Wide Open – Chapter 1 – He Couldn’t Stop Looking

The bar was called Cutter’s and it had been called Cutter’s for thirty years and would probably be called Cutter’s for thirty more because this town did not change the names of things that were working, and Cutter’s worked – cold beer, decent wings, a television big enough to watch the game without squinting, and the specific, comfortable noise of a room full of people who had known each other long enough that nobody needed to perform.

I’d been coming here since I was twenty-one.

I was thirty-seven now and I came on game nights with the same three people I’d been coming with for most of those years – Dana, who had married a good man and had two kids and still showed up for game night like the rest of it wasn’t happening; Marcus, who worked at the same company I did and whose fantasy league opinions were objectively wrong but deeply held; and Carla, who was my closest friend and who had the specific, radar-precise social awareness of a woman who noticed everything and commented on most of it.

The game was close.

The wings were good.

I was halfway through my second beer and arguing with Marcus about a call when Carla leaned over and said, with the specific, low urgency of someone delivering actionable intelligence: “Don’t look now, but the man at the bar has been looking at you for twenty minutes.”

I looked.

He was tall – properly tall, the kind where you notice it even across a room. Dark hair with grey at the temples that he had no business looking that good about. Broad in the shoulders in the way of a man who builds things for a living rather than the way of a man who spends significant time thinking about how he looks. Brown eyes that I clocked from twenty feet because they were pointed directly at me and had apparently been pointed directly at me for twenty minutes.

He didn’t look away when I looked.

That was the first thing.

Most men, you catch them looking, they find something else to look at real quick. Something on their phone. The game. The ceiling. He just – held it. Not aggressive, not performing. Just: steady. The specific, unhurried gaze of someone who had decided something and was waiting for the right moment to do something about it.

“Do you know him?” Carla asked.

I looked back at the game.

“Not really,” I said. “He looks familiar.”

“He looks like someone who should be familiar,” she said, which was Carla’s way of saying he was attractive without using the word because using the word would have required acknowledging she had noticed.

“Watch the game,” I said.

She watched the game.

I did not, for the remainder of the first half, successfully forget that there was a man at the bar looking at me.

His name, when it came to it, was Logan.

He came over at halftime with the specific, unhurried directness of a man who had decided he was doing this and saw no reason to do it anxiously. He introduced himself, said he was back in town, said he thought he recognized me from way back. I said yes, the name was familiar, I thought we’d crossed paths in high school, different circles. He said yes, he’d been a few years ahead. He said he’d been gone a while. He said he was back now.

He said it with a quality in his voice that felt like it meant something beyond the logistical fact.

He was drinking something from a bottle that turned out to be zero-alc.

I clocked that.

I clocked it and filed it without asking, which was the correct move because it was his business and not mine and asking would have been presumptuous, but I noticed.

“Are you watching the game?” I asked.

“I was,” he said. “I got distracted.”

“By what?”

He looked at me.

That same steady, unhurried look from across the bar, now at close range.

“You,” he said.

Just like that. No performance, no smirk. Just the direct, uncomplicated statement of a fact.

I looked at him for a moment.

I had been in Texas my whole life and I had been in bars for sixteen of those years and I had encountered a significant number of men attempting a significant variety of approaches, and I want to tell you honestly that the direct, undisguised, completely earnest version was not the most common one and was therefore, by simple economics, considerably more effective than it had any right to be.

“Is that right?” I asked.

“Yes ma’am,” he said.

“Well,” I said. “Game’s still on.”

“I know,” he said. “I’ll go back to watching it.”

He went back to the bar.

Carla leaned over.

“What was that?” she asked.

“A man introducing himself,” I said.

“That,” she said, “was not just a man introducing himself.”

“Watch the game, Carla.”

The game ended.

His team lost and ours won and there was a brief, enthusiastic celebration among the four of us that involved Marcus being insufferable about his fantasy picks and Dana trying to get us all to agree to leave at a reasonable hour because she had children at home and a husband who deserved relief.

We were getting our things together when Logan appeared at the end of the table.

“Can I offer you a ride home?” he asked. To me, specifically.

I looked at him.

The shoulders. The grey at the temples. The warm brown eyes that had been tracking me across a bar for two hours with the patient, unhurried certainty of a man who was going somewhere and knew it.

Dana was watching with the barely-concealed delight of a married woman living vicariously.

Carla was watching with the slightly more complicated expression of a woman doing a rapid risk assessment.

Marcus had already found something on his phone.

“Are you sober?” I asked.

“Always,” he said.

“All right,” I said.

I said goodbye to my people – Dana’s eyebrows communicating an entire paragraph of information that I chose to receive and not respond to – and I walked out of Cutter’s with a man I barely knew and the specific, warm, slightly reckless feeling of a woman who had spent two years making safe decisions and was considering, for one evening, making a different kind.

His truck was out front. A good truck, older, well-kept – the truck of a man who maintained things properly rather than upgraded things perpetually. He opened my door. I got in. He walked around and got behind the wheel and the cab of the truck had the specific, warm smell of clean and engine oil and something else I couldn’t name that I found, involuntarily, appealing.

He started the engine.

“Where am I taking you?” he asked.

I told him.

We drove.

The town was quiet at this hour – the specific, warm quiet of a small city that had done its Tuesday and was resting from it. The streets were familiar and amber-lit and I watched them go by and thought about the man beside me who had looked at me for twenty minutes across a bar and then come over and said you with the simple certainty of someone stating a fact.

“Did you open a detailing studio?” I asked.

“Just got it going,” he said. “The building was my grandfather’s. Space made sense.”

“Do you do a good work?”

“Best in town.”

“Big claim for a new operation.”

“True claim,” he said. “Different thing.”

I looked at him.

He was watching the road with the easy, focused attention of a man who drove the way he did everything else – present, unhurried, not performing the driving.

“Have you been gone for a while?” I asked.

“Long while.”

“What brought you back?”

He was quiet for a moment.

“Felt right,” he said. “That’s the whole of it.”

We pulled up in front of my place.

The street was quiet. My porch light was on. The house was exactly what it was – mine, small, a garden I maintained with adequate rather than exceptional devotion, a porch with two chairs and a table that mostly held coffee cups.

He stopped the truck.

I looked at my house.

I looked at him.

He was looking at me again.

The same look. Close range. The specific, warm, steady look of a man who had asked a question earlier in the evening by simply looking at a woman across a bar and had been waiting patiently for the answer.

“Do you want to come in?” I asked.

It was not quite a question.

“Yes,” he said. Like the first time – direct, simple, the statement of a fact.

I got out of the truck.

He got out of the truck.

We walked up to the porch and I found my key and I put it in the lock and I was aware of him standing behind me at the specific, close, warm distance of a man who has been invited inside and is not yet inside but is very aware of the threshold.

I turned the key.

I opened the door.

I turned around to say something – I don’t remember what, something appropriate to the moment, some line that would have managed the transition – and he kissed me.

Right there in the doorway.

His hands on either side of my face, his body filling the frame behind me, the door handle at my back, and his mouth on mine with the warm, certain, completely unhurried quality of a man who had decided this was happening and was not going to rush it.

I stopped thinking about what I was going to say.