9. Smooth Move
9
Smooth Move
Negroni
Combine equal parts gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth with ice. Stir, then strain into a rocks glass over ice. Garnish with an orange peel.
DANNY
A round six o’clock, a voice that set my teeth on edge rang out across the bar. “Aunt Barb!”
“Tad, what are you doing here?” She held out her arms, and he flipped up the pass-through to hug her.
I ground my teeth. He didn’t belong behind the bar, but I couldn’t say anything. He might be a smarmy asshole, but he was still my boss’s nephew. He flashed me a shit-eating grin. What was he up to?
Releasing him, Barb said, “I thought my bar was too low-class for you.”
“Did I say that?” His eyebrows went high.
“Only about a dozen times,” I grumbled, plucking a glass from the rack I’d carried out from the back.
Fuck! Still hot from the dishwasher, it burned my fingertips. I bobbled it and almost dropped it.
“Smooth move, Ex-Lax,” Tad crowed.
What the fuck did that mean? Probably some stupid-ass saying from the Stone Age. Regardless, I needed him out of my workspace. I tipped my head toward the other side of the bar. “What can I pour you?”
He sauntered back through the pass-through and bellied up to the bar. “Mojito.”
Clenching my jaw, I grabbed a sprig of mint from the shelf where I hid it to discourage people from ordering fussy drinks. That trick didn’t work on Tad. I shoved the mint into a glass and crushed it with the muddler.
“What’s new, honey?” Barb rolled closer.
Tad leaned on the bar rail and told her about his kids. He had three: a five-year-old, a two-year-old, and a brand-new one who couldn’t be more than a month old. What the fuck was he doing at a bar when his wife had to be exhausted at home? I smashed the mint.
Then he shifted into telling his aunt about work. I’ll admit it, I eavesdropped. He worked with Lucie, whom I hadn’t seen in a while. But he didn’t mention her. Instead, he talked about the celebrity divorce he was covering. What a yawn. Lucie wrote about things that mattered. I wondered if Tad was jealous of the article she’d written about the migrants in Sacramento.
I peered into the glass and found I’d muddled the mint into an unrecognizable slurry. I dumped it into the trash and rinsed the glass. I grabbed another sprig and started again.
I set the drink in front of Tad as he said, “So, I was thinking, what if I took the bar off your hands when you retire?”
“Tad, we talked about this when I offered it to you last summer.” Barb shot me an apologetic glance and shrugged. “He’s family.” Looking back at Tad, she said, “You told me you didn’t have the cash to buy me out.”
“I’m sure I can beat whatever profit-sharing agreement he offered,” Tad said.
I pushed out my chest. “It’s a cash offer.”
“Cash? Where the hell did you come up with six figures?”
“Hard work. Living cheap.” I looked down as I wiped the bar to hide my smug smile. I may have won, but I couldn’t act like a douche about it. Not in front of Barb.
His straw gurgled in his empty drink. “Another,” he said.
I didn’t mind making the next one as much.
An hour later, after I’d put Tad’s drunk ass in a cab, I screwed the bottle pourer into a bottle of Bombay and turned back toward the bar only to find her there. Lucie. Sitting right in front of me. Wearing…lipstick?
I sucked in a breath. Was she some kind of apparition? Or one of those too-fast vampires from the movies I’d watched when I was in middle school?
“Hey, Danny,” she said. Her eyelids drooped, and her skin looked pale. Was she drunk? Couldn’t be. It wasn’t eight yet, and she’d just gotten here. Was she sick?
“You okay?” I leaned my hands on the bar.
“Yeah.” She chuckled. “Just tired. I, um… Could I have a burger and some red wine?”
“Sure.” I took in the circles under her eyes as I reached into my back pocket for my order pad. Her gaze landed on the center of my black T-shirt and stuck there as I snagged the pencil tucked into my bun. “You want everything on that?”
“Everything on what?” she said.
“On your burger?”
She blinked her gaze to my face. “Right. No onions, please.”
“You got it.” I wrote, HB 86 onions on the ticket, clipped it to the old-fashioned order wheel in the pass-through, and twirled it to Norm in the kitchen. I grabbed a bottle of Lucie’s favorite red and poured it into a glass, then set it in front of her.
She laid her hand on the foot of the glass and swirled it gently.
“You sure you’re okay?” I asked.
“Yeah. I…” She cleared her throat. “I haven’t been sleeping much lately.”
