Southern rock far too loudly for the low-ceilinged space.
No, Graham didn’t belong here.
Eighteen months ago—a lifetime ago—he’d been Captain Benjamin Graham of the United States Marine Corps. For eight years, he’d served everywhere he was needed, from Japan to Europe, but after his last deployment to Afghanistan, he’d had the distinct feeling he no longer belonged in the military. His body had taken a beating in those years. The daily wear and tear of backpacks and boots had taken as much of a toll as the bursts of adrenaline that kept a Marine from noticing that he was bleeding while returning enemy fire.
But it was more than that.
Graham had simply known, one average day on an average rifle range while safely stateside, that he was done. He’d proven whatever it was young men had to prove when they volunteered for the service. He’d served his nation and he’d served with good people—but it was time to move on. Graham had submitted the proper paperwork to his chain of command. In short order, he’d gotten his final orders and left.
Those eight years felt like eighty, sometimes. Like now. Graham worked his way toward the exit, leading with his good shoulder as he snaked his way through the impossibly young crowd. He might have felt like the oldest thing around, but he knew he wasn’t. The three-man band kept riffing—endlessly—on a Lynyrd Skynyrd tune that was older than he was. There were clusters of weathered men here and there, men like his uncle, who’d lived most of his sixty years outdoors, working a ranch.
The man ahead of him abruptly cut out of the traffic flow to join a group wearing black motorcycle jackets that matched. The biker lowered himself onto a bar stool as if his whole body ached, a feeling Graham knew too well. But the biker had gray in his beard; Graham was thirty. Maybe Graham had seen too much overseas to have anything in common with the young college crowd, but surely he didn’t belong on a bar stool next to that biker. Not yet.
A woman stumbled into him, one of the college set.
He caught her with one hand as she glared over her shoulder at the girls who had pushed her into his path. Then she turned her attention to him with a flip of her hair. She bit her lip and checked him out from his eyes all the way low to the zipper of his jeans.
“Sorry,” she said over the music, with a smile that said she wasn’t sorry at all. Her top was cut low, her breasts were pushed high and she nudged against him as the crowd pushed them together.
Graham assumed the attention meant he must not look as old as he felt—which changed nothing.
“No problem.” With an attempt at a polite smile, he turned sideways and stepped around her, leading now with the shoulder he’d shattered on the other side of the world. The shrieks of her girlfriends followed him. He was so not into you carried over the music, and was gone.
Graham soldiered on. The traffic flow was hampered by the pool table and a foosball game. He spotted another motorcycle jacket, but it sported a different logo than the bearded man’s club. Bikers, college kids, soldiers and locals—too many people in too small a space, with alcohol thrown into the mix. By the time that mix went sour, Graham would be long gone, but since everyone was peaceful for the moment, he changed his target from the exit door to a side hallway that held the restrooms. He didn’t know how far he had left to drive tonight, maybe sixty miles. Best to hit the head while he could.
There was a line for the bathroom, but at least the hallway was marginally quieter, since it was out of the direct blast of the band’s oversized speakers. Conversation continued all around him as he took his place in line with the men. Women formed a line on the opposite wall, the sexes as segregated as they’d be at a dance in a middle school gym. Each time a person came out of either of the bathrooms, bright light and the sound of running water spilled into the little hallway.
Graham resisted the reflex of closing one eye at each burst of bright light. This wasn’t a combat zone. He didn’t need to save the night vision in one eye each time the enemy sent up a flare. He let the back of his head rest on the wall and closed both eyes, weary of his own habitual alertness.
“Come on. Just one drink. I’m buying.” A male voice, cajoling.
“No, thanks.” A female voice, polite.
“Don’t be like that. You’re too pretty to pay for your own drinks.”
Spare me from college hormones.
Graham had turned thirty this fall on a college campus while in pursuit of an MBA. Although he’d realized pretty quickly that going back to graduate school wasn’t right for him, he’d forced himself to finish the semester. Most of his fellow students had entered straight from their bachelor’s degree programs, which meant they were twenty-one-year-olds like this guy, who was green enough to try to seduce a girl who needed to use a bathroom.
Graham had quit the MBA program a few weeks ago, at the end of the semester. The university had a nicer name for it; they’d charitably listed him as on sabbatical, but Graham doubted he’d return. He didn’t belong there, with the college boys.
“Come on,” this college boy said. “Dance with me.”
She doesn’t want to dance if she’s got to pee, pal.
If being thirty meant one had lived long enough to gain a few scars, it also meant one had gained some practical wisdom—or at least better control over one’s hormones. Either way, he was grateful that he wasn’t desperate enough to pursue a woman in a bathroom line. Graham opened his eyes and took the burst of bright light as the door opened.
“You gotta forgive me sooner or later,” the young man said, managing to whine and laugh at the same time. “Come on, let me see that pretty smile. You want to smile for me, Em, I know you do.”
Graham glanced at the man: button-down shirt, blond hair, tanned skin that said he’d probably spent the Christmas holidays somewhere tropical. The look on his face wasn’t confidence but cockiness.
The woman whom the man seemed to think owed him a smile had her back to Graham. He let his gaze follow her dark brown hair as it flowed over the large, loose ruffles of her light blue dress, stray curls detouring on their own little paths here and there. Her hair fell all the way to the small of her back, capturing what light there was along the way, lustrous with youth and health.
The door shut, leaving them all in the dark.
Em, the man had called her. They knew one another.
“Why don’t you go back to Mike and Doug?” This Em spoke almost like a teacher, not shrill, no giggles—a teacher whose patience was being tested as she tried to redirect a student’s attention to something more appropriate. “I’ll stop by in a minute and say hi. You don’t want to stand in line here with me.”
“I’m not leaving until you say yes.” The man leaned in closer. “Come on. Say it. One little yes. You won’t regret it.”
Graham felt older than ever. Had he ever been that cocky? At what age did a man learn that persistence was annoying, not charming?
Then the ladies’ room door opened again, the woman turned away from the college guy, and in the sudden bright light, Graham saw her face.
For one moment in time, just one suspended moment, Graham stopped thinking. The Marines, the bar, the MBA, everywhere he’d been, everywhere he was going, everything just ceased for a moment of blessed...interest. He looked at her, and he wanted to know her.
She was beautiful. Of course she was, but there was something about her, something that appealed beyond an oval face and pink lips and the smooth skin of a young woman, something in her expression—it felt like morning, to see her face in the bright light. For the first time in years, something, someone in the world, was interesting.
Their eyes met and held for a fraction of time, but then she blinked and turned back to the man who stood too close to her.
The guy poked the corner of her mouth with one finger. “Smile for me, baby.”
She