Chapter Three #2
I looked at him for a moment. It was a small thing to say, and he'd said it flat, without any particular weight, but it sat in the kitchen air between us and landed anyway.
"Beth Kessler," I said. "Friday night."
He didn't move. His expression didn't change.
"You told me the professional story," I said.
"The operation, the safe house, the failure.
And I let you tell it because it's what you offered and I'm not a person who forces doors.
But you've been carrying that for three years and it's still right there in your chest and I think it's not entirely about Beth. "
The ceiling fan clicked overhead. Bourbon Street pressed through the walls.
"No," he said. "It's not entirely about Beth."
"The man who leaves before it gets real."
He looked at me across the kitchen and his jaw shifted, a small adjustment, and for once I didn't reach for the humor or the deflection. I just let it be there.
"I'm good at this job," he said. "I'm good at it because I keep the wall up."
"You're also good at it because you're actually good at it. Those aren't the same wall."
A pause just long enough to mean he hadn't expected it: "No."
"I built this bar alone," I said. "Handled everything myself, solved every problem myself, because needing someone is a liability and I learned that early and I thought I'd finished learning it." I picked up my cup. "Turns out I'm still in the middle of the lesson."
We stood there in the quiet kitchen and looked at each other and the space between us had no business being as small as it was.
Then his phone buzzed on the counter. He looked down at it. I was almost relieved, because I didn't know what would have happened if it hadn't.
"Hebert," he said.
"I have a shift in two hours," I said.
"I know." He was already reading. "Go get ready. I've got this."
I went.
I PUT ON LIPSTICK IN the bathroom mirror.
This was not a remarkable event. I put on red lipstick every morning, every time I left the apartment, because it was habit and it was mine.
But standing in front of the bathroom mirror on Saturday evening, the wrap top new, my hair half-pinned for the shift, I was aware that this moment was going to be different from the other ones.
I didn't know why I knew. I just did.
The bathroom door was open. I'd heard Dane moving in the hallway, the particular cadence of him: deliberate, not heavy, each step placed like he already knew what was on the other side of it. I heard him stop.
I kept my hand steady.
In the mirror, he was in the doorway.
He just stopped, and his eyes found mine in the glass, and neither of us moved for a beat that lasted slightly longer than accidental.
He looked at my mouth. Then back up.
I capped the tube and set it on the counter and met his eyes in the mirror. The air in the bathroom was warm. His face carried the same look from this afternoon — that heat, not quite contained — and I thought: there you are.
"Ready in ten," I said.
"I'll be at the door," he said.
He left. I pressed my lips together and looked at myself in the mirror and said, under my breath, to the woman looking back at me, "Okay."
THE SATURDAY NIGHT crowd was nothing you could've called a crowd and kept a straight face.
It was a force of nature. By eight the room was at capacity, every table turned, the courtyard so packed I'd had to put Huck on the gate, and the noise from Bourbon Street outside had reached a volume where you didn't hear it anymore, you just felt it, a low vibration in the soles of your feet that meant the whole city was moving.
I loved this. I'd loved it before any of this week happened and I was refusing to stop loving it now.
I worked the rail, Huck on my left, the barback running empties.
Dane was in the corner by the service entrance with his back to the wall and his eyes on the room, and I was aware of him the way I was aware of the music and the crowd and the heat, just a constant background thing that lived in my peripheral vision and wouldn't leave it.
Except for when he moved.
He ran the circuit a few times over the course of the night — entrance to entrance, courtyard to hallway, a visual sweep of the alley camera every forty minutes.
He moved through the packed room without touching anyone, which at this density I'd never seen.
Both times he came back through the narrow space behind the counter I had to shift to let him past. We ended up closer than the square footage required, his shoulder at my eye level, his arm brushing mine when he turned.
The first time it was accidental. I didn't entirely intend the second one, and I wasn't going to examine that too closely.
He went back to his corner. I went back to my end of the counter. The crowd worked around us and I poured four drinks without stopping and didn't look at him, and the room kept building.
"Four-fifty on fourteen," Huck said.
"Got it." I ran the card, closed the tab, handed back the receipt, and turned to restock the well.
Dane was standing at the service end of the counter — the crowd had pushed him in from his corner — and I'd already shifted before I registered he was there.
I came up against the back bar. He was a foot and a half in front of me.
"Sorry," he said.
"It's fine." I ducked under his arm, grabbed the bourbon from the back shelf, and came up on the other side of him.
We did a half-rotation in the narrow space that was one hundred percent situational and zero percent anything else.
Except I could feel the heat off his arm through my sleeve, and he smelled like cedar and the bar and underneath that something I was going to stop taking inventory of right now.
"You good?" he said, close enough that I didn't have to raise my voice.
"Always," I said, and went back to work.
WE CLOSED AT TWO.
Staff filtered out. Huck did his lock check on the courtyard gate, gave me the nod, and left. The barback did a final run and I sent her home. The room settled into the particular quiet of a place that had just held three hundred people and was now holding two.
I started the closing routine.
My closing routine, on this specific night, went: sweep the courtyard before the floor, restock the bottles in the back-forward order instead of the front-back order I'd used every other night this week, and then run the register while standing on the left side of the terminal instead of the right.
Dane came in from the alley camera check at the side entrance, shaking the damp off his jacket because the night had turned humid, and stopped.
He looked at me, then at the order in which I was restocking. Looked at the courtyard door. Looked back at me.
I watched him recalculate in real time, and it was the most enjoyable thirty seconds of my entire Saturday.
"Did you change the order," he said.
"Did I?" I reached past the usual spot, grabbed the next bottle from the row behind it, and set it in the front. "I do things a little different every few days. Keeps the routine fresh."
He put his hands in the front pockets of his jeans and looked at me and his mouth was making a slow negotiation with a smile it hadn't committed to yet.
"You changed it to see if I'd notice," he said.
"I changed it because I wanted to." I moved down the rail. "You noticing is just a bonus."
"You could've just asked me if I memorize your closing routine."
"I didn't need to ask." I set the next bottle. "I already knew the answer."
He was quiet for a moment. Then: "You're a lot of work."
"Thank you," I said.
He looked at me across the quiet room, ceiling fans still turning, the place smelling of bourbon and the last of the crowd. The tension that had been building all week pulled tighter. I held his gaze and let it.
Then he went to walk the front.
I watched him go. Then I pulled a glass from under the counter, poured myself two fingers of Blanton's, and stood at the end of the rail and drank and looked at the room, which was mine, which I'd built with my own money and my own stubbornness and my own hands, and which contained, at this particular moment, one person who was walking the front and would be back in three minutes.
I thought about the look in the mirror. The drunk's hand on my wrist. The photo in my car. It's yours, said flat, like it was obvious.
I thought about what it meant that he'd said Beth Kessler's name the same way I said this bar's name when someone asked me why I didn't just close for the week.
I poured another finger of bourbon.
I knew what was building. I'd known it since the first morning he'd shown up in my doorway and grinned at my lipstick and I'd had to blame the coffee for my stomach.
I'd been watching it build all week — every accidental shoulder, every loaded look, every moment where the air between us got heavy with what neither of us was saying.
The only question was when.
Footsteps in the hall. The side door.
I didn't turn around yet. I looked at the glass in my hands and the room that was mine and listened to him come back, and I thought: soon.