Chapter 3 #2
“That’s either freight or crime.”
“On this coast, the difference is paperwork.”
“And which side of the paperwork are you on tonight?”
“Tonight,” he says, and the word comes out slower than the rest, “I’m off duty. It’s new. I’m told people relax.”
“How’s it going?”
“I’ve located one thing on this terrace that isn’t boring. Early results.”
“Flattery, from an auditor?”
“Findings,” he says. “Auditors don’t flatter.”
The drink arrives, the one I actually want, a cold bitter thing I didn’t name out loud, which means he watched what I sent back this afternoon, or the waiter told him.
Either answer should send me home. I drink it.
It’s perfect. One drink I actually drink, I promised Bianca, and the terms said nothing about with whom.
“Your turn,” he says. “The truth about this place. Not the version they’ll print.”
“Kitchen’s forty covers over capacity, service door’s on a ninety-second swing, the spa carries the whole property, and the man who runs the nights sells his tables to anyone with a boat.” I shrug. “The view does the rest. Beauty covers a multitude of staffing decisions.”
He reads me a beat longer than politeness allows.
“Dance with me,” he says. Plainly. A door opened, held.
“I was leaving at two.”
He turns his wrist without looking away from me, the old watch catching the pool light. “Then we have forty minutes, and this DJ is wasting them for everyone. Come waste them accurately.”
Dancing with strangers is a transaction, ten years of gorgeous venues taught me that. Somebody’s proving something, to the room, to an ex, to themselves, and the body is just the receipt. By the second bar I know this is something else.
He doesn’t perform me around the floor. His hand settles at my waist, wide enough that his thumb and little finger find two separate ribs, a fact my skin reports as an emergency.
He moves from the ground up, weight in the right place at the right time, nothing wasted, nothing shown off.
The bass arrives through the tile, through him, into my palm where it rests on his chest. Warm through the linen.
A heartbeat in there somewhere, slower than mine, which is unfair.
“You’re not Milanese money,” I say, near his ear, because up close the jacket’s good but the hands are wrong for it, the watch is wrong for it. “Milan performs. You audit.”
The gray eyes come down to me, and there it is again, that almost-smile he keeps in reserve like the good wine. “And you write brochures for places you don’t believe in, then stand at railings taking them apart. Which of us is working tonight?”
The floor moves us. His hand doesn’t.
“Neither,” I hear myself say.
“Good,” he says, quiet, against the music. “Then nothing that happens tonight is anybody’s business.”
“Your watch is older than this whole club,” I say, because I need somewhere safe to look.
“Fifty-two years.”
“It doesn’t match a thing you’re wearing.”
“It’s not for matching. It’s for knowing exactly how long I’ve been somewhere I shouldn’t be.”
“And how long is that, tonight?”
“Longer than planned,” he says. “The work ran over.”
We dance until the set changes, then don’t stop.
The club performs its whole gorgeous loud show around us, Bianca sails past once with the boat man in tow, blowing me a kiss off her palm like a hand grenade, Dario watches from the bar with a face wiped clean of promotion, and none of it reaches me.
Khristofer’s hand is at my waist, his mouth an inch from my temple saying nothing at all, and I am in so much trouble.
Trouble has details. His thigh brushing mine on the turns, the drag of linen, heat coming off him in a band from chest to belt buckle.
I want his mouth on my throat. I want the hand at my waist lower and less polite.
I want, full stop, at a volume I haven’t allowed myself in years, and if he asked me right now what I was thinking I’d either lie or ruin us both.
It’s nearly two when he draws back enough to look at me properly. Whatever he finds, he considers it once, thoroughly, no second pass needed.
“There’s a private corridor behind the upper bar,” he says. Level. No hurry anywhere in it. Leaving every inch of the sentence to me.
I know exactly what this is. I have a policy about exactly this. I wrote the policy, I ratified it, I’ve defended it in committee against Bianca for years. I can hear it now in my own voice, tinny and far away, a safety announcement in an airport where my flight is already boarding.
“Terms,” I say, and my voice comes out steadier than the rest of me. “No last names. No numbers. No morning.”
He studies me a moment, and I watch something in him settle, as if the conditions confirm something he’d hoped about me.
“Agreed,” he says. “One amendment. You keep the terms, not me. If you change your mind, at any point, about any of it, you say so and I stop being here.”
I put my hand in his.
The corridor is service-plain behind its velvet curtain, cool air, the bass gone muffled through the wall.
A door at the end with a brass lock. He closes it behind us and turns.
In the half dark he’s mostly outline, hands, the watch face catching the light strip under the door. He doesn’t reach for me.
I can hear my own pulse. My imagination, a professional describer of rooms, has moved on to describing what those hands would feel like on bare skin, and it writes well, it’s had all night to draft.
“You can still walk out,” he says.