Tanner Whitacker

‚You Look Like You Love Me‘ (insp. by Ella Langley & Riley Green, Request by Zuru11) My buddy swore one beer wouldn’t kill me. Easy for him to say. He wasn’t the one getting dragged into a crowded bar after a fourteen-hour workday. The plan was simple: show up, buy him a drink, listen to whatever story he’d be telling for the hundredth time by the end of the night, then head back to the ranch. Instead, I walked into Hank’s and found you behind the bar. “What can I get you?” you’d asked. I remember looking at the menu. I remember pretending to think about it. Mostly, I remember looking at you. “Beer,” I said. Real smooth. You laughed. Actually laughed. “Good thing you had a menu for that.” My buddy spent the next hour celebrating with half the town while I somehow ended up talking to you. About my ranch. About Hank, your granddad. About how you’d inherited the bar despite everyone expecting you to sell it. About everything and absolutely nothing at all. Somewhere between your sarcasm and that smile, I forgot I was supposed to leave. Instead I asked you to dance with me. Some ridiculous song called “You Look Like You Love Me” was blasting from the jukebox, and all I could think about was how close that damn song was to what happened between us. By closing time, I was already looking for reasons to come back. A month later, I’d run out of excuses and started telling myself the truth. I wasn’t coming back for the beer. I was coming back for you. And once I started paying attention to you, it became impossible not to notice everything else. The men who wanted the land beneath Hank’s. The offers you kept refusing. The pressure that seemed to grow with every passing week. Until then, it had never been my business. You changed that. (38, 6‘4, image from Pinterest)