Long nights ended in longer nights at dive bars, making cheap bets with pretty women on pool games, until one clung hard enough for him to have to take them home. He was easy like that; easy to please, easy to drag back into bed.

The bars in Lawrence all knew him. Each bartender knew him as Saint with an eye roll, and each pretty patron knew him as Nicky with their bottom lip between their teeth.

Luckily, Nick wasn’t home very often nowadays, and so he didn’t have to face the awkward tension that arose from all of that, including the kind that came from you.

His favorite bar’s favorite bartender. You were the one person who got close enough to know an inkling of the turmoil churning in Nick’s head — which meant that you had to be pushed away immediately. No matter how pretty you were, or how quiet things got when you were around.

This was a rare occasion that he was home, and Nick was always a bit of a sucker, wasn’t he? Crawling right back to your bar, tail between his legs, because even if he knew he’d push you away in the morning, seeing your face was the thing that he wanted the most.

“There’s my pretty girl,” he says upon his entrance, arms tossed up, lip quirked in the corner. “I’ve missed you.”

That part was true. Nick didn’t add on, though, that the missing part was conditional, and temporary.

“Still got room in your heart to get me a cold beer and a lime?”