2. Amber Light
Amber Light
Vera Alvarez
I don't turn on the main lights.
Just the low bar lighting, warm and gold.
He sits at the bar and I go behind it and pour two glasses of the good whiskey without a word.
Set one in front of him.
He picks it up.
Doesn't assess it this time.
Just drinks.
The bar looks different at this hour.
The light turns everything softer.
The scarred wood of the bar top.
The bottles along the back wall catching the glow.
The O'Malley's sign in the window, the first L burned out since March.
At closing the place stops being a business and becomes just a room.
A warm room in the cold.
Mine in a way the rest of this block isn't.
"You grew up here," he says.
"Three floors up." I lean against the back bar. "My father's lived in that building since before I was born."
"And the bar?"
"Three years. Since my last living situation fell apart." I turn the glass in my hands. "You probably already know that too."
"Some of it." His eyes are on me in the low light. "Not all of it."
"The parts you don't know are mine."
"Fair."
The word sits between us.
Simple and surprising.
I hadn't expected him to say fair.
He looks different in this light.
Not softer exactly.
The sharp corporate edges have worn down to something more human.
His shoulders an inch lower.
His hands around the glass looser.
A man who has put something down and isn't sure what to do with his hands now.
"Why did you come back?" I ask.
He sets down his glass.
Looks at it for a moment.
"Because you called me a vulture and meant it, and most people in that situation are afraid of me. You weren't." He looks up. "I wanted to understand that."
"I've been afraid of worse things than you," I say. "Debt collectors. Eviction notices. Men who thought a no was a negotiating position." I shrug. "You're a man in an expensive suit."
"Just a man," he repeats.
"Right now? Yeah."
He's looking at me like I'm a problem he's decided he wants to solve personally.
I pour us both another finger without being asked.
"Tell me something true," I say. "Not corporate. Not strategy. Something you'd say if there were no cameras."
He's quiet long enough that I think he won't answer.
The ice machine clicks once in the silence.
Then it's just us and the low light and the whiskey.
"I drive past buildings I've redeveloped sometimes," he says finally. "After. When they're done, when the new tenants are in. I tell myself I'm doing a post-project assessment."
He turns his glass slowly on the bar.
"I'm looking to see if anything's still there. If anything survived."
"Does it?"
"Occasionally." He meets my eyes. "Rarely enough."
The honesty of that lands somewhere I wasn't expecting.
I'd prepared for the CEO.
For the corporate language and the power moves.
I hadn't prepared for a man sitting in my bar at one in the morning admitting he drives past his own destruction looking for survivors.
"That's a hell of a thing to say out loud," I say.
"You asked for true."
"I did."
There's a pull in my chest I have no interest in examining.
"You should go," I say.
"I know."
He doesn't move.
Neither do I.
The bar is quiet around us.
The ice machine has finally gone still.
Traffic outside thins to almost nothing.
Just the occasional cab passing, headlights sliding across the ceiling and disappearing.
His coat is still open.
His glass is almost empty.
He stands from the stool.
I think he's going to leave and I'm going to let him.
He rounds the bar.
I don't move back.
He stops close enough that I can feel the heat of him.
"This is a terrible idea," I say.
"Yes."
He reaches up and tucks a strand of hair back from my face.
Gentle in a way that matches nothing else about him.
"Tell me to go."
I open my mouth.
My father is three floors up, probably asleep with the TV running.
The bills are on the counter.
I signed a contract with this man this morning — nothing physical, nothing real, those were his exact words and I agreed to them.
I look at his face.
The controlled lines of it.
The jaw that's been tight since the moment he walked through my door.
The eyes that haven't stopped watching me since the first whiskey.
He's waiting.
Patient in a way that makes me angrier than I want to be.
I grab the front of his shirt.
He kisses me like he's been deciding to since he first walked through the door.
Focused and certain and completely sure of where he's going.
His mouth warm against mine.
I kiss him back with one hand fisted in his shirt and the other finding his jaw.
