaled for a water. "Speaking of business, try to be on time from now on. This is twice now you've been late, or sent Trinity in your stead to meet me. It's unseemly."
"What's unseemly is that drink you just had the bartender pull from the tap," Eddie said. "Excuse me, miss? Do you work here?"
Eddie waved to an attractive female bartender, one who was clearly stationed further down. She caught sight of Eddie's gesture and immediately sauntered over—completely dropping the task she’d been attending to, Sam suspected, in favor of taking Eddie's order.
"Yes? Can I help you?" she inquired. Her eyelashes batted as if she was conveying a different question entirely in Morse code.
Eddie leaned in. "I couldn't help but notice the expert way you were pouring those gentlemen's shots earlier." He nodded toward a group of sour-looking young execs further down the bar. Clearly they had posted up at the far end of the bar for a reason, and now that their reason had been called away, they didn't quite know what to do with themselves. "How much would it cost to get me one of those?
"For you?" The pretty bartender appeared to consider his request, although Sam had the distinct feeling she had already priced it out—and the math she had used wasn't taught inside any schoolroom. "Why don't I just refill your drink, and throw the shot in for free?"
"Sounds like a deal to me." Eddie glanced at Sam as the bartender trotted off, which made Sam wonder which of them the show had really been for. "You want to do a shot with me, Sam?"
"Please tell me you don't intend to drink like this in front of clients."
"What? No, of course not!" Eddie scoffed, but he couldn't hide the way his face fell at the comment. "I thought…look, I know we're working together more closely than ever now, so talking business is unavoidable. But I thought tonight was more about you and me getting to know one another again."
"You thought so, huh?" Sam stared at Eddie's paired drinks dubiously as they appeared. "I'm not…." The word interested came to mind, but he held it back at the last moment. Maybe it was better to tread lightly with Eddie's feelings now that they would be working so closely together. In truth, his youngest brother was a stranger to him. Every motivation and subsequent action that drove Eddie to make the decisions he did was completely foreign to Sam.
"…I'm not available to discuss anything other than the onboarding at the moment," he concluded. "That I'm more than happy to talk to you about."
"Jesus. No wonder you piss everybody off." Eddie knocked his shot back as if there was nothing he needed more in that moment. Sam watched him, feeling equal parts puzzled and annoyed. What was Eddie talking about? He was the brother who pissed everybody off, not Sam.
"If you're referring to William," he said, "I've already spoken to him about the complaints to H.R. I've made my case that it's all just a misunderstanding. Our clients out west don't always get my concise brand of professionalism."
"I'm talking about Trinity, bro!" Eddie exclaimed. "Just having you around again is stressing her out big-time. Don't you think you could dial it back a little for once?"
"I don't get what you mean." Sam leaned harder into the bar, suddenly wishing he had ordered more than just a tall glass of water. "Trinity and I are finally talking again. She even stayed to have a drink with me. Would she have done that if I stressed her out? In fact, I think I might ask her out after the next meeting." He felt confident that Trinity's date tonight would go about as well as the last one. There was no man in the world, much less New York City, who knew her as well as he did. He thought it was something even Trinity suspected to be true.
Eddie groaned, his head dropping down between his
hunched shoulder blades. "Christ, please don't. Spare us both your humiliation."
"We divorced because we drifted apart," Sam argued. He realized that despite his best efforts to keep things superficial between himself and Eddie, his youngest brother had succeeded in worming his way into Sam's personal life anyway. "Believe me, I won't make the same mistakes this time. I've spent a lot of time thinking about Tri…I've thought a lot about it. I know that I fucked things up in the past. I didn't appreciate what we had until it was gone. Now that we've both achieved success in our careers apart from one another, I'm hopeful we'll be able to pick back up where we left off."
"Fuck, you are too much sometimes," Eddie said. Then he laughed and grabbed a hold of his drink, spinning on the barstool to face Sam fully. "Listen, don't you ever wonder how Trinity and I got to be such good friends? It's because she used to call me all the time, sometimes in the middle of the night, when you guys were still married. Do you want to know what our main topic of conversation was?"
"No," Sam replied, knowing the answer was probably unavoidable at this point.
"We talked about you, Sam. Specifically you and your career, and the happy marriage you were sharing with it while your bride was calling me to cry on my proverbial shoulder. Case in point: I was the first person Trini called when she had to take the cat to the vet and put her down without you. You were supposed to be home early that night, but you got pulled into a meeting you claimed you couldn't get out of. You were unreachable."
"Cat? What cat?" Sam stared at Eddie for a long moment, trying to gauge whether or not his brother was pulling his leg. What did he have to gain from lying about a pet?
Eddie returned his stare incredulously. "Are you kidding me? The cat! Your cat!"
"Trinity and I never had a cat."
"It was the stray Trinity found in the alleyway behind the agency! She brought it back home with her! You resisted initially, but eventually caved and agreed to let her keep it. Are you seriously telling me you don't remember your own pet?"
The memory was fuzzy to Sam, but he thought he recalled something orange and vaguely feline-shaped. "Trinity has a big heart," he said finally. "But I think you're exaggerating. There's no way the death of a cat was enough to dissolve our marriage."
