A Fresh Spark: Part One

The bartender places an old-fashioned on the coaster in front of me and immediately turns to take care of another customer at the far end of the hotel bar. The disappointment I feel is mixed with relief, as the temporary bravery I had built up to perhaps flirt with the cute younger man dissipates. Silly idea, anyway. Right? I mean, I know I’m not bad looking, but I’m certainly not the twenty-something sexpot I once was. More than that, ever since my husband and I split, I have this sense that people can smell it on me. Eau de divorcé.

Experimentally, I run my finger along the edge of the glass the way I’ve seen women do in movies as a seduction tactic. Only, I accidentally knock the orange slice off the rim and right onto my lap, stamping my silk dress with citrus. 

“Ope!” I exclaim, as if I’ve suddenly become my midwestern college roommate, dontcha know. I glance over at the couple a few spots down from me and throw them my best how embarrassing, am I right? smile. It comes off extremely doofy, but it’s just as well; they’re so enamored with each other that they don’t even notice. I feel irrationally rejected.

I toss the orange wedge back into my drink, because who cares? I’m a mom; I have a high threshold for disgust, and this barely approaches the line. Finally, I take a sip and damn, I don’t expect it to be this good, not even with the $17 price tag that has become so commonplace for cocktails regardless of what kind of establishment serves them. This is worrisome, because I promised myself I would only have one. I came to New York for a work conference, not to develop a drinking problem. 

I also came to New York to get out of my post-divorce rut. Perhaps to do some shopping and begin to assemble a wardrobe that reflects who I am now (Hence the sexy dress. I am a sexy dress person now!)

And, very tentatively, to dip my toe back into the waters of… not the dating pool, but potentially the get-railed-so-hard-I-forget-how-much-much-life-blows-for-a-few-moments pool? Yes, that. I would very much like to swan dive into that particular pool, and I know my now ex-husband has already done at least two flying leaps off the high dive (before we split) as well as a sort of synchronized swimming routine at a sex party sometime after, if the soccer-dad gossip network is accurate. And it is always accurate.

I sigh. It’s not a competition, of course, but I would love for it to be my turn to do something scandalous for once. Our girls are grown now and out of the house. Just in time for us to break their hearts with a decision that should have been made ten years ago, minimum.

The shame of the failure washes over me anew, as it usually does when I’m idle, and I reach for the drink again, but my hand stops. I’ve never had a problem with alcohol, but something still tells me it’s not a good idea to get drunk right now. Not just because I’m in the city by myself and in an emotionally fragile place, but because it felt like a knee-jerk reaction, and I’ve sworn off being controlled by jerks.

I lift my hand to flag down cute younger bartender, but he’s deep in conversation with that other guest. Seemingly someone who didn’t have to work up the nerve to chat with him, and who could probably pull off the drink-rim-finger-drag with the ease of a Bond girl. Before I can crane my neck to get a good look at her, just to rub salt in the wound of my own failings, a voice from behind me causes the hairs on the back of my neck to stand on end.

“Aww, don’t tell me you’re leaving already, Belle.”

I know that voice. I know it so well. Too well.

Unable to help it, I snap my head around with absolutely zero chill, and lay eyes on him for the first time in five years.

“Vinnie,” I say on an exhale as if I’ve just sprinted across the room to catch up to him.

He smirks and emits a low chuckle that sends bubbles of joy sliding up my spine. I try to ignore the euphoric sensations threatening to overwhelm me. Underneath my excitement is befuddlement. Because Vinnie and I met in online university when I went back for my Master’s Degree, but eventually had to cut ties entirely. It was nothing untoward, not actually, but there was… chemistry. A lit flame between us that had to be snuffed out as soon as it appeared. We had talked a lot, but had never even met in person. Until right now.

I shake myself from my reverie and refocus on him.

He motions around at the room and says, “What are you doing here?”

I suck in a breath and say, “Uuuh,” with my mouth hanging open like I’ve been caught doing something wrong. Then, I remember that he isn’t asking about my presence at the bar and (temporary) intention to find some nice (or not nice) man to fuck me senseless. No, he simply wants to know what I’m doing in New York. Or at this particular hotel. Or… Christ, Annabelle just answer the man’s question!

“Uuh, a… conference! Writer’s conference. Not at this hotel, I hate staying in the conference hotel when I got to conferences. Though, I haven’t actually been to a conference in many years, it’s not like I’m some conference junkie or something, hah! I just decided to go to this conference, but didn’t wanna stay in the conference hotel, and wow the word conference has stopped feeling like a real word, hasn’t it?”

My cheeks must be bright red as I can feel the mortification born of my babbling seeping out of my pores and oozing into the ether.

If they are, and of he notices, he simply chuckles again, then suavely slides into the bar chair next to me.

“I have a theory that if you say any word the right number of times it loses all meaning. The beginnings and ends meld together, the pronunciation becomes moot, and we all just turn into cave people grunting sounds that only make sense to us.”

I’m gaping at him again, but it cannot be helped.

“I feel like I wrote almost those exact words in a blog post once,” I say.

His smirk electrocutes me almost as much as his next words.

“You know something? I feel like I read that one. Maybe internalized it,” he says with another low chuckle. “Sorry for the unintentional plagiarism.”

“You read my blog?” I ask, but stupid cute younger bartender has reappeared after apparently pulling himself away from woman-who-shall-remain-faceless.

“What can I get for you?”

Vinnie turns to me, then points to my drink. “Worth it?”

“Oh, actually, yes.”

“Actually?” the bartender says, putting a hand to his heart. “Madam, you wound me.”