The stubble rough under my palm.
He tastes like whiskey and underneath that is just him.
Clean and warm and disastrously good.
His hands find my waist and pull me in.
Not gently.
The grip of a man whose control just slipped a notch.
My hip hits the bar edge and I don't care because his mouth is on mine and his thumbs are pressing into the hollows above my hipbones.
He presses me back against the bar.
His thigh slots between mine and the pressure of it lands right where I need it.
I'm already so wet it's embarrassing.
I grind down on him before I can stop myself and the friction sends a jolt through me that makes my breath break.
His mouth drags from mine to my jaw.
To the spot below my ear.
His breath hot against my skin.
His lips find the curve of my neck and stay there, open and warm, tongue tasting salt.
I tip my head back and give him room because apparently my body has no loyalty to my principles whatsoever.
"Vera." My name against my throat. Low enough that I feel it vibrate.
"Don't talk."
He doesn't talk.
His mouth moves lower.
The hollow of my collarbone.
His tongue traces the line of it and my hand goes from his jaw to the back of his head, fingers threading through his hair, pulling him closer.
His hands slide up from my waist.
Slow enough to be deliberate.
His palms close over my breasts through the thin fabric of my shirt.
My nipples are already hard and aching.
When his thumbs drag across them the sensation goes straight through me.
I arch into his hands and make a sound against his mouth that I will be furious about later.
Later is not now.
He kisses me harder.
His tongue sliding against mine.
I bite his lower lip and he groans, low and rough, and the sound goes straight between my thighs.
He rolls both nipples between his thumbs and forefingers through the fabric.
I grind against his thigh with zero subtlety.
He's hard.
His cock presses thick against my hip.
I can feel the full length of him through his trousers, heavy and unmistakable.
The knowledge that Cole Vestri's cock is hard because of me, in my bar, at one in the morning, sends heat through my stomach that pools low and stays.
I roll my hips again.
Slower.
Dragging myself along the hard muscle of his thigh while his cock presses against my hip.
His grip on my breasts tightens.
His forehead drops to my shoulder and he breathes there, ragged.
"Fuck."
Quiet.
Wrecked.
I want to reach between us.
I want to wrap my hand around his cock and feel him throb against my palm.
I want to know the sound he'd make if I unzipped him right here in this empty bar.
I don't.
Not because I've found my principles.
Because I want to want it longer than this.
The ache between my legs, swollen and slick and desperate, is doing something I'm not ready to let go of yet.
His mouth finds mine again.
Slower this time.
His tongue traces my lower lip.
His teeth graze it.
He kisses the corner of my mouth, then my jaw, then the spot below my ear.
One hand slides down from my breast.
Over my ribs.
Fingers trailing heat across my stomach.
He reaches the waistband of my jeans and stops.
His fingertips resting right there.
My whole body clenches around nothing.
I can feel my pulse between my legs, hard and fast.
His fingers press flat against my lower stomach.
One inch from where I need him.
He holds there — feeling my breath, feeling what he's doing to me without touching me where it counts.
The most intimate thing anyone has ever done to me.
More intimate than touching would be.
He's choosing to hold back.
And I can feel exactly what that costs him.
His palm warm through the denim.
His forehead against my temple.
His breathing uneven against my ear.
Both of us suspended in that one inch.
Then he pulls his hand away.
His forehead rests against mine.
Both of us breathing.
His hands return to my waist.
I can feel his heartbeat under my palm where my hand rests on his chest.
Fast. Real.
He steps back.
Deliberately.
Creating distance where there had been none.
The cold air between us feels like a verdict.
He picks up his glass.
Finishes the last of it.
Sets it down with a quiet click.
"Eight o'clock," he says.
His voice has recovered its control faster than I want it to.
"Eight o'clock," I agree.
He leaves.
The door closes and the cold air comes in.
I stand behind the bar with my hand on the wood where his glass was and I don't move for a long time.
One inch.
That's all it was.
One inch and he chose to stop.