[Callum’s POV]
She's wiping table six like she’s defusing a bomb, and I've been drying the same glass for forty-five seconds because my hands forgot they had a job.
Here's what I know about Odette Marsden. She doesn't drink—not a sip, not even when old Gerald spills his third pint and the whole bar's doing sympathy shots. She gets sick every morning around seven and thinks the bathroom floor between us is soundproof, which—love, it is not.
She flinches when anyone asks where she's from. She threw a diamond into my harbour without blinking, and I am still not over it. Here's what I don't know: everything else.
"You missed a spot on table four." I nod said table, because winding her up is rapidly becoming my favourite sport.
"I haven't started table four." She doesn't look up. Her hair is doing the thing where it escapes whatever she's tied it in and falls across her face, dark against the flush the evening shift puts in her cheeks.
My cloth resumes duties on the glass, which does not need further attention. "Exactly. Table four feels neglected—especially after two toddlers and a woman who doesn't believe in coasters."
She straightens, rag over her shoulder, one hip cocked against the table edge, and listen, I am a grown man who has seen hips before—naked or otherwise—I have been to beaches and festivals, ill-advised nightclubs and private rooms, but the way this woman stands is doing something to my respiratory system I'd rather not focus on.
"Tell table four I'll get to it when I get to it." Her mouth twitches. That's seven. I've been counting her small smiles for five days, and yes, I know that's unhinged.
"Fair enough. You want the rundown on the regulars, since you're staff now?"
"I've been staff for three days." She starts on table four anyway, because she's incapable of leaving a thing undone, which I consider terrifying and also wildly attractive. “I’d say it’s long overdue.”
"My apologies, then, I’ll jumpt right to it. So, Gerald, the fisherman—been proposing to the same woman for six years. Same knee, same speech. She says no, he buys her a pint, they watch the football." I'm talking with my hands, and she's watching them.
"Does she ever say yes?"
"Once, after a particularly good fish pie. She took it back by pudding. It’s almost like a yearly tradition—the next proposal is gonna be soon, you’ll love it." The laugh comes out of her surprised and involuntary, and it's over too fast. Eight. My chest does a thing I'm choosing to ignore.
"And Mrs. Kelleher—retired English teacher, Thursday evenings, gin and tonic followed by a second gin and tonic, and she cries into the second one. Every week. I've never asked why, she's never offered, and somehow that's become the most honest relationship I have."
Odette stops wiping. Her hand goes still and her eyes find mine across the room, and whatever's in her face makes my pulse do a drum fill—quick, involuntary, completely unprofessional.
"That's actually beautiful," she says, soft enough that I have to lean forward.
"Don't tell anyone. I have a reputation." She rolls her eyes, but the corner of her mouth stays up, and I'm collecting these like a man who knows the jar will empty.
"Right—trade. One story for one story, non-negotiable." I pour two teas, because giving my hands a task means they won't do the other thing, which is push that strand of hair behind her ear.
She takes the stool across from me. Close enough that I can see the freckle below her left eye. "Fine. One for one."
"You first."
"I used to work in marketing." She wraps her hands around the mug, and her fingers are long and bare where the ring used to be, and I cannot stop looking at that empty space.
"Marketing what?" I lean my forearms on the bar, and the gap between us shrinks to something my common sense would like me to address.
"Other people's lies." She says it flat, and the temperature drops three degrees. Her eyes go somewhere I can't follow, somewhere behind the steam and whatever she left in London.
I let it close. Pushing a woman like Odette is the fastest way to watch her walk out my door.
"My turn. Did I tell you about the bike?" I settle back, my eyes not leaving her face. "Coast to coast, me and a Triumph that leaked oil like a confession. Slept in fields. Got chased by a farmer's dog in Wales—the kind of chase where you're scaling a fence in motorcycle boots and your dignity is in the previous postcode."
Her shoulders come down from wherever they'd climbed, and her mouth curves. "Why'd you stop?"
"Found the pub. Seagull on the chimney. Seemed like a sign." I shrug.
"Do you miss it?" She's studying me over the rim, and the harbour light through the window is catching her cheekbones and the line of her throat and I am losing this game so badly it's almost art.
"Only when the pub's empty." I hold her gaze one beat too long. "Which it hasn't been, lately."
I mean her. She knows I mean her. Neither of us touches it—it sits between the mugs and the steam, warm and impossible and exactly the kind of complication I've spent thirty-two years dodging.
Her phone shatters it.
The sound cuts through the pub and her body changes—spine snaps straight, knuckles white around the mug, colour draining from her face. She glances at me and I read everything in that look: not now, not you, give me the room.
I grab the crate of empties by the back door. "Recycling," I say, and I'm outside before she has to ask.
The courtyard is cold and smells of salt and old hops. Through the door I catch pieces—not words, just the shape of a voice pulled tight. Then quiet. Then tight again. I stack bottles slowly. Restack them. Give serious thought to a career in bottle arrangement.
When I come back she's at the bar, phone face-down, hands wrapped around a mug gone cold. Her eyes are somewhere else entirely.
I put a fresh tea in front of her. She takes it, and the silence stretches until it's almost comfortable.
"My mother," she says. Barely a whisper. Then quieter, like the words cost something she can't afford: "There might be a letter coming. For me."
That's all she gives. I nod, because nodding is easy and asking is a door she hasn't opened, and I am—despite every instinct telling me to pull this woman close and demand she let me help—a man who knows when to be quiet.
Her eyes come back to the room. Back to me. There's a flicker in them that makes my hands tighten on the bar.
"Callum?" My name in her mouth is small and raw and without armour, and it sounds like a place I didn't know I wanted to live.
"Yeah?"
"Thank you for not—" She stops. Presses her lips together. Stares at her hands.
"For not what?" I ask gently, even though I already know, even though the fact that she almost said it is doing something to the inside of my chest that I have no plan for.
She shakes her head. Picks up her tea. And later tonight, when the pub is dark and I'm behind the kit with sticks in my hands, I will play the rhythm of a man who is in so much trouble it isn't even funny.
Except it kind of is. And that might be the worst part of all.