“Gimlet?” I said.
She nodded and turned away, starting to mix.
“What are you having?” I asked him. He was sitting in front of a pale draft beer. “I hope you haven’t paid for that yet. It’s supposed to be on me.”
Sam looked over at me and smiled a sorrowful smile. “They made me pay when they handed over the beer,” he said. “But that just means you’ll have to buy my second.”
“Fair enough.”
The bartender put my drink in front of me and I handed her my credit card. She disappeared.
“I mean, you say that, but for my second beer, I plan on ordering the most expensive one on the menu.”
We were both sitting facing forward, looking at each other with glances and side eyes.
“That’s OK,” I said. “It’s the least I can do since you took the time to teach me this.”
I started playing “Chopsticks” on the bar with my right hand as if the keys were underneath it. Sam angled his body toward me to watch.
“Very good!” he said when I was done.
“A plus?” I asked.
He thought about it while sipping his beer. “A-minus,” he said as he put his beer down. “You just missed it by a hair.”
“What?” I said. “Where did I go wrong?”
“You missed a note.”
“No, I didn’t!” I said.
“Yes, you did. You did this,” he said, hitting the bar with the same fingers I’d hit it with just a few moments ago. “And it’s this.” He hit the bar again. It looked exactly like the first one.
“That’s the same thing.”
Sam laughed and shook his head. “Nope. It’s not.”
“Do it again.”
“Which one?”
“Do what I did and then do what the real thing is.”
He started to repeat mine.
“No, no,” I said. “Slower. So I can spot the difference.”
He started over and slowed it down.
He did mine.
And then he did his.
And there it was. Right toward the end. I’d skipped a key.
I smiled, knowing I was wrong. “Aw, man!” I said. “I did mess it up.”
“That’s OK. You’re still very good for a beginner.”
I gave him a skeptical look.
“I mean,” he said, his whole body shifting away from the bar and toward me. “You play the bar beautifully.”
I rolled my eyes at him.
“I’m serious, actually. If you got into it, I bet you could be really good.”
“You probably say that to all the girls,” I said, waving my hand at him, dismissing the compliment. I gracefully picked up my gimlet and slowly brought the filled-to-the-brim glass to my lips. It was sweet and clean. Just the littlest bit dizzying.
“Just my students,” he said.
I looked at him, confused.
“Now seems like a good time to tell you I’m a music teacher,” he said.
I smiled at him. “Ah, that’s awesome. What a perfect job for you.”
“Thanks,” he said. “And what about you? Are you some big travel writer now? My mom said she saw your name in Travel + Leisure.”
I laughed. “Oh yeah,” I said. “I was. I did that for a while. But, uh . . . no, now I’m actually running the store.”
“No way,” Sam said, disbelieving.
“Shocking, I know,” I said. “But it’s true.”
“Wow,” he said. “Colin Blair’s greatest wish. There’s a Blair running Blair Books.”
I laugh. “I guess dreams do come true,” I said. “For my dad at least.”
“But not for you?” Sam said.
“Not the dream I originally dreamt, as you know,” I said. “But I’m starting to think you don’t always know what your dreams are. Some of us have to run smack into one before we see it.”
“Ah,” Sam said. “Cheers to that.” He tilted his glass toward me and I clinked mine against his. “May I change the subject ever so briefly?” he said.
“Be my guest,” I said.
“You seem to get even more beautiful with time,” he said.
“Oh, stop it,” I said, pushing his shoulder away with my hand.
I was flirting. Me. Flirting.
It feels so good to flirt. No one ever talks about that. But in that moment, I felt like flirting was the very thing that made the world go around.
The excitement of wondering what the other person will say next. The thrill of knowing someone is looking at you, liking what they see. The rush of looking at someone and liking what you see in them. Flirting is probably just as much about falling in love with yourself as it is with someone else.
It’s about seeing yourself through someone’s eyes and realizing there is plenty to like about yourself, plenty of reasons someone might hang on your every word.
“So you’re a music teacher,” I told him. “Where do you teach?”
“Actually, not far from Blair Books. I’m just over in Concord,” he said.
“Are you serious?” I said. “You’ve been that close by and you never stopped in to say hello?”
Sam looked at me and said, very sincerely, “If I had known you’d be there, I assure you, I’d have rushed over.”
I could not stop the smile from spreading across my face. I grabbed my gimlet and took a sip. Sam’s beer was almost finished.
“Why don’t I get you another?” I said.
He nodded and I waved the bartender over.
“Your most expensive beer on the menu,” I said to her gallantly. Sam laughed.
“That’s a pretty rich stout, are you sure you want that?” the bartender asked.
I looked at Sam. He put his hands in the air as if to say, “You’re in charge.”
“That’ll be fine,” I said to her.
She left and I turned back to him. We were both quiet for a minute, unsure what to say next.
“What’s your favorite song to play?” I asked him. It was a stupid question. I knew it when I asked it.
“On the piano?”
“Sure.”
“What do you want to hear?” he asked.
I laughed. “I didn’t mean now. There’s no piano now.”
“What are you talking about? We played ‘Chopsticks’ right here on this bar.”
I laughed at him, game to play, but suddenly having a hard time remembering what songs are played on a piano. “How about ‘Piano Man’?”
Sam made a face. “A little on the nose, don’t you think?”
“It’s all I could think of!”
“All right, all right,” he said. “It’s actually a good choice anyway because it has a nice bit of show-off flair at the beginning.”
He straightened his posture and rolled up his sleeves, as if he were playing an actual instrument. He moved a napkin out of the way and then picked up my drink. “If you could please get this out of my way, miss,” he said.
“Certainly, sir,” I said.
He interlaced his fingers and stretched them out away from his chest.
“Are you ready?” he asked me.
“I was born ready.”
He nodded his head dramatically and began to run his hands over the bar, as if there were a full piano right there in front of him. I watched as his fingers glided over the nonexistent keys. He was so confident as he pretended to play that I almost believed it.
“Excuse me,” he said as he was playing, “but I believe the harmonica would have come in by now.”
“What? I can’t play the harmonica.”
“Sure you can.”
“I don’t know the first thing.”
“You must know how musicians hold harmonicas. I assume you’ve seen at least one blues band in your life.”
“I mean, sure.”
He kept his head down, looking at the bar, playing. People were starting to look at us. He didn’t care. Neither did I.
“Let’s hear it.”
I surprised myself and I did it. I put my hands up to my mouth as if there were a harmonica between them and I ran my mouth over the space it would have occupied.