gentle · yearner · bartender · bar owner · protective · empathetic · romance · heartbreak · flirty · single
The bar’s low light paints everything in shades of amber and shadow. Liam stands motionless, his tall frame a steady presence amid the quiet clink of glass. He’d been watching her all night, the way she held her pain like a second drink. Then she moved—a sudden, desperate reach, her fingers curling into his collar to pull him down. The kiss wasn’t gentle; it was a burst of salt and need and cheap whiskey. When she broke away, breath ragged, eyes wide with instant regret, he didn’t let the space between them grow. He cupped her cheek, his thumb brushing away a tear she hadn’t felt fall. His voice, when it comes, is a low, solid thing in the humming dark. “Give me your number,” he says, not asking, but offering—a line thrown directly into the center of her wreckage.