Never Been Kissed by Molly O'Keefe

Montgomery state of mind.
    “Did you know what your mother was planning?” Brody asked.
    “The press conference? No. Though, I’m not surprised. Disappointed, but not surprised.”
    Maybe there was hope for the man yet.
    “Your sister will be in touch,” Brody said.
    “Thanks,” Harrison said. “And about payment—”
    Brody hung up, threw the phone onto the passenger seat, and picked up his personal phone. His thumb stroked the face for a moment as he considered his non-options. This … coming back to Bishop, the call he needed to make, the help he was going to have to enlist, it banished the nostalgia and made him claustrophobic.
    At Camp Lejeune for part of his SERE training, he’d once had a black bag over his head for ten hours in the back of a truck. A hostage exercise. All the physical shit required of Marines, he never had a problem with. But the night of that black bag … that was as close as he ever got to wanting to quit.
    If it was claustrophobia or a panic attack, he wasn’t sure, but he’d frozen. He couldn’t pay attention to which direction they were traveling, identifiable sounds. Smells. None of it. His whole world shrunk down to that black bag.
    And the prospect of calling his family made him feel the exact same way. Frozen. Lost.
    All of this was a weird reaction, he got that, disproportionately dramatic. Ed was a good man. And Sean … well, he missed Sean, at times. Missed his chatter.
    They weren’t a threat or asking him to be different.
    But in the end, he just couldn’t convince his body of that.
    Chili was supposed to push Thursday night poker at the Pour House over the edge.
    After all, what poker night wasn’t improved by chili.
    And drink specials. Dollar drafts!
    The stools were full, and half the tables, but no one was eating chili. And no one was playing poker. People weren’t playing darts, or even talking to one another.
    When Sean had taken over the bar from his dad, he’d dreamt of making The Pour House the social hub of the town. Of the county. It was going to be the place to go for fun. For dates. For Friday night hookups. He wanted The Pour House to be a place people gathered to celebrate and commiserate.
    A party, that’s what Sean wanted. Every night of the week.
    What he got was three drunks at the bar and Tammy Wynette on repeat.
    “Doomed,” Sean muttered from behind the bar. “Poker night is just doomed.”
    “Talking to yourself, Sean? First sign of lunacy,” Bill Barnes commented, from the stool at the edge of the long mahogany bar he called home. There were days Sean spent more time with Bill Barnes than with people he actually liked.
    “You’re not eating your chili.” Sean pointed to the bowl in front of Bill.
    “Because it’s gross.”
    “Bullshit.”
    “Why aren’t you eating the chili?” Bill raised the white eyebrow that marched like one big caterpillar across his face.
    Because it’s gross,
Sean thought.
    “Why don’t you play poker?” Sean shot back.
    “I’ve got better things to spend my money on,” Bill grumbled, taking a sip of his fourth dollar draft.
    Maybe that was the problem. No one had money to waste on poker. The town was still climbing its way out of the recession.
    “Why don’t you ask those assholes why they’re not playing poker?” Bill jerked his thumb back toward the corner where two full tables of the film crew sat under fake Tiffany lamps. They were in town taping the reality show
What Simone Wants.
    The star of the show, Simone Appleby, had grown up in Bishop and perpetrated the one truly scandalous crime in the town’s history when she shot her abusive husband in the chest, killed him in the alley right behind The Pour House.
    Simone was filming the last season of her reality show back in her hometown in an effort to help the local economy.
    And as part of that local economy, Sean was real grateful. Because without them it would just be Bill and his cronies at the bar.
    “Because they’re busy