Okay, about five minutes ago that line would have made me smile, but now I’m just annoyed by his terrible timing, so he loses the cute moniker immediately.

I throw him a non-committal shrug and he runs through the list of bourbons with Vinnie as I take a sip of my previously abandoned cocktail.

“You know something?” Vinnie says after the bartender leaves. “It just occurred to me that we’ve never actually met in person before.”

“Right?! But it feels like we have.”

“Totally. I mean… enough video calls and reality starts to bend, I guess.”

“Yeah,” I say looking down at my glass and surprisingly seeing that I’ve begun trailing my finger delicately along its edge without thinking about it.

“How’s Hank?” he says.

I look up, feeling air swoop over my eyes as they widen like a doe’s.

“Uh,” I say, then reflexively tuck my thumb under my index and middle fingers so that I can rub the spot where my wedding band used to lay. I don’t notice I’m doing it at first, but his eyes move down immediately.

He stills for a moment, then looks up at me.

“Oh no,” he says, and his forlorn expression conveys that he means it.

I need to be clear; this man was never a homewrecker. We were friends. Peers. We worked on some projects together. We wrote together. It got intimate, as any creative partnership does, but… there was too much of a spark between us. Fire seemed inevitable. And once that was clear, though we never explicitly spoke of it, he was the one to take himself out of the equation. We stopped communicating. We never even had another class together, which I have to imagine he had some sort of a hand in.

My marriage had been over for a long time before meeting Vinnie. I never told him this, of course, because I hadn’t fully admitted it to myself. But Hank and I had stopped trying. Stopped tending to our fire. Stopped knowing one another the way we needed to. We were just holding out for the twins to leave for school, and almost immediately after they did, we called it quits.

That was almost nine months ago, but sometimes it feels like last week. It was, and is, such a confusing mixture of despair and relief. Of failure and freedom. I still feel like a walking contradiction every day. And the only ones who know about this in detail are my best friend Jackie, my therapist, and God. (God is nicest to me about it. Thanks, God.)

My therapist, whose name is—weirdly—also Jackie, has been urging me to move my life forward. My friend Jackie has said that if she gets on the phone with me one more time without hearing a story about me having my guts rearranged she’s going to fling herself off the side of the tallest building in her vicinity. We live in the suburbs of New Jersey, so this isn’t a fatal threat, but that’s all the more reason for me to worry she’d actually do it.

“Belle, I had no idea,” Vinnie says. “When?”

“Oh,” I say, waving my hand like it’s no big deal, even though it couldn’t be a bigger one. “February.”

His eyes widen and his eyebrows arch upward. “Oh wow,” he says in an almost whisper just as formerly cute bartender delivers his drink.

He doesn’t touch his old-fashioned and mine likewise sits on the bar next to his, temporarily abandoned yet again as I launch into the story.

Vinnie nods and mhm’s and sighs in all the right places. He asks gentle, tentative questions. Some moments, I can tell he almost reaches a hand over to maybe rub my shoulder, but thinks better of it. He’s being incredibly understanding and respectful, but part of me wishes he wouldn’t be.

Still, I give the story its due, and finally land on my more pressing problem of what to do about the girls and their disillusionment.

“You know,” he says, after a long moment of silence, “my parents split when I went to college.”

“Did they?” I say with fresh intrigue.

He nods. “I was crazy mad at them. For a while,” he says, then seems lost in thought for a few moments.

I can’t help but interrupt his thoughts to ask, “And then?”

“Oh, right,” he says, shaking himself slightly. “I… eventually I realized that… my parents are people. I spent most of my teenage years wishing they could treat me like my own person, but… there I was treating them like some trope. Some entity that needed to sustain its integrity. To never change. To be my parents forever, but… but that wouldn’t actually be respectful of them, you know?”

I start nodding. “Like if you get to be your own person then so do they.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“And,” I say, then pause to cringe before going on. “How long did it take you to come to that very wise conclusion?”

“Do you really wanna know?” he says with a grin.

“I don’t,” I say, shaking my head, and laughing for the first time in a while, as the conversation has gotten fairly heavy since he noticed the absence of a ring on my appointed ring finger.

He chuckles and says, “I’ll do you the service of keeping it to myself, then. But, Belle?”

“Yeah?” I say, making full eye contact with him.

“I think it’ll be okay sooner than you think.”

I sigh. “Thank you. I think I know that, it’s just hard to… hold?”

“Yeah, I get it. I mean, I don’t have kids so I really don’t, but… I also get it.”

I smile at him, and he holds it for a moment before looking over at our drinks. I open my mouth to say something about how the ice has been rudely impatient while we had our conversation, but he’s already flagging down the bartender, who is new. A cute little tattoo’d and overly-pierced pixie who grins at Vinnie in a way that makes me wish I had pointy Fae teeth to bare at her while his back is turned.

He is graceful and kind but does not encourage her flirtatious comments. He just asks her to put both drinks on room 222 and then flicks his head away from the bar and says, “Let’s take these to go, I wanna show you something.”

Before I can reply, he’s moving, so I grab my drink and can’t help but throw the girl a non-pointy grin. She is, surprisingly, grinning right back at me, and I get a little thrill that women really can be happy for other women. I instantly forgive her for her charming banter and reason that she needs to earn tips, and she’s good at it. I stop just short of saluting her as I leave, lest I spill more orange liquid on this far-too-expensive dress.

A/N: I set out to write this as a snippet and ended up with 2.4k words, oops! But, how delightful! I honestly wanted to write a smutty one-shot, but just as with my fanfic, I can't just write smut, there need to be STAKES and EMOTIONS 🙄🤭

oh well, there will definitely be smut eventually! subscribe for updates if you aren't already!