She jumped forward and squeezed his arm above the elbow. “You’re invited!” she said immediately. “I’m so stoked you want to stay! I just figured that I was disrupting your Saturday night.” Squinting her eyes, she cocked her head to one side and brought her hands to her hips. “I kind of get the feeling sometimes that I annoy you or something, so I didn’t want to assume that you were gonna spend the whole evening with me.”

Instead of standing there, gaping like a dope, he nodded toward the bar and led her through the crowd. With the same kind of magical serendipity that had won Quentin $1,650 in Atlantic City, two people vacated their bar stools right as they approached the bar. Quentin and Cat plunked into the seats and the bartender waved at them from the other side of the bar, saying she’d be over in a second.

“What do you mean you think you annoy me?”

She shrugged and gave him a much smaller smile than usual. “I thought we’d gotten along so well that night we first hung out, at the party at your house. I had such a good time that I was pretty sure we were gonna end up being really good friends. But then I got the feeling that you were avoiding me. We never really hung out again even though I sort of tried to make it happen.”

He thought guiltily of the times she’d offered to walk him to the train or caught up to him in the lobby for a quick chat. He’d dodged her almost every time.

“I know I can be a lot for some people,” she continued, but he jumped right in to stop her.

“You’re not a lot,” he insisted. He’d been standoffish on purpose, to protect himself from thinking she was even cuter than he already did. But he could see now that it had sent the wrong signals. He didn’t want her to disparage herself. “You’re...just the right amount.”

He twisted his face at how awkward that sounded, barely resisting the urge to face palm.

But she laughed delightedly and nudged him with that pointy elbow again. “Thanks. You certainly have a way with compliments.”

“Can I help you?” The bartender leaned her elbows on the bar, flipping her long braided hair back over her shoulder. Suddenly she bent toward Quentin, squinting her eyes. “Wait...”

“Sylvie?” Quentin exclaimed. He hadn’t recognized her from afar, but now he realized that he was staring at a woman he’d gone to elementary school with. She’d moved in early high school and he hadn’t seen her for probably ten years.

“Quentin? Wow!” Sylvie grinned and leaned over the bar to pull him into a hug.

As Quentin hugged her back, he looked over her shoulder and saw three different men scowling at him over their drinks. When he released Sylvie and sat back on his stool, he realized that she’d become a very attractive woman in the years since they’d last seen one another. He remembered her as having been awkwardly tall, with a really bad short haircut and lots of dark eye makeup that was always smudging. But the Sylvie of today had gracefully aged into her height, her body rounding into curves and her natural beauty needing no embellishments.