6. A Tense Encounter #2
I'm lying, and I know I'm doing it, the way you know a tooth is loose before you touch it, and I keep doing it anyway. The alternative is admitting, out loud and to myself, that I waited.
My father walks me out the back near one.
Follows me home. Sits at the curb until I've thrown the deadbolt, the lock, the dowel down in the slider track, and then I flicker the porch light twice — our signal, the one he taught me the week I moved into this house.
He pulls off the curb and is gone around the corner.
I take off the apron. I take off the boots. I leave them by the door in the order I always leave them, because the order of my own house is one of the few things I own complete.
The dowel is in the slider. The deadbolt's thrown. The Glock's in the drawer. The porch light's on. Nothing comes through these doors I don't let through — that's the deal I made with the dark ten years ago, and the dark has kept it every single night since.
Tonight I go straight to bed.
I lie on my back. I put my hand flat on my own stomach over the worn gray cotton of the shirt I sleep in, and I don't move it.
I think about the man at the end of my bar.
I think about him three blocks south, in Eleanor Voss's four-poster — and then on Eleanor's hardwood floor, because the bed was too soft for him and he chose the floor.
I don't know that he chose the floor. I know it anyway, the way I knew the pour of a Blanton's before he ordered it, the way I knew his name was going to be the kind I'd catch myself saying out loud.
I think about whether he's awake. Whether he's on his back the way I'm on my back. Whether his hand is anywhere near where mine is.
Then I think about his hand specifically. The scar from the knuckle of the ring finger to the back of the wrist. The way his thumb ran the rim of the rocks glass, slow and absent, like he was thinking of something else the whole time. The way his fingers laced when he set his forearms on my bar.
I think about those fingers somewhere they are not. The inside of my wrist. The inside of my elbow. The inside of my thigh.
I think about his mouth saying my name an inch from my ear — the way he said Sloane the second time, fitting it to me. Deciding to keep it.
My hand isn't on my stomach anymore. It hasn't been for a while.
I am thirty years old. I have not let a man stay the night in this bed since I was twenty-five and a half. I have not done what my hand is doing for me, with another person in my head, in eight years.
I tell myself I won't finish.
I finish anyway.
I bite the inside of my cheek to keep it quiet even though there's no one in the house to hear, hard enough to taste copper, and the finish takes twenty seconds and leaves a hollow ache behind my ribs, a space where something has come loose.
I lie still after. My breath uneven, the heat of my own hand still in me, the ceiling just the ceiling. The dowel in the slider. The Glock in the drawer.
A federal prosecutor wants me on a witness list in three days. Men who don't belong here are showing up in my town. And I just said the name of one of the good ones into the dark, finishing on my own hand.
I am not sorry.
Eight years running this bar. Ten years out of that fence. One Tuesday with a Blanton's lifted me clean off my feet.
I sleep. I don't dream.
In the morning I drink coffee at the kitchen counter and look at my phone for fifteen minutes before I dial.
The B&B has one line, and Eleanor likes it that way — she gives her cell to family and nobody else and considers the rule a kind of manners. I dial twice and hang up before it rings. The third time I let it go through. She picks up on the second.
"Voss residence."
"Eleanor."
"Sloane."
"Is he up?"
"He's up. Has been since five."
"Of course."
"Of course, dear."
"Can you ask him to come to the bar at four. An hour before I open?"
"I can."
"Eleanor."
"Yes, Sloane."
"Don't tell him why."
"I don't know why, dear."
"Right."
A pause. Then her voice goes soft in the particular way Eleanor's voice goes soft — not soft like comfort, soft like an old wool blanket. Heavy. Warm.
"Sloane."
"Yes."
"Whatever it is."
"Yes."
"You are not alone with it."
I close my eyes against the counter, heat pushing up behind them. I will not cry over a phone call at seven-eighteen in my own kitchen.
"Thank you, Eleanor."
"I'm putting the kettle on. Come Saturday for breakfast. The girls'll be here."
"Saturday."
"Good."
She hangs up.
The morning is the morning. I run prep. I take the propane delivery, two days late, the driver apologizing the whole time he unloads.
I lose an argument with the linen company about a missing crate of bar towels, the way I always lose with the linen company, because the woman on the other end has been wearing me down since two thousand twenty.
I do not look at the door.
At three fifty-five I'm behind the bar pouring two fingers of whiskey I am not going to drink, because my hands need somewhere to be.
My father taught me the trick when I was twenty-two.
If you're about to ask a man a question you don't want to ask, kiddo, pour the glass first. Gives your hands a place to stand.
At four o'clock the front door opens.
Cole comes in. Jeans, a black t-shirt, the same boots. No duffel. The jacket over his forearm.
He stops just inside and reads the empty room — the exits, the booths, the back hall, all of it before the door has finished swinging shut. Then his eyes come to me.
He waits. He doesn't come any further into the room until I move.
I lift my chin a quarter inch at the stool at the end of the bar. That's all it takes. He walks the length of the room at the pace of a man who's decided something and isn't going to tell me what until I ask. He sets the jacket on the next stool, sits, lays his forearms on the wood.
He doesn't ask why.
I push the whiskey across to him — the one I poured to give my hands somewhere to stand.
He looks at it. He doesn't pick it up.
"Sloane."
"Cole."
"Tell me."
I press both hands flat on the bar and I look at him — and he's looking at my face.
Not my hands, not the glass, not the bottles.
My face. He's been looking at me like this since the second he came through the door, and it's a look I haven't felt off a man in a very long time, and it makes the wood of my own bar feel unsteady under my palms.
"I need to ask you something that's going to sound insane."
"Ask."
"I need to know if you are one of them."