2. Chapter 2
Nick
I lost a nineteen-year-old on my table today.
That's the day I brought to the bar. That's the day I was drinking at until a woman in a green dress asked me if it was that bad, and now I'm holding the door for her while she walks out ahead of me, and the day is somewhere behind us on that bar stool where I left it.
The river path runs along the water with lamps every thirty feet. It's warm out, the air heavy the way it gets here at night, and she pulls her jacket off almost immediately and carries it over her arm.
"You said slow," she says. "This is slow. This is practically standing."
"You're free to set the pace."
"I don't know where the coffee is. You're the local."
"Half a mile that way. Little window in a wall, stays open until midnight. The guy's name is Ray. He'll act like we're inconveniencing him."
"Are we?"
"Deeply. He loves it."
She laughs. It's a real laugh, quick and low, and I'm aware that I've been counting them. Three at the bar. That's four.
She walks close to the railing side, trailing her hand along the metal, and I walk on her other side with my hands in my pockets because if I don't put them somewhere they're going to find a reason to touch her.
The small of her back. Her elbow, steering her around the puddle ahead.
There's a whole language of small permissions on a first walk and I know every word of it, and I keep my hands in my pockets anyway.
She starts a new job tomorrow. I heard the friend. I'm being good.
"So, Nick." She glances over. "What did you lose today?"
I look at the water. A barge is going by, slow, lit up along its edge.
"You don't have to tell me," she says. "We're being nobody."
"A patient." I say it before I decide to. "Kid. There was nothing else anyone could've done, which is a thing people say to me, and a thing I say to other people, and it's true, and it doesn't help."
She's quiet next to me for a few steps. Most people rush in here. They say I'm so sorry or oh my God, what happened, or they get that hungry look, wanting the details, wanting the story of it.
"What was his name?" she asks.
Nobody has ever asked me that.
"Danny," I say. "His mom kept calling him Danny in the waiting room, so. Danny."
"Then tonight we'll have a coffee for Danny," she says, and keeps walking, and I stand there for a second before I catch up, and something in me that's been clenched since 6:41 lets go of the rope.
So she works with people. Nurse, maybe, or a teacher, or hospice, somebody who's stood in rooms where the worst thing is happening and learned that the kindest move is the smallest one.
I don't ask. But I move it around in my head the whole next hundred feet, this stranger in a green dress who knew to ask the name.
"My turn," I say. "The new job. Why'd you check your phone twice for the time if you're not nervous?"
"Who says I'm not nervous?"
"You did. At the bar. To your friend."
"You were listening to that?"
"You were sitting three feet from me and you have a loud voice."
"I do not have a loud voice."
"Ray's going to hear you before we round the bend."
She swats my arm with the jacket. It's nothing, cloth against a shirt sleeve, and I feel it the way you feel a match strike.
"Fine," she says. "I'm nervous. It's a big job at a place where everyone already knows everyone, and I'll be the outsider who has to prove she belongs there, and I left a whole life to come do it. If it goes wrong I don't have a backup plan. I sold my backup plan's furniture."
"Why'd you leave? The whole life."
She looks at the water. "A man asked me a question in front of eighty people because he knew I couldn't say no in front of eighty people."
"And?"
"And I said no in front of eighty people."
I laugh. Loud, once, before I can stop it. She turns and stares at me.
"That's not funny," she says, and she's fighting a smile while she says it.
"It's a little funny. Eighty people."
"His grandmother cried."
"His grandmother should be crying at him. Who does that? That's not a proposal, that's an ambush with a ring."
"Thank you." She says it with her whole body, arms out. "That's what I said. Everyone acted like I shot a man at a wedding, and all I did was answer the question honestly, which is allegedly what you're supposed to do with questions."
"You did him a favor."
"His mother sent me a four-page letter."
"Handwritten?"
"Handwritten."
"That's a woman with time on her hands. He'll be fine."
"He kept the ring receipt," she says. "Found out after. He bought that ring with a return policy in mind, so somewhere deep down he knew, too."
We reach Ray's window. It really is a window in a wall, a cut-out in the side of an old brick building with a hand-painted sign and a menu of five things. Ray leans on the counter inside like we've woken him from a nap he wasn't taking.
"You're the only person who comes here at this hour," he tells me.
"That's not true, Ray."
"It's you and the insomniacs."
"Two coffees. One of them's for a toast, so make it decent."
Ray mutters something and turns to the machine. Sarah leans against the brick next to the window, watching me with her head tipped.
"You come here enough that he knows you."
"I keep strange hours."
"For your mysterious job."
"Yeah."
Ray hands the cups through the window. I pay him, and he tells me my change is his tip, and Sarah laughs, and Ray looks briefly pleased with himself before he remembers his brand and scowls.
We take the coffees to the railing. The barge is gone. The water is black and moving and the lamps put down long yellow stripes on it.
She raises her cup. "To Danny."
"To Danny."
We drink. The coffee is better than it has a right to be at this hour, hot enough to mean it.
She holds her cup with both hands even though it's warm out, and I file that away with the other things, the carrying voice, the laugh, the name question, this catalog I have no business building for a woman I met ninety minutes ago.
"Can I say something?" she asks.
"You're going to anyway."
"You looked different at the bar. Before I talked to you. You looked like a man doing math he hated."
"That's about right," I say.
"And now?"
I turn toward her. She's got her back to the railing, elbows resting on it, the cup steaming under her chin, and she's looking up at me with a directness most people can't hold for more than a second. She holds it.
"Now the math's done," I say.
"What was the answer?"
"Come here and I'll tell you."
She doesn't move. Her eyes go over my face, checking, the way you'd check a ledge before you put weight on it.
Then she sets the cup down on the flat top of the railing and takes one step, which puts her close enough that I can see the lamplight caught in her hair and the freckle above her lip that I noticed forty minutes ago and have been managing ever since.
I take her jacket off her arm and lay it over the railing next to the cup. Slowly, so she can watch me do it. Her arms are bare now and the night air moves over them and she doesn't step back.
"The answer," I say, low, "is that I walked into that bar tonight wanting to be left alone, and you ruined it."
"You're welcome."
I bring my hand up and push a loose piece of hair back from her face, and my fingers graze her cheek on the way, and her lips part. Just that. Just her mouth opening a half-inch on an inhale, and it hits me harder than the scotch did.
"Big day tomorrow," I remind her. My voice comes out rough.
"You keep saying that." She puts her hand flat on my chest. Not pushing. Reading. Her palm sits over my heart like she's taking a measurement, and whatever number she gets, it makes her mouth curve. "Your move, Nick."
I kiss her.
I do it with my hand sliding along her jaw into her hair, tilting her face up, and she comes up onto her toes to meet me halfway, and her mouth is soft and tastes like coffee and the last of that pink drink.
She makes a small sound against my lips, quiet, caught, and my other hand finds her waist and closes there, fingers spreading over the thin fabric of the dress, and I pull her in the last inch until there's no space left to argue about.
She grips my shirt. Both hands now, knuckles against my chest, holding on like the railing's not the only thing keeping her up.
I walk her back one step so her shoulders touch the brick beside Ray's darkened window, and I brace my forearm above her head, and I kiss her slower, deeper, taking my time with it, because a woman like this should never be kissed in a hurry.
When I finally pull back we're both breathing hard. Her lipstick is wrecked. I did that. Good.
"Okay," she says, unsteady. "Okay. That was."
"Yeah."
"I don't do this."
"Kiss strangers by rivers?"
"Any of it. The bar, the walk, the—" she gestures between us, at the six inches separating our mouths. "I'm a planner. I have a laminated life."
"How's the laminate holding up?"
"Poorly."
I should put her in a car. It's ten-forty. I made a deal with the friend, and the deal has twenty minutes left on it, and the responsible thing has been sitting in my head all night wearing a reflective vest.
She looks up at me, and her hands are still holding my shirt, and she says, "My apartment is eight blocks from here."
The vest comes off.
"Sarah."
"I know what day tomorrow is. I know what time my alarm is set for.
I'm a grown woman with a laminated life, and tonight is the one night that doesn't count toward anything.
" Her thumb moves against my chest, one slow pass.
"No names past the first one. No numbers.
You leave before my alarm goes off, and tomorrow we're strangers again. Those are the terms."
"Those are terrible terms."
"Take them or leave them."
I look at her mouth, then her eyes. There are a hundred reasons a smarter man says goodnight here, and I'm reaching for any one of them, and they're all somewhere at the bottom of that black water.
"Which direction?" I say.
Her apartment has boxes stacked by the window and nothing on the walls, and I don't see any of it for long, because the door's barely shut before she's pulling me down by the collar.
We hit the wall in the little entry hall. Her jacket drops somewhere. My hands find the zipper at her back, the one running the length of that green dress, and I take hold of it and stop.
"Yes," she says against my mouth, answering the question before I ask it, and I draw the zipper down slow, the whole way, knuckles tracing her spine as I go, and she shivers under my hands like the air conditioning is a rumor.
The dress goes. My shirt goes, her fingers quick on the buttons and then losing patience at the third one, pulling it over my head instead.
In the dark of the hallway she puts both palms flat on my chest and just looks, taking inventory, and I stand still and let her, and when her hands slide down to my belt I catch her wrists.
"Bedroom," I say. "I'm not doing this against a wall the night before your big day."
"That's weirdly considerate."
"Also the wall's got a thermostat digging into my back."
She laughs, breathless, and takes my hand and leads me through the dark apartment, past the boxes, into a room with a bed and one lamp on a stack of books where a nightstand should be.
She turns on the lamp. She turns to face me in the low light, standing there in almost nothing, chin up, no apology anywhere on her.
"House rules," she says. "The alarm's at five-fifteen. You're gone by five."
"Understood."
"And Nick." She steps in, reaches up, and pulls me down so her mouth is at my ear, and what she says next in that low carrying voice is not repeatable in any company, and it takes out my knees and rewires my whole night.
I get exactly one thought in before thinking stops being available.
We tumble onto the bed, mouths fused, her legs parting to pull me between them.
I peel away the last scraps of lace and my hand finds the heat between her thighs, fingers circling her swollen clit with slow, deliberate pressure until her hips buck and she gasps my name like a prayer.
She arches into me, nails raking down my back as I kiss my way down her body, tasting salt and need along her collarbone, the curve of her breast, the soft plane of her stomach.
When I settle lower, my tongue replaces my fingers, licking and sucking until her thighs tremble around my head and she comes hard, crying out into the quiet room.
She recovers just enough to push me onto my back, straddling me with that same fearless directness.
Her hand wraps around my cock, stroking once, twice, guiding me to her entrance before she sinks down in one smooth motion.
The tight, wet heat of her envelops me completely.
We move together—slow at first, then urgent—her breasts brushing my chest with every roll of her hips, her breath hot against my neck.
I grip her waist, thrusting up to meet her, lost in the slick friction and the way she clenches around me.
She rides me harder, chasing another peak, and when she shatters again I follow right after, burying myself deep as release crashes through me in heavy pulses.
We stay locked like that, panting, skin damp, the lamp casting long shadows across the scattered sheets.
Whatever job she starts tomorrow, some office is about to get the most dangerous woman in this city.
At 4:52 I dress in the dark.
She's asleep on her stomach, face turned away, one arm under the pillow, the sheet riding low on her back. Her dress is still in the hallway. Her laminated life is scattered across three rooms and I'm the one who has to leave it that way.
I stand at the bedroom door longer than the terms allow.
No names past the first one. No numbers. I agreed to it, and it was the right deal for her, and it's the first deal in ten years I want to break. I could leave my number on the counter. There's a pen right there by her keys. I look at the pen. I put my hands in my pockets.
A deal's a deal.
I let myself out, walk down four flights instead of taking the elevator, and step onto the street just as the sky starts going gray over the river. My phone shows three texts from the hospital group thread and a reminder I don't need.
New residents start today. Meeting at seven.
I get in my car, turn it on, and drive toward St. Vincent's with her coffee toast still somewhere in my head.
To Danny. From the girl at the bar who asked his name.
Whoever she is, wherever she starts work this morning, some part of me hopes her laminated life forgives her.
Mine never has.