Manny Ruiz, 53, forensic accountant from Chicago, sits at a sticky Formica tiki bar counter in Tampa, staring at the dark rum and coke sweating through a paper napkin in front of him. It’s mid-July, the humidity so thick it coats the back of his throat with salt and the faint sweet tang of grilled pineapple from the food truck parked out front. He just wrapped the last deposition of a week-long fraud case targeting a local veterans’ housing charity, and his leather bound work notebook is crammed full of scribbled figures and cross-referenced expense report line items. He’s been a rigid rule follower his entire adult life—refuses to get a smartphone over security concerns, pays all his bills three weeks early, hasn’t broken a single self-imposed work boundary in 27 years of his career. His ex-wife left him eight years prior, saying he valued his spreadsheets more than the spontaneous weekend trip to Mexico she’d spent three months planning, and he hasn’t so much as flirted with anyone since.
A woman slides onto the stool two spots down, and he recognizes her immediately. It’s Lila Marquez, 32, the paralegal for the opposing counsel, the woman who’d sent him 37 snarky emails over the past five days fighting his requests for 2019 bank records, who’d rolled her eyes at him three times that morning when he’d pressed for access to unredacted expense receipts. She orders a frozen mango daiquiri, and when they both reach for the stack of paper napkins between their stools at the same time, their elbows brush. Her skin is warm, a little sticky from the humidity, and he yanks his arm back like he’s been burned, mumbles an awkward apology. She snorts, swirling the neon yellow daiquiri with a paper straw, and says she’s off the clock, no need for the stuffy corporate act he hides behind all day.
He hesitates, then nods, offers to buy her next drink. It’s a direct violation of rule three in his work notebook, the one that explicitly forbids fraternizing with opposing counsel in any capacity, but for some reason he doesn’t care right now. She accepts, sliding onto the stool directly next to him, and he catches a whiff of coconut sunscreen mixed with faint jasmine perfume over the smell of rum and salt. The steel drum band in the corner kicks into a cover of a 90s ska track he used to play bass for in his college band, and he mentions it offhand. Her eyes go wide, she says she loves that band, her dad used to blast their cassettes in his pickup truck when he drove her to soccer practice as a kid. They talk for 45 minutes, no mentions of depositions or redacted documents. She tells him she’s been working 16 hour days for two weeks, her boss takes all the credit for her work and yells at her when she misses even the smallest deadline. He admits he only took this case because the fraud was stealing from veterans, that most of his regular clients are rich guys trying to hide assets from their ex-wives, and he hates it half the time. Their knees keep knocking under the bar, neither of them moves away, and when she passes him a bowl of spiced candied pecans the bartender set down between them, her thumb brushes his wrist for half a second, sending a jolt up his arm he hasn’t felt in years.
The first firework bursts over the bay, bright red and gold, and the whole bar cheers. It’s the city’s annual veteran benefit show, he’d seen flyers taped to streetlights all week but had planned to go back to his hotel and finish his expense reports instead. She grabs his wrist, tugs him toward the back wooden deck, says the view is way better out there. He lets her, no overthinking, no scribbling a note about unprofessional conduct in his notebook before he stands. The deck is packed, a group of guys in veteran ball caps pass around a cooler of cheap beer, and someone bumps into her from behind. She stumbles forward, presses up against his chest, and his hand lands on her waist to steady her, his palm pressing into the soft cotton of her blue sundress. She doesn’t step back, just tilts her head up to look at him, the fireworks painting streaks of blue and purple across her face, and says she thought he was the most boring, uptight man she’d ever met the first day of depositions, but now she thinks he’s just hiding from having any fun.
The old, rigid voice in his head screams that this is wrong. He’s 21 years older than her, they’re on opposite sides of a 1.2 million dollar fraud case, his ex-wife left him for a reason, that he’ll regret this in the morning. But for the first time in eight years, he doesn’t listen to that voice. He doesn’t kiss her, not right there, not with a hundred people milling around, not when they’re both still tied to the work that brought them here. He asks if her flight back to Atlanta is tomorrow afternoon, she nods, says it leaves at 3. He says he knows a little diner 10 minutes from the airport that makes the best key lime pie in the state, asks if she wants to meet him there for breakfast. She grins, plucks his beat-up 2016 flip phone out of his hand, types her number in, saves it as “Lila (the one who hates your document requests)”.
The final firework bursts overhead, bright white, fading to wispy pink smoke that tangles in the palm tree fronds drifting in the bay breeze. He tucks the flip phone back into his slacks pocket, and for the first time in almost a decade, he doesn’t draft a color-coded to-do list for the next day before he leaves a bar.
