Last Call

You'd been circling each other all summer. Tonight the orbit finally collapsed.

The patio bar was the kind of place that felt like someone's backyard — string lights sagging between wooden posts, picnic tables sticky with spilled beer, a speaker somewhere playing something with too much bass. Late August heat clung to everything. The kind of night where your shirt sticks to your back and nobody cares.

Nadia was across the table, half-listening to the conversation, tracing the rim of her glass with one finger. She hadn't looked at me directly in twenty minutes. Which is how I knew she was thinking about me.

We'd been doing this all summer. The group hangs, the shared rides home, the texts that started practical and ended at 2 a.m. with neither of us saying what we actually meant. She was seeing Tomás. I was seeing — someone. It didn't matter. What mattered was the way her knee had been pressed against mine under the table for the last hour and neither of us had moved.

"I'm getting another round," she said, standing up and stretching in a way that lifted her top just enough. She looked at me over her shoulder. "Come help me carry."

It wasn't a question. I followed her inside.

The bar was packed, bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder, and she navigated through them like water through rocks. I lost her for a second near the hallway to the bathrooms, and then her hand was on my wrist — warm, certain — pulling me sideways through a door into the narrow corridor where the light was dim and the music was muffled and we were suddenly, finally, alone.

She leaned against the wall and looked up at me. Not smiling. Not teasing. Just — open.

"We keep almost doing this," she said quietly.

"Yeah."

"I'm tired of almost."