“I don’t know, I replied as I walked several steps away from the two men who seemed to know too much for my liking. Maybe I had been given more than just booze and my senses—and emotions—were just on high.
“I wished you had left him earlier,” John said a bit of sadness in his eye.
“How do you know about my life?”
“It’s on your face. It’s all around you in this place.”
“I’ve never been here before in my life!” I yelled.
The bartender shrugged his shoulders
“He’s just trying to make you feel calm.”
“I’m not calm. Nothing can make me feel calm. I stayed with him for so long and this, this argument happens and now I’m hundreds of miles away from family, our, I mean, my friends.”
John took a step towards me. “What would you want to tell them?”
“That they were right. I never found the guy for me.”
“But you thought you did?”
John took yet another step towards me and I, in turn, walked closer to him.
“Of course. He was all I ever knew. He was my life, and how’s he walked out.
“It’s almost closing time, John,” the bartender quipped.

John held his hand out.
“Just one time, how bout it?”
I nodded and took another step towards him.
I had a strange and a lingering feeling at the touch of his hand. It was something I had missed for a few years and I felt like I was a teenager—who had somehow snuck into a bar—on the first time I was able to how any affection to anyone.

I moved closer to John, closed my eyes, and put my head on his shoulder. The pain of the past lifted and for a another moment, everything felt okay.
No, not just okay, but ethereal.
“What’s going on!”
My eyes spring open at the sound of his voice.
“Brian,”I whispered as I stepped away and fell to the floor.
The bartender jumped over the the bar and stood in front of Brian.
How did he find me in Alabama?
Had he come to apologize?
Could I forgive him and move on?
“Keep him back, Roger!” John yelled as the bartender slammed Brian to the ground.
John dived down next to me.
“Jamie, stay with me, okay?”
I felt at my forehead—-the small bump I had ached with a sharp pain.
“You’re a kind person,” I whispered to John as his face looked golden.
“We’re lost him, Roger.”