Chapter Thirteen #2
He poured Sero's Shirely Temple over ice with a wedge of lime without being asked.
Same as always. He walked it over and set it down and Sero looked at him, really looked, the way he'd looked at Amani the night after the cum-harvesting when Amani had sat with him at this bar and told him the truth about what Trevor had done, and Sero's dark eyes moved over the hoodie and the jeans and the careful way Amani was holding himself and then he picked up his drink and took a sip.
"You changed the limes," Sero said.
Amani blinked. "What?"
"The lime in this. It's different from the ones Bethany was using."
"Bethany uses the wrong compartment. She puts them with the lemons and they—" He stopped.
Sero was smiling at him. Not a big smile.
Not a sympathetic smile. Just the quiet, knowing smile of someone who had sat on this stool a hundred times and who was telling Amani, without saying it, that some things were still the same and some things were still worth noticing and the limes were in the right compartment again.
Amani's throat went tight. "Yeah. I moved them back."
"Good." Sero took another sip. "Bethany means well, but she doesn't understand citrus hierarchy."
A sound came out of Amani that was almost a laugh.
Almost. It got about halfway there before something caught it and it turned into a breath instead, and Sero heard the difference and didn't remark on it.
They sat there in the noise of the club while the half-laugh hung between them like something fragile that neither of them wanted to touch.
Sero didn't mention the hoodie. Didn't ask if he was okay.
He just sat on his stool and drank his Shirley Temple and when his glass was empty he set it down and said, "Same again," and Amani made it and brought it over and Sero said, "Trevor says hi.
He wanted to come tonight but he's got a practical with Miriam. "
"Tell him I said hi back."
"I will." A pause. Then. "You know where to find me."
That was all. No pressure, no probing, no you should talk to someone or have you thought about therapy or it gets better.
Just, you know where to find me. The same thing Amani had said to Sero, in this bar, months earlier, when Sero was the one sitting on a stool with something broken behind his eyes.
The words had come around in a circle, the way they always did in this place, and they landed on Amani now the way they'd landed on Sero then, not as a solution but as a door that would stay open whether you walked through it or not.
"I know," Amani said.
Sero nodded and went back to watching the room.
Amani went back to making drinks.
The night went on.
Lady Leo appeared at eleven.
She was doing her rounds, the circuit she made every night, moving through the club with the unhurried precision of a lioness surveying her territory.
She stopped at the bar and looked at Amani.
He could see her cataloging: the hoodie, the sneakers, the hands wrapped around a glass he was polishing too intently to be casual, the stool behind him that he'd actually used.
She didn't ask if he was fine. She didn't ask about the glass he'd broken. She knew. Bethany would have told her, or she'd heard the shatter from her office, or she had the omniscience that came with running a building full of people whose worst nights played out in her rooms.
What she said was: "Marco and I have been talking about the security rotation. We're making some changes."
Amani's hands stilled on the glass. "What kind of changes?"
"More coverage on the late shifts. Escort policy for staff leaving after three AM. I'm also bringing someone new in to head the security team. Someone from enforcement."
She said it casually, the way she said everything that mattered, as if it had already been decided and the informing was a courtesy rather than a consultation.
But she was watching Amani's face as she said it.
Amani understood that this was not casual at all.
This was his mother saying: I could not protect you before, but I can change what happens next, and I am going to change it.
"Anyone I know?" he asked, because he already suspected the answer and he needed to hear her say it.
Lady Leo's mouth curved. "The detective who brought you home made an impression. He's good at his job, he understands our world, and—" She paused, choosing her words with care. "He seems to understand you. Which is not a quality I was screening for, but it's not one I'm inclined to overlook."
Amani said nothing. He wasn't sure what to do with the complicated tangle of feelings that formed at the mention of Nero, the relief, the irritation, the memory of falling asleep in the back of an SUV with his face against a stranger's shoulder and feeling, for the first time in days, like nothing in the dark could reach him.
"I haven't offered yet," Lady Leo said. "I wanted to tell you first."
"Since when do you run staffing decisions by me?"
"Since the staffing decision involves a man who carried you up my porch steps."
Amani looked down at the glass in his hands. It was perfectly clean. It had been perfectly clean for two full minutes. He set it on the rack and picked up another one.
"It's your club," he said. "Hire whoever you want."
Lady Leo leaned across the bar and kissed his forehead. It was quick, matter-of-fact, the kiss of a mother who had been kissing this forehead since it was small enough to fit in her palm. "It's your club too. That hasn't changed."
She continued her circuit. Amani watched her go and then he polished the glass until his hands were steady again, which took longer than it should have.
He left at midnight.
Reza could handle closing.
Bethany was closing out the front desk, logging the last of the night's membership check-ins. She looked up when he came out of the elevator. "Ready?"
"Yeah."
They walked out together through the staff entrance, the way they'd walked in.
The yellow car was where she'd left it in the staff lot, and she drove him to his apartment, not Lady Leo's, his, because he'd been sleeping there for the past two nights and the three locks on his door were starting to feel like his instead of just a precaution.
She walked him to his door and waited while he unlocked all three and then she hugged him, quick and fierce, her lioness strength compressing his ribs for one sharp second before she let go.
"You did good tonight," she said.
"I broke a glass and scared a wolf."
"You showed up. That's the part that counts."
She left. Amani closed the door. Locked it. Checked it. Checked it again. Stood in his dark apartment and listened to the silence and the distant sounds of the city through walls that suddenly felt very thin.
He didn't turn on the lights. He went to the kitchen and opened the freezer and took out the gelato and sat on the couch with the container in his hands and he didn't eat it.
He just held it. The cold seeped through the cardboard into his palms and it was real and immediate and his and nobody was watching him hold it and nobody was going to come up behind him and put their hands on his stomach and whisper about how beautiful he was.
He sat there in the dark for a long time. The gelato melted. He put it back in the freezer. He checked the locks one more time.