The Blind. A.F. Brady

      “I do love you, you dirty whore,” he replies, and he might not be joking. “But I’m tired, and I have a long week coming up, so I’m going home.” He pulls his coat into his hands and makes a show of looking around the bar for his suit jacket. “If you see my jacket, will you bring it home with you? I don’t have time to go searching for it now.”

      “No problem,” I say, hiding the cigarette and lighter I have clutched in my fist, as if I wasn’t about to step outside. If I give him a seamless exit, I can save myself from another one of his drunken attacks.

      “You don’t have to come with me. I’ll get home fine,” he slurs, and I give the panty-hosed girl a side-eye. We perform our saying-goodbye act, with big hugs and kisses, and after he doesn’t bother to pay his tab, he stumbles out the door. I pretend not to notice the panty hose follow him out.

      “You gonna be okay if I go, too?” David asks, joining me in pretending he didn’t see anything.

      “Yeah, I’m probably only going to have one or two more.”

      After tugging his coat over his shoulders, he leaves a fifty on the bar and wraps me in a bear hug. “I’ll see you on Monday, but call me if anything stupid happens, okay?”

      “Thanks, David. I’ll see you Monday. Home safe.”

      Now that David and Lucas are both gone, I can turn my attention to AJ. He’s been sitting at a booth with some people I don’t know, but from the looks he’s been giving me, I know that we’re both waiting for the moment—the moment in time when it’s going to be okay and we can run into the other room, the other world, the other universe where we can wrap up in one another and not worry what anyone else thinks, what anyone else knows, what anyone else can see, but at the same time, we know that that’s never going to happen. So we have to live in between the lines. We have to be somewhere only he knows, and only I know, and no one says anything, because there’s nothing to say. Where we can walk in daylight and hear no voices.

      Even though it’s the same bar we’re always at, somehow the walls seem new to me. All the things around us seem to be brighter. The cheeky quotes written in chalk on the blackboard behind the bar are funnier. The music sounds like something I haven’t been listening to for the last two months. There’s something about the way he looks at me that takes down every single wall I have ever erected in order to keep people out.

      He’s standing at the DJ booth now, putting on a song and pointing at me across the bar. I’m doing everything I can to stay as far away from him as possible. He sees this and he sees me, and he puts on my favorite song and mouths to me, This is for you.