[Callum’s POV]
The supplier shorted me twelve cases of pale ale, which is either incompetence or a personal vendetta, and I'm rehearsing a voicemail so devastating it'll end his career when I pull into the car park and see a silhouette leaving my pub.
Collar up, hands in pockets, moving with the quick stride like he doesn't want to be recognised leaving somewhere he shouldn't be. I know that walk because I've done that walk—the exit of a guy who's been alone with a woman he has no business being alone with at ten on a Tuesday.
The harbour light catches him at the corner and my hands go tight on the wheel. Liam Ashford, walking out of my closed pub like he's got a key and a claim.
I kill the engine and sit there watching his silhouette disappear toward the B&B, and my brain is connecting dots I wouldn’t want to connect at all. Building a picture I would very much like to return to the gallery, receipt and all.
Inside, her door is closed upstairs. The pub smells the way it always does—wood polish, old hops, salt through the kitchen window—but the quiet has a texture tonight, thick and held, the kind that shows up after two people stop talking.
I go behind the bar and start uncrating bottles with the subtlety of a marching band. Crates slamming, fridge doors swinging, the whole percussion section announcing that Callum Ware is home early and absolutely, categorically not performing a territorial display.
Twenty minutes. She takes twenty minutes to come down, and I know because I've been counting.
She comes down the stairs skipping the fourth step but not the ninth, which means her head's somewhere else. Her hair is loose—not sleep-messy, not wind-messy, the specific kind of messy that has someone's hands having been in it written all over.
Her lips are darker than at six. She's wearing the jumper backwards, and she wasn’t when I left. Every detail walks into my brain and sits down without being invited.
"Didn't expect you back yet." She takes her stool, third from the end, closest to the exit, and her voice is doing its impression of casual.
"Supplier shorted me twelve cases. Twelve! The man looked me in the eye last Thursday and shook my hand like we were blood." I pour her ginger ale and myself whisky, and both glasses meeting wood is the loudest sound this room has produced all night. "How was your evening?" I ask it like small talk. It is not small talk.
"Quiet." Her fingers wrap the glass, eyes staying down. Short, curt and straight to the point. Not helping me at all.
"Funny, that." The whisky goes down hot. "Because I saw Liam leaving." Her fingers tighten—one contraction, there and gone—but I've been watching this woman's hands for weeks and I catch it as I always have.
"He came to talk." Her voice is level, which means she's holding it level with both hands.
"Talk about what, exactly?"
"It's complicated, Callum." She bites back. Any other night I might have left it at that, and not push her away with my damn jea—curiosity. Today’s not ‘any other night’.
"It's always complicated with you, isn't it." The words come out edged, bitter, carrying something I never let into my voice because the whole point of being me is that nothing gets under the surface. I'm the fun one, the easy one, the guy who pours another round.
Her eyes come up from the glass. I watch her register the new tone, recalculating me in real time, and my neck goes hot under the collar.
"So the supplier, right—this absolute legend tries telling me his system glitched, and honestly, if I had a pound for every bloke who blamed technology for being terrible—" I reach for the swerve, the emergency exit that's saved me from every serious conversation since puberty.
It dies between us. The words hit the bar and lie there, and the silence afterward knows things neither of us has said.
"Are you angry?" Straight, no shield, and my ribs squeeze tight enough to notice.
"No." Too fast. Both of us hear the lie sitting there on the wood between our glasses, pathetic and mine.
I put the whisky down. My palms go flat against the bar because I need something that doesn't move, something that isn't her.
"I saw him walk out of this pub. My pub, closed, ten at night." My voice has gone somewhere I don't recognise—low, stripped, no punchline. "And my first instinct was to follow that man down the road and ask what the hell he's doing in my building, near my—"
I stop. The word fills my whole mouth and I swallow it so hard my throat burns.
She waits. The harbour laps at stone outside, counting seconds neither of us wants counted.
"Near my server." The wrong word sits between us so loudly I can practically hear it breathing.
"Callum." My name in her mouth, soft and careful, and I can hear what's coming—something kind enough to crack me clean open behind my own bar.
"Don't." One hand up between us. "Don't say my name like that, because when you do I forget why I'm on this side of the bar and not yours."
My jaw is clenched so tight my back teeth ache. My eyes are burning the way they haven't since I was seventeen and my mum sold my drum kit while I was at school—bright and wet and not something I'm going to acknowledge out loud.
"I'm not built for this, Odette." The words tumble out fast because slowing down means stopping. "The jealousy, the competition, lying awake wondering who someone's with and whether I even register on the list."
I drag a trembling hand down my face. "Thirty-two years making absolutely sure I'd never stand in my own pub with my chest turned inside out—and here I am. I don't recognise myself, and I really don't like the man I'm looking at."
Her hand crosses the bar and finds mine. I let her hold on, because pulling away would take something I apparently don't have anymore.
"I'm going to play drums." I slide my hand free, and the absence is immediate—cold rushing into the shape warmth just left. "Back room. Don't wait up."
"Okay." Small and quiet, a word the size of a pinhole, and I don't look at her face because I can't afford what's on it.
The kit waits in the dark, patient and unchanged—the only thing I own that has never walked out of my pub at ten o'clock wearing someone else's history. My hands find the sticks and the first hit is too hard and the second is harder and by the fourth I'm not playing music.
The stick cracks—clean split, wood splintering against my palm—and I don't stop. I keep going with the broken half, snare to tom to cymbal, the sound ugly and shredded, nothing like rhythm and everything like what's actually inside my chest.
My palm stings where the splinter digs in. I keep hitting, because stopping means going back out there, and out there is a woman I'm in love with sitting at a bar I can't leave, and this wrecked sound is the most honest thing I've made in weeks.
Through the wall, faint—footsteps on the stairs. Fourth step, then ninth. Her door closing softly, like an apology she didn't say out loud.
And I'm still hitting.