Chapter 17 #3
"That's," she starts, and then she stops. "That's a terrible negotiating strategy. You're supposed to deny it so I can call you a liar and we can argue about it for twenty minutes."
"I looked at your legs every morning you walked into my kitchen.
I looked at your neck when you put your hair up at the bar.
I watched your hands every time you made a drink because they are the most precise instruments I've ever seen and I have spent my career watching people for a living.
" I hold her gaze and I don't soften it.
"That's not a negotiating strategy. That's a fact. "
The flush starts at her throat and moves upward, and the speed of it tells me she wasn't prepared for direct honesty.
She was prepared for the dance, the deflection, the push and pull that lets her control the distance.
She was not prepared for a man who cuts through the choreography and puts his cards face-up on her bar.
"What do you want from me?" she asks, and her voice has dropped low, beneath the bravado, into the tone I've only heard in my kitchen at three in the morning.
"I want to see if this works outside of a crisis."
"It won't." The answer comes fast, automatic, the reflex of someone who has tested this theory before and concluded that the data supports failure.
"I'm too much. I push people away. It's my whole thing.
I'll pick a fight about your dish towels or your case files or the way you fold your shirts, and it'll escalate because I need it to escalate because escalation is the only way I know how to test whether someone is going to stay or leave.
I'll make you miserable until you go, and then I'll tell myself I was right all along. "
"That's a thorough self-assessment."
"I've had years of practice and a string of men who'd all agree on the diagnosis."
"You've been trying to push me away since the night I stopped being just another member at your bar and showed up with a badge and a dead man's name." I hold her gaze. "I'm still here."
She pulls her lower lip between her teeth and bites down, and the small violence of the gesture sends a pulse of heat low through my abdomen that I absorb without moving.
The bar sits between us, the same polished surface where she's served me drinks for months while both of us pretended the distance was professional.
I want to reach across it. I want to close my fingers around her wrist and feel her pulse trip under my thumb, except this wouldn't be performance and the bar between us is the only reason I'm not testing that theory right now.
"I'm a brat," she says, and the word carries weight.
At Dominion, brat is a role, a dynamic, a negotiated part of a scene that starts and ends with safewords.
Here, in the quiet bar with the last members drifting toward the exit and Terrence pretending not to listen from his end of the counter, brat is a confession.
"I will make you lose your mind. I will push every single boundary you set because I need to know they're real.
I will test you until you're exhausted and then I'll test you again because the first round wasn't convincing enough. "
"I know."
"You don't know. You think you know because you've seen me do it in scenes, but scenes end.
This doesn't end. It will be me at three in the morning picking a fight because you left a coffee mug in the sink and I decided that the mug means you don't respect my space, which really means I'm terrified that you're going to leave and I'd rather blow it up on my terms than wait for you to walk. "
"Renata."
"What?"
"I'm looking forward to it."
She stares at me. Behind her, a row of bottles catches the amber light in a way that makes the whole wall glow, and the woman standing in front of it with her jaw set and her eyes bright with a fear she can't quite keep out of them is the most honest version of herself I've seen since the night she told me about a dead man's face.
"If you bore me," she says finally, "I'm gone."
"Fair."
"I'm not moving back into your guest room."
"I wasn't offering the guest room."
The words land exactly where I aimed them.
Her breath catches and the bravado collapses into the raw openness that she hates showing and can't stop showing me.
Her gaze drops to my mouth before she catches herself and drags it back up, and that slip tells me everything her next sentence is going to try to unsay.
"You can't just," she starts, and then she stops, because the sentence she was building required a composure she doesn't currently have access to.
She swallows. "You can't say that to me while I'm working.
I have two more hours behind this bar and you just made it very difficult to think about glassware. "
"Think about it anyway. I'll be here when you're done thinking."
"That's obnoxious."
"I know."
The corner of her mouth twitches. She fights it and loses, and the almost-smile that breaks through is the realest thing she's given me tonight.
She picks up the rag and goes back to wiping the bar, and her shoulders are steady but her breathing is not, and the flush at her throat hasn't faded.
"Go sit in the lounge," she says. "You're taking up prime real estate and you're a terrible tipper."
"I tip twenty-five percent."
"You tip twenty-five percent because you think it buys you the right to stare at me while I work. It doesn't. It buys you adequate service and a cocktail napkin."
"I'll take the napkin."
"Go. Sit. Lounge. I'll find you when I close out."
I take my bourbon and relocate to the lounge seating at the edge of the main floor.
The leather catches the heat from the sconces and the seat gives me a sight line to the bar, which is a sight line to her, and she knows it.
She moves through the remaining hours of her shift with the efficiency that has defined her work since the first night I watched, building drinks and clearing glasses and managing each member with an attention that never loses track of the room.
She doesn't look at me. The refusal to look is louder than any glance would be.
At one, the last members settle their tabs. Terrence finishes his section and heads out with a wave. Renata starts the breakdown, the practiced routine of restocking and wiping and organizing that transforms a working bar into a locked-down station ready for tomorrow's shift.
I stand and walk back to the bar. She doesn't tell me to leave.
"Ice bucket's heavy tonight," she says, her head down, occupied with the bottles.
I carry the ice bucket to the back. She follows with a rack of glassware, and the narrow corridor between the bar and the dishwasher station puts us in a proximity that the main floor never allows.
Her shoulder brushes my arm when she passes.
She smells like citrus and bourbon and bitters, the residue of a full shift, and underneath it there's a warmth that is just her, clean and unnamed, a scent I've been carrying in my memory since the mornings she padded through my kitchen in bare feet and my stolen shirts.
She reaches past me to set the glassware on the drying rack and her hip grazes mine and neither of us steps back.
"Stop hovering," she says. "You're enormous and this hallway was not designed for people built like refrigerators."
"Is that a complaint?"
"It's a spatial observation." She ducks under my arm to reach the storage shelf, and the movement puts her face level with my collarbone for a beat that she lets stretch longer than it needs to. "You take up a disproportionate amount of any room you enter. Someone should study it."
"You seem to study it plenty."
"Professional awareness. I track large objects that might knock over my glassware."
I hand her the mop and she takes it, and our fingers overlap on the handle.
Neither of us lets go. The mop handle sits between us and her knuckles are warm against mine and the whole moment is absurd and charged and she knows it, because the look she gives me over the handle is exasperation burning off into a heat she's been trying to bury since I walked onto the floor in leather and linen.
"You are making it very hard to mop," she says.
"I'll hold the door while you lock up."
She mops. I hold the door. She sets the alarm.
Every task is offered without comment and accepted without argument, and the quiet domesticity of closing a bar together is laced with a tension that turns every incidental touch into a negotiation and every shared glance into a conversation that neither of us has the vocabulary for yet.
We take the service elevator down to the underground lot.
The fluorescent lights buzz overhead, washing the concrete in the blue-white pallor that turns every parking garage into a memory she carries whether she wants to or not.
I've walked her through this lot before, and my body finds the position without thinking, half a step to her left, angling myself between her and the darker section where the lighting thins toward the maintenance corridor.
She notices. She always notices. The look she gives me is brief and complicated, gratitude she'll never voice wrapped in the stubborn refusal to admit she needs it.
Her MINI Cooper sits in the employee section where it always does. She digs her keys out of her bag and holds them without unlocking the door.
"Tuesday," she says.
"What about Tuesday?"
"You're taking me to dinner. Somewhere that isn't a crime scene or a federal building or your kitchen.
Somewhere I can't smell your cedar." She turns the keys over in her fingers.
"I want to find out if you can hold a conversation that doesn't involve evidence bags or dead men or the structural integrity of my emotional walls. "
"I can hold a conversation."
"You haven't demonstrated any range." She unlocks the car and opens the door, then pauses with one hand on the frame and looks at me over her shoulder.
The parking garage light catches the line of her jaw and the fading scar on her forearm and an expression that has shed every layer of defense she put on tonight.
"Tuesday," I say.
She holds my gaze. Then she drops into the driver's seat and pulls the door shut, and the engine turns over, and the MINI Cooper pulls out of the employee section and takes the ramp toward the exit, taillights glowing red as she rounds each turn.
I stand in the fluorescent light and watch her go. The taillights disappear up the ramp and the lot goes quiet.
I can wait until Tuesday. I've been waiting longer than that, and the woman I'm waiting for just invited me to dinner with the defensive hostility of someone who wants me to show up badly enough to be furious about it.
I take the pedestrian exit to the street. The Warehouse District is quiet at this hour, the block empty, the air warm and heavy with jasmine and river water. My car sits at the curb where I left it, and the walk is short and unhurried, and the New Orleans night holds me the whole way.