On a Roll by Beth Bolden (free ebook novel .txt) 📗

this. But he hadn’t realized it until he narrowed in on the thing that he’d only vaguely hinted at. “And you’re the friend who wasn’t honest.”

“I . . .” Sean took another drink. “I wasn’t. I . . .” It still wasn’t easy talking about this; probably because he didn’t talk about it. Not for years. “I was married, before I came to Los Angeles.”

“Divorce?” Shaw asked casually, like he already had this pegged. And maybe he thought he did, because no doubt a lot of sad people who passed through this bar had had their hearts broken from a relationship that just hadn’t worked out.

“He died,” Sean said.

Shaw’s eyes flew to his. “Oh shit. I’m sorry, I didn’t . . .”

“You couldn’t have known,” Sean said heavily. “Because I didn’t tell you. I didn’t tell anyone. I told myself I was starting over. That I was moving on, the way my therapist wanted me to do, and in a lot of ways, I was.” But now, looking back over the last two years, Sean wasn’t sure that was what he’d been doing at all.

“You told Gabriel, didn’t you?” Shaw guessed.

“I did . . . not long ago,” he admitted. “I thought he should know, before we . . . well, before we got naked together.”

“I knew you guys were up to something,” Shaw said.

“I stupidly thought we were just hooking up. I even told him that was all it was, because well, how could it be anything else? I knew how it felt to fall in love. To love someone so much I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. The way I felt about Gabe? Totally different.”

“But no less intense, right?”

“Well . . .” Sean hesitated. Because Shaw was right. It had gotten intense, right at the end. He could remember this morning, when everything had felt so sunny and right and perfect and it had felt like his heart would beat out of his chest, just so it could follow Gabe. He’d known things were changing. But he hadn’t thought it was love.

Because he knew what that felt like.

“Love doesn’t always feel the same,” Shaw said kindly.

“I don’t know if what I feel for Gabe is even love,” Sean said. “And wouldn’t it be worse if I told him it was, and it turned out that it wasn’t? I couldn’t . . .” His voice broke, remembering the way Gabe had looked tonight. “I couldn’t do that to him.”

Shaw leaned a hip against the edge of the counter. “And doing what you did tonight was better?”

Sean felt suspicion bloom inside of him. “How do you know what I did tonight?”

“Listen,” Shaw said, setting the clean glass down. “It’s not very hard to be a student of human nature when you’re a bartender, especially when it’s for your group. You guys have patterns. For awhile, after you showed up and after the group started coming together, y’all had one pattern. And you kept to it, together and apart, most of the time. But then, a few weeks back, you came in with Gabriel and broke your pattern. You drank something else. It was just the two of you. And you weren’t fighting.”

“We weren’t.” Sean licked his lips, tasting the alcohol on them. He remembered just how much they hadn’t been fighting. That night had been the first glimmer that there might be something more between him and Gabriel.

“And now you’re back, and to be frank, you look pretty fucking miserable, and you’re drinking more than you have in the last six months,” Shaw said, gesturing to the half-full manhattan in front of him. “And even without all that, you’re drinking the same drink you two drank together. Now, I’m not here all the time, though God knows it feels like it sometimes, but you didn’t drink those before, and you haven’t had one since the night you two were here.”

Put together, it was rather damning.

“You’re really too smart for your own good,” Sean said, letting out an unsteady exhale. “You’re right. We had a fight. Or not a fight necessarily.” There hadn’t been yelling. Didn’t there need to be yelling in a fight? “But something. Something . . .”

“Something you’re not happy about.” Shaw finished his sentence even as he pulled two beers.

“I don’t think either of us are happy about it,” Sean said wryly. Maybe he should have gone to Tate. Or Tony. Or Lucas. Or even Ash. But Shaw had been a good listener.

“Then that’s something, isn’t it?” Shaw pointed out. “It was clearly not just the two of you getting naked. Because I promise, the getting naked Ren does has never brought him to my bar, looking like he might cry.”

“We’d all be doing a lot better if we were more like Ren,” Sean muttered.

“Yes and no,” Shaw said. “Honestly? I think he sleeps like a baby, after. But to answer your question, your first question, I think it’s never too late to tell your friends your history. Maybe you didn’t share it before. Maybe they won’t be happy about it. But I think you already know that you should. Even if it’s hard.”

Shaw was right; he already knew what he should do.

“And,” Shaw added, smiling now, “I have it on good authority that Tony and some of the others are out by the fire pits right now.”

“What? Are you psychic now, too?” Sean wondered.

“They came in before you,” Shaw said. “And if I know them at all, they won’t leave until they’ve had a few drinks.”

Shaw was right about that. Sean had a feeling that Shaw was right about a lot of things.

“I guess if they’ve had a few drinks, maybe they’ll be less pissed,” Sean said, fumbling with his wallet as he pulled a twenty out of it and slid it across the bar.

“It’s on the house,” Shaw said with a quicksilver smile and a shake of his head. “Just do me a favor.”

“Go tell them?”

Shaw nodded decisively. “They’re good