1. Chapter 1 #2
"Reflection." He nods once at the bottles racked in front of us, the mirror behind them, the whole room floating there in the glass. "She's been out there ten minutes walking little circles with the phone. That's a boyfriend."
"New boyfriend," I say.
"Looks like she'll be out there for a while." He shifts again, and now his knee is close enough that if I swiveled an inch we'd be touching, and neither of us says anything. "She left you here, though, so I'm having a better night than I was. I'll allow it."
"You'll allow it?"
"I'm in a generous mood."
"Two minutes ago you were glaring at the bar like it owed you rent."
"Two minutes ago I hadn't met you."
I take a sip of the pink thing so I don't say something I'll regret. Over the glass, I watch him watch me do it. His eyes drop to my mouth for exactly as long as the sip lasts, then come back up like nothing happened.
"So what's the story?" he asks. "You're new here."
"What makes you say that?"
"You read the drink menu like it was in another language.
You checked your phone for the time twice, which means you've got somewhere to be tomorrow, and it matters to you.
And nobody's come over to say hi." He turns his glass a slow half circle against the bar.
"This is a local's place. Everybody knows somebody. Except you."
I set my drink down and look at him straight on. "That's either very impressive or very creepy."
"It can be both."
"Who notices all of that?"
Something moves behind his eyes. "People who watch things for a living," he says, and he drinks, and he doesn't say anything more. We agreed to be no one tonight, so I let it go.
"Fine. Yes. New," I say. "Nine days. Everything I own is still in boxes."
"How's it treating you so far?"
"The humidity is a war crime."
"You'll adapt. Takes about a year."
"A year?"
"Give or take. First summer breaks you, then the second summer you stop fighting it." He says it the way a man reports weather he's already lived through, so I sit there wondering what his first year here broke him of, and I don't ask, because we're no one.
Dana arrives at my shoulder in a cloud of perfume and terrible timing. "Hi," she says to Nick, in the voice, the presenting-my-friend voice.
"Hi," Nick says.
"I'm Dana. I'm so sorry, I have to steal her.
" She's got one hand pressed to her chest, breathless, already halfway back out the door in her head.
"Rain check on—" she waves at the whole situation of us, our angled knees, the space between them that keeps shrinking "—all of this.
Mark's car died out on Beckett Road, and he's got my apartment keys, so I'm his ride. I'm so sorry, we have to go."
"Go," I tell her. "It's fine. I'll get a car home."
Dana stops. I watch her recalculate. The machinery turns over behind her eyes, and I know exactly what's coming out of her mouth before she does.
"You know what, you're right." She straightens up.
"You should absolutely stay and finish your drink.
Text me when you're home." She points at the man beside me.
"Nick, was it? She starts a new job in the morning.
Have her home by eleven." Then she's gone, out the door, phone already back at her ear.
Nick watches the door swing shut behind her. Then he looks back at me.
"New job tomorrow," he says.
"Apparently we're done with the no-one thing."
"Big job?"
"Feels big from where I'm sitting."
He nods, slow, then reaches over, takes the pink drink out of my hand, and sets it down on the far side of the bar, and the drag of his fingers against mine on the way is brief and deliberate and rearranges my pulse without asking permission.
"Then you shouldn't drink any more of that," he says. "It's mostly vodka. You'll feel it at six in the morning."
"How do you know I'm up at six?"
"You've got five-thirty written all over you."
He isn't wrong. Five-fifteen, actually. I don't give him that.
I'm too busy noticing that he moved my drink and not his stool, that he's close now, close enough that I catch cedar and clean cotton and the faint bite of the scotch on him, that his forearm rests on the bar an inch from mine, and that neither of us has anywhere left to be.
"So what do we do instead?" I ask, and my voice comes out lower than I planned for.
He looks at me. The gray eyes make the slow pass again, my eyes, my mouth, my eyes, and this time he doesn't bother pretending it didn't happen. His jaw sets, just a little, like there's something he's keeping behind his teeth.
"There's a walk along the river," he says. "Half a mile. Well lit. Very public. I'll buy you a coffee at the end of it, then put you in a car by eleven, exactly like your handler ordered."
"That's very responsible of you."
"I'm a responsible guy." A short silence. "Tonight."
"And if I said I don't want coffee?"
He breathes out through his nose. When he answers, his voice has dropped into a register I feel low in my chest.
"Then I'd say you've got a big day tomorrow, Sarah. And I'd walk you along the river anyway. Slowly."
I look at him. He looks back, and he doesn't blink, and he doesn't push, and that's the thing that does it in the end. He's already decided he's going to behave. Which means whatever happens next has to be mine.
I stand up and lift my jacket off the back of the stool.
"Walk slow, then," I say.
He signals the bartender for the check without taking his eyes off me, and I finally understand what people mean when they say some decisions get made in your body long before the paperwork ever reaches your brain.