I grunted. I already knew that. I’d heard her marching around again last night. I’d resisted the urge to go up and check on her. She didn’t want me. She’d made that clear last month, the morning after Valentine’s Day, when she’d booted me from her bed. Besides—I shoved a pint glass into the glass washer with more force than necessary—I couldn’t afford to spend my energy mooning over her. My commitments to Barb and Leo were the most important things in my life.
I nodded at Frank, two stools over from Lucie, and pulled another IPA for him. I set his empty into the rack and carried it back to the dishwasher even though it wasn’t full yet. Hefting the rack of clean glasses, I returned to the front and started replacing them on the shelves. When I glanced up, Lucie stared at me, her wine seemingly untouched.
“Don’t like the wine?”
Blinking, she took a sip and grimaced. “It tastes weird. Is it a different kind?”
“No, it’s your usual.” I lifted the bottle, uncorked it, and took a sniff. Nothing smelled off. I splashed some into a lowball and sipped it. “Tastes fine to me, but want me to open a fresh bottle?”
“No. I’m sure it’s me. A few things have tasted funny to me lately. Maybe I’m coming down with something.”
Her pale cheeks and shadowed eyes said she was probably right.
“Order up!” Norm called.
I fetched her burger from the pass-through and placed it in front of her, along with a bottle of ketchup and the salt and pepper shakers. Then I poured her a tall glass of water. Maybe she was dehydrated. She was probably too busy worrying about vulnerable people like kidnapped migrants and unhoused people to take care of herself like she should.
When I glanced back at her, her mouth was full, and her eyes were closed in satisfaction. She moaned happily, chewed, and swallowed. “Guess I was hungry.”
“Did you eat lunch today?”
Shoving a fry into her mouth, she screwed up her face. “Maybe? I think I had a cup of yogurt at some point.”
I growled deep in my throat. “You need to take better care of yourself.”
Her tired eyes flashed. “I’m a grown-ass woman. I know how to take care of myself.”
“Do you?” I stared at her a moment as she chewed angrily, then I headed toward the end of the bar to take care of a couple of new customers. By the time I’d finished shaking their margaritas and returned to check on Frank and Lucie, she’d polished off the burger and most of the fries. She’d drunk half the wine but hadn’t touched the water.
Clenching my jaw to keep from reminding her to hydrate, I pulled another beer and set it in front of Frank. He held it up in a toast, then buried his nose in it.
“So, what are you doing tonight?” Lucie dragged a fry through the puddle of ketchup on her plate and popped it into her mouth.
“Me?” I looked around, but Leo was off tonight, and Barb had gone to the back to work on the books.
She snorted. “Yeah, you.”
“Working. Is this a trick question?” The smartest person I knew, she was always about a mile in front of me. She’d gone to a fancy college and everything.
“I meant after work. Maybe you’d like to come up to my place?”
My lungs stopped working for a second. Every cell in my body fizzed with joy as I stared at her. But reality crashed back into me. She wanted another hookup, and I was done with that.
Three strides took me to the sink, where I plugged the drain, opened the hot water tap, and squirted dish soap into the sink. “Need a picture hung or something?” Better to give her an easy out, especially with Frank leaning in.
“No.” She fluttered her eyelashes. “I’ve got something that needs pounding, but it’s not a nail.”
“Hmm?” I stuck my hand into the sink and fished around for something to wash.
“Y’know. My vagina.”
Pain sliced into my thumb. “Shit!” I yanked my hand out of the water and grabbed a paper towel to wrap around the blood welling from my thumb.
“You okay?” She peered over the bar top at my hand.
“Yeah, I’m… Don’t say shit like that while I’m washing knives.”
“You were being deliberately obtuse. Look, I’m exhausted, and I can’t sleep. I think I’d sleep better…you know, with a partner.”
“I’ll be your partner,” Frank said, leering.
“Back off, Frank,” I snarled.
Lucie rolled her eyes. “So, Danny, you in or what?”
“What? No.” I squeezed the paper towel around my thumb.
“No?” Her plush lips curled like she was unfamiliar with the word.
“We want different things. It’s not a good idea for us to”—I glanced at Frank—“do that.” Again.
“You seemed to enjoy it last time, same as me.” She lifted her eyebrows.
“I…” I peered at the door, willing a new customer to come in and save me from this conversation, but it stayed closed. “I’m not interested.”
She narrowed her eyes like she could spot the lie on my face. Then she grimaced and pressed her hand into her belly. “Fine.”
“You sure you’re okay?”
