2. TWO #2
But tonight I’d been quiet and also not listening, which Jagger caught, because Jagger catches everything that involves another person’s emotional state. It’s his curse. He’s a six-foot-two feelings detector in a Tom Ford suit and he cannot turn it off.
“—and Caleb’s been sitting there for twenty minutes without saying a word, which, fine, that’s Caleb on any given Sunday.
” He swirled his bourbon. “But he’s also been staring at the concierge desk for at least nineteen of those minutes, and since the concierge desk is currently empty because it’s Sunday, I’m going to go ahead and ask. ”
I drank.
Danny set his glass down, slow. “It’s been more than tonight.”
“How long?” Jagger said.
“About a month.”
Jagger put his glass down and leaned back in the booth and pressed both hands flat over his heart like he’d been shot. The performance was flawless. He should have been on a stage somewhere.
“A month. A whole month, and you didn’t bring it to the group?
This is a sharing group, Caleb. We are men who share now.
Danny shared.” He pointed at Danny. “Danny Sterling, the man who once fired a bartender for one extra ice cube, went and fell in love and shared it with the group, and now it’s a precedent. ”
“You share, Jagger,” Danny said. “The rest of us maintain boundaries.”
“Boundaries are for people who don’t have friends willing to pry. And lucky for you, you have me.”
I took a sip. Set the glass down. Jagger was looking at me with the grin that meant he was not going to let this go, and Danny was looking at me with no expression at all, which meant the same thing.
“She’s the concierge,” I said.
“I gathered that from context clues. Does she know you’ve been—” He made a vague gesture with his bourbon hand, sloshing a little. “—lurking?”
“I don’t lurk.”
“You absolutely lurk. You lurk professionally. It’s on your business card.”
“No. I don’t know. Maybe. She caught me looking last week.”
“Caught you looking,” Jagger repeated. “Okay. And did you, at that point, do anything? Say anything? Nod? Wave? Blink in a way that communicated human warmth?”
“No.”
“Outstanding. Truly outstanding work. A month of surveillance and your move was to get caught and then do nothing.” He looked at Danny. “Is this what I looked like?”
“You looked worse,” Danny said. “You went to the kitchen.”
“I went to the kitchen to compliment the chef.”
“You went to the kitchen because you couldn’t stay in your chair.”
Jagger opened his mouth, closed it, drank. “Fair. At least I didn't spy on her through the security camera's.”
I wasn’t going to tell them the rest of it — how long the look had lasted, what it felt like to watch her count the seconds the way I’d been counting them for weeks, what happened in my chest when she passed four and was still there.
That was mine. I wasn’t putting it on a table next to bourbon glasses for Jagger to workshop.
But there was something I needed to say, and the cake story had given me enough runway to say it without it sounding like what it was.
“There’s a member,” I said.
Jagger’s grin dropped. Danny went still.
“Who?” Danny said.
“Tom Griffin.”
“The loud tipper?” No joke in it now, from either of them. “What’s he done?”
"He crowds her desk. Leans in past where she's comfortable, takes her space, makes her be the one to move. Last week she held out a confirmation card and he made sure his hand dragged across hers when he took it." I took a beat. "Slow enough that he meant it."
The table went quiet.
"He touched her," Jagger said. Not a question. The charm was gone. Under it he had the same cold thing Danny had — the thing they'd both built their empires on. People forgot Jagger had it because the smile was so good.
"Barely. Knuckles across her fingers on a card pass. She dropped it the second she felt contact. If I called it, he'd say it was an accident and I'd be the one making a scene."
"But it wasn't an accident?" Danny questioned.
"No."
"So he's already past the line. He's just built himself deniability."
“For now,” I said. “Next time he won’t need it.”
Nobody talked for a few seconds. Elliot had put his phone down and was watching me with an expression I couldn’t read, which was unusual — Elliot’s face didn’t do much but what it did was generally legible. This one was new.
“What are you going to do?” Danny said.
I’d known for a week. I’d been keeping it to myself because saying it out loud in front of the three men who knew me best would make it real, and real meant I’d have to deal with what was underneath it.
“She closes down the desk at one every night,” I said. “Walks out alone. No one waiting for her. No one walking her home.”
I set my glass down.
“That’s done. She’s not walking out of here on her own anymore.”
It came out flat, the way everything comes out of me. Danny heard what was under it. Jagger heard it too. They’d both been here — stood in this booth and said their own version of the same sentence about the woman who’d taken them apart.
Jagger picked up his bourbon, lifted it an inch. Not a toast. An acknowledgment. One man recognizing another man’s fall.
“Well,” he said, smiling. “Welcome to the club, brother.”
Elliot blinked. Looked at Jagger, then Danny, then me. “Is this a different club from the one we’re currently sitting in, or—”
“Metaphorical, Elliot.”
“Ah.” He picked up his water glass. “Congratulations, then. I think.”