Love Lettering by Kate Clayborn

Author:Kate Clayborn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington Books
Published: 2019-10-24T16:00:00+00:00

It isn’t where I’d want to have my first fight practice.

Swine is the kind of bar that might make a tourist happy, that might make it into a guidebook for its gimmicky theme, its eagerness to attract a crowd. Oddly enough, the exterior is something Reid and I might’ve snapped a photo of on a walk—a white brick wall with bold, black block lettering, a big drop shadow with diagonal grading, a crude but clever outline of a pig, its various good-for-food parts blocked out and labeled in a thin slab serif. Over an arched opening in the wall there’s a curving script indicating a “Biergarten,” a patio from which plumes of woody smoke rise into the night sky.

But outside of its clever lettering, everything else about this place tells me Reid—and I—would’ve wanted to keep on walking. So far as I can tell, there’s about ten million people in that Biergarten, and every man I can see is wearing some version of the same outfit: boat shoes, no socks, cropped-style khakis or slim-cut shorts, pastel-colored shirts. I almost check my phone to see if I’ve teleported out of Brooklyn into some college town’s rush week.

It’s so incongruous to imagine Reid here that I don’t let myself wonder at my surroundings for long. I push through the heavy front doors into the non-Biergarten part of this sideshow and am met with a wall of noise. The crowd in here is different, more skinny jeans and beards, even a few leather bracelets.

So it’s pretty easy to find the man I came for.

He’s at the end of the long, dark-stained wood bar, wearing his weekend jacket over his weekend T-shirt and jeans. To anyone else, I’m sure his posture looks out of place: upright, overly formal. But I realize I know Reid’s body so well that I can see how his broad shoulders hunch, ever so slightly, over the short glass of amber-colored liquid in front of him, the fingers of one hand curled around it.

That doesn’t look right, I think, ridiculously. It should be a cup of tea.

It’s this final incongruity that propels me forward, no thought to whether this’ll end in a confrontation. I only want him out of here, out of this place where he doesn’t belong. I take the empty stool next to him and right away he turns his head to me, his eyes widening briefly, those barely hunched shoulders straightening immediately.

“Meg. Hello.”

He seems all the drunker for pretending not to be. His voice is extra deep, extra stern, and I should not be attracted to that, given that he’s probably compensating for an inclination to slur. But there’s no helping it: He sounds great.

“Hey there, Reid.” I catch the bartender’s eye, give her a wave of acknowledgment that I made it. She smiles and makes a discreet gesture to the register and I nod, indicating that I’ll take the check.

“You’ve got cats all over you,” Reid says.

I look down, remembering the gold Hello Kitty faces. I

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.