She snorted. “Because I changed my mind about sleeping with you, I must be ill? I mean, the sex was good, Danny?—”
I waved my hand to shush her. Frank and every other patron in the bar didn’t have to know we’d slept together.
“—but it wasn’t so great that I can’t take no for an answer,” she continued like she didn’t care that the entire bar knew our business.
“Good,” I growled.
“Good,” she echoed.
“I don’t mind—” Frank began.
“Shut it, Frank,” Lucie and I said at the same time.
I turned my back to the bar and got out the first aid kit. I found a bandage and wrapped it around the cut on my thumb, then I pulled on a black latex glove.
“Hello, Michael Jackson,” Lucie said. Frank chuckled.
“What?” I said.
“Michael Jackson,” she said. “You remember, he used to wear one glove in his music videos. I danced along to ‘Black or White’ about a million times. No?”
“We weren’t allowed to watch YouTube unsupervised.”
“YouTube? Didn’t you watch MTV every day after school?” she asked.
“Nope. I had a bunch of little brothers and sisters to watch.” Turning back to the sink, I plunged my hands into the soapy water and scrubbed up the knives, more carefully this time. I was cautious not to look at Lucie, though I noticed when she scurried off to the restrooms.
She still hadn’t returned by the time I’d dried and put the knives away. I got an unpleasant prickly feeling in the back of my throat when I peered down the hallway to the restrooms. Finally, I asked our dishwasher to man the bar for a minute, then jogged down the hall and stuck my head into the office. “Hey, Barb, can you cover for a minute, please?”
She looked up from the computer screen. “Thank God. I need to look at something that isn’t a spreadsheet.”
As she wheeled to the bar, I hustled to the restrooms and knocked on the ladies’ room door. “Lucie, you in there?”
She coughed. “Yeah.” Her voice was hoarse.
“You alone?”
“Yeah.” She sounded terrible.
“I’m coming in.”
I pushed open the door. A gagging sound came from the first stall.
I was in front of the door in a second. “Lucie, you okay?”
“Not really. I think I puked up a minor organ.” The toilet paper roll rattled, then the toilet flushed. When she opened the stall door, her face was green and sweat curled the hair at her temples.
I grabbed her elbow and led her to the sink. I started the cold tap and held her wrists under it.
She swayed, and I braced her with my body behind hers. “Feels nice,” she murmured.
“I used to do this with my younger siblings when they were sick to their stomachs. You, uh…you sure that red wine was the only thing you drank today?”
Her red-rimmed eyes flew open. “You think I was day-drinking on a workday?”
I winced. “You don’t seem like yourself.”
“I’m definitely not. But I’m not drunk either.” She pumped the soap and washed her hands, then dried them. “I’m going upstairs to lie down.” She looked a second away from passing out.
“I’ll walk you up,” I said.
She pursed her lips. “Okay. Thanks.”
I knew how much that thanks had cost independent Lucie. Looping an arm around her waist, I slowly guided her out of the restroom to the back hallway that connected to the residents’ rear entrance, then up the stairs.
“Is work going okay?” I asked.
“Work is work, you know?” She squinted up at me.
“I love my work.”
“Even when you cut your hand and have to take care of puking customers?”
I huffed out half a laugh. “Cutting my hand was an accident, but I work at Barb’s because I love taking care of people.”
She glanced at me, then back to the stairs as we continued past the landing to the second floor.
“How’s your book coming along?” I asked.
“Ugh, don’t ask. I started strong, but I’ve kind of lost steam lately. I’ve been feeling uninspired.”
“You’ll find your groove,” I said. “You’re so smart. And driven.”
“Smarts and drive do zero good when I’m exhausted. I need to fucking sleep.”
My stomach clenched. I would not sleep with her out of guilt. She’d hate that. I wouldn’t sleep with her out of a sense of obligation or even a desire to help her. Judging from what she’d said last time, she’d hate that even more.
The only emotion she wanted from me was lust. And although I definitely felt that, I couldn’t follow through. It wasn’t worth it if I was going to feel like shit in the morning. And I would when she kicked me out of bed, expecting me to feel nothing but relief that she wasn’t one of those clingy women who wanted more. So when we stopped in front of her door and she pulled her key from her pocket, I said gruffly, “You going to be okay?”
She brushed my arm off her waist and stood up, pale and straight. “I’ll be fine. Good night, Danny.”
“G’night.” I trudged back downstairs to the bar, my belly still prickling. Goddamn Catholic guilt. Someday I’d move past it and feel proud for standing up for myself.
But not today.