Someone took my seat. He glanced down the table. Sure enough, her spot had been absorbed. A stranger in a baseball cap had wedged himself in while she was at the bar, deep in conversation with Kevin like he'd always been there. Ethan looked back at Clare.
You can have mine. I'll stand. Ethan Parker, if you stand up right now, we'll pour this beer on your shoes. He blinked. Move your legs.
He moved his legs. He didn't even fully process what was happening until it had already happened until Clare Bennett had turned around, settled herself onto the edge of his thighs, arranged both drinks in her hands like she was completely at ease, and rejoined the conversation with Marcus and Diane as though she had simply changed chairs, as though sitting on her co-worker's lap was an utterly unremarkable event. The table went momentarily, almost imperceptibly quiet, the kind of pause that lasted maybe half a second but felt like five. And then Marcus said something and Diane laughed and the conversation picked back up again and the whole thing moved forward like nothing had happened except that something had happened. Ethan knew that because his ears had gone hot both of them simultaneously which was a thing that happened to him approximately never.
He could feel his own heartbeat in a way that was slightly ridiculous. He had placed both hands flat on the sides of the stool because he didn't know what to do with them, and he was genuinely concerned about where they might land if he didn't pay careful attention. Clare weighed almost nothing. That was the absurd clinical thought his brain produced to cope. She was perched on the very edge of his legs, barely touching him, holding herself upright with a spine so straight she might as well have been sitting in a board meeting.
She was laughing at something Marcus had said. She'd handed Diane her drink. She was completely infuriatingly normal about this. Ethan was not completely infuriatingly normal about this. He looked at the side of her face, the line of her jaw, the way she tucked a strand of dark hair behind her ear when she turned to respond to Kevin.
He looked away. He stared at the beer he'd left on the table and tried to remember how sentences worked. "It's just a bar," he told himself. "She doesn't have a seat. It's a logistical solution.
This is nothing." He almost believed it. 3 minutes passed, maybe four, long enough that the stranges of it should have faded, should have recalibrated into background noise like everything else in the bar. And then the man in the baseball cap, Kevin's new friend, shifted in his chair and said something about needing to find his buddies and stood up. And the space he'd been occupying opened up again.
Cla's seat right there, 6 ft away. Ethan saw it. He knew she saw it, too, because her eyes moved to the empty stool for just a moment, a single brief, entirely deliberate moment before she brought them back to Marcus. She didn't move. She kept talking.
She kept laughing. She adjusted her grip on her own drink and crossed one ankle over the other and said something sharp and funny that made Marcus slam his hand on the table. She stayed exactly where she was. Ethan stopped breathing. Not dramatically, not visibly, just for two or three seconds, the automatic business of inhaling and exhaling simply stopped happening because his brain had encountered a piece of information it didn't know how to process and all available resources had been redirected, he said quietly.
So quietly that only she could hear it under the noise of the bar. There's a seat. Clare didn't miss a beat in her conversation. Didn't turn her head. just said in the same quiet register. Um, right there.