CHAPTER 2 — THE BAR
1003 Words
She opened the door.
She did not think about it. Her hand just turned the handle and pushed and the door swung open, the light from inside fell across her face and for a second nobody moved.
Cormac was the first one to react. He scrambled back so fast he nearly fell off the bed. Her best friend, Lianne, grabbed the sheet and pulled it up to her chin and made a sound that was half a scream and half a cry. They both started talking at the same time. His voice over hers over his. Wait. Tamsin. This is not. Please just. Let me explain. It is not what it.
Tamsin stood in the doorway and looked at them.
She felt very calm. That was the strange part. She had expected something explosive, rage or tears or the urge to throw something, but what she actually felt was a very specific and total stillness.
She took her phone out of her dress pocket. Opened the camera.
Cormac said her name harshly. A warning in it now.
She took three photos with the flash on. The bed. The two of them. The dress Lianne had been wearing tonight crumpled on the floor next to his jacket.
Lianne said, “Please, Tam, please don't.” Her voice cracking on the second please.
Tamsin looked at her for a moment, this girl she had known since they were fifteen, this girl who had been her best friend and confidante. Tamsin felt something move through her chest that was too big and too complicated to deal with right now so she put it away and looked back at her phone screen instead.
Cormac got up. He was pulling his shirt on and moving toward her with his hands out, placating, the voice he used when he wanted to manage a situation. He said her name again, softer this time. He said they needed to talk about this calmly. He said it had only happened once.
She looked at him, she had no words for him.
He kept talking. The words came out faster the longer she stayed quiet. It meant nothing. It was a stupid mistake. He loved her. Tonight of all nights, did she understand what tonight meant to him, what their future meant. He reached for her arm.
She stepped back out of his reach.
She took one more photo, this one of his face mid-sentence, and then she put her phone back in her pocket and turned around and walked back down the hallway.
Behind her she could hear him following, still talking, and Lianne somewhere back in the room saying his name, and the noise of the party floating up from downstairs like it was coming from another planet. She reached the hallway table at the top of the stairs. Looked down at her left hand. Took the ring off and set it on the table without stopping walking.
Cormac grabbed her arm at the top of the stairs. He was not rough but he was firm and she stopped, looked at his hand on her arm and then up at his face and something in her expression made him let go.
He said please.
She went downstairs.
She smiled at two people who tried to stop her near the bottom. Nodded at something someone said. Kept moving through the warm loud room full of people who were celebrating something that had just quietly ceased to exist. She got her coat from the rack by the front door, pushed her arms through the sleeves, and walked out.
The cold hit her immediately. She stood on the steps for a second and breathed it in. November air, city sounds and somewhere nearby a car alarm going off. She walked down to the street and stuck her arm out for a taxi and got in and told the driver to just drive for a bit.
He did not ask questions. She watched the city go past the window and did not think about anything and when the taxi stopped at a red light outside a hotel she told him this was fine and paid and got out.
The hotel bar was quiet. Almost empty on a Sunday night. A piano player in the corner working through something slow and a little sad. The bartender was young and uninterested in her in the best possible way.
She ordered whiskey, something she never usually drank, and sat down on a stool at the far end of the bar and looked at the piano player and let the music be the only thing in her head for a while.
She checked her phone once. Seventeen messages. Cormac. Lianne. Dad. She turned the screen face down and finished her drink and ordered another one.
The bar stayed quiet. A couple in the corner. A businessman at a table with his laptop. The piano player switching to something that had even less hope in it than the last song. Tamsin sat with her second whiskey and thought about nothing, she let herself just be a woman in a bar in a party dress at eleven on a Sunday night with nowhere she needed to be.
She did not hear him sit down next to her. She just became aware at some point that the stool on her left was no longer empty. She did not look up. She did not want to talk to anyone.
Then he spoke. One sentence that was directed mostly at the piano player rather than at her. Something about the song choice and the general atmosphere of quiet devastation it was creating.
She almost smiled. She did not mean to. It just sounded exactly right in a way she could not explain, the tone of it, the specific dryness, the fact that he was not talking to her so much as just talking and letting her choose whether to respond.
She picked up her glass. Set it down.
She turned to look at him.
- Writer
