Chapter Six #2
The street was trashed. Post-Mardi Gras Bourbon Street was the aftermath of a war nobody won. Beads in the gutters, crushed cups, a folding chair on its side in front of the daiquiri place two doors down. The cleanup crews hadn't reached this block yet.
Proof sat shuttered behind its windows. Closed sign.
Dark wood, the Edison lights in the courtyard visible through the gap in the side fence.
Her place. Her bar. The thing she'd built with her own money and her own hands and her own stubbornness.
It had nothing to do with me, and would go on having nothing to do with me the minute I gave the speech and pulled away from this curb.
I opened my mouth. The words were ready.
"The detail is—"
"Don't."
Her voice was calm. Her hands were still in her lap.
"Don't you dare," she said. "I can hear it coming.
The speech. The professional wrap-up. Thank you for your cooperation, we'll send an invoice, here's a number to call if you feel unsafe.
" She turned in her seat and looked at me full-on, and the composure was gone and what was underneath it was fury and fear in equal measure and neither one was flinching.
"I've watched you build that wall back up since Monday.
Monday morning you kissed me in the kitchen and by Monday night you were sleeping on your side of the bed with a foot of space between us and I could feel you rehearsing your exit in the dark. "
I didn't deny it. She'd have known.
"You've spent so long being the man who leaves that you don't know how to be anything else.
Clean exit. Packed bag. New city, new job, new woman who doesn't matter enough to keep.
And I almost let you do it." Her voice dropped, and the drop was the Jenna warning I'd learned to recognize, the quiet before the thing she actually meant.
"I almost kept my mouth shut and watched you drive away because that's what I do.
I don't ask people to stay. I've never asked anyone to stay in my life because asking means it matters and if it matters and they leave anyway then I was the fool who asked. "
She held my eyes. Steady. Unwavering. The same woman who'd looked at me in her doorway the first night and called my grin a rehearsal.
"But I'm not doing that. Not with you. So you need to decide right now whether this was the job or whether it was real. Because I already know my answer, and I'm not sitting in this truck while you give me the goddamn exit speech."
The truck was still. Bourbon Street was silent. The engine ticked as it cooled.
I looked at her. Red lipstick half-gone, dark eyes, the fine tremble in her jaw that she was holding still through sheer force. The woman who'd poured me coffee every morning and changed her closing routine to watch me recalculate and slept with her fingers curled around my wrist.
Forty clean exits. Forty packed bags. Forty rearview mirrors and highways and the relief of not having to feel anything that stayed.
"It was real," I said. "All of it. From the first night."
Her breath caught. One sharp inhale. Her jaw unlocked, her eyes went bright, and I watched the anger and the fear and the defiance rearrange into an expression I'd never seen on her face before. She'd never let me.
I cleared my throat. "I don't know how to do this. I've never stayed. I don't have a protocol for staying."
"Good," she said. Her voice was rough. "I don't have a protocol for letting someone."
"We're going to be terrible at it."
"Probably." She wiped under one eye with her thumb, fast, the way you wipe a mark before anyone notices. I noticed. "Get out of the truck and come inside."
I pulled the keys and got out.
She was already on the sidewalk, digging through her bag for the bar keys.
I came around the front of the truck. Her eyes came up to me standing on the curb in the suit I hated, on a street that smelled of stale beer and the river and the tail end of the biggest party in the country. She shook her head.
"You look ridiculous in that tie," she said.
"You told me I cleaned up."
"I was being generous. All you're missing is the badge and the earpiece."
"I was a fed."
"Exactly my point." She unlocked the door, pushed it open, and the smell of Proof rolled out: bourbon and wood and the ghost of last week's crowd. She looked back at me in the doorway. "You coming in or are you going to stand on the sidewalk and let me do this alone too?"
I followed her inside.
The bar was dark and cool and still. She didn't hit the overheads.
The light from the street came through the front windows and caught the bottles on the back wall, amber and gold.
The stools were up on the counter, the floor was swept, and the place held the particular stillness of a room that knew how to wait.
Jenna set her bag on the end of the bar and walked behind the rail and pulled down two glasses and a bottle of Blanton's without asking. She poured two fingers in each, slid one across the wood to me, and stood on her side of the bar the way she'd stood the first night I'd walked into this room.
"For the record," she said, "if you ever try to give me that speech again, I'll throw you through the window."
"You said that about the couch."
"The couch threat stands. This is a separate threat. I'm expanding the program."
I picked up the glass. The bourbon went down warm and smooth and tasted how her bar smelled.
I stood on the wrong side of the counter in a suit I was going to burn the first chance I got and looked at the woman across from me and felt the last wall come down.
Not with a crash. Just a settling, a building giving in when it stops holding itself up and lets the foundation take the weight.
"So," she said. "What happens now?"
"I have no idea."
"First honest thing you've said all morning."
"Second." I took a sip. "The first one was in the truck."
She looked at me across her bar in the Thursday morning quiet. Her mouth did the thing it did — the slow curve that started at one corner and built until it hit her eyes. I stood there in the light from the windows and let it hit me and didn't flinch.
"Okay," she said. "We'll figure it out."
She picked up her glass and I picked up mine and neither of us had a script. The sun came through the windows of her bar and landed on the wood between us, warm and ordinary. We drank bourbon at eleven in the morning and let the quiet be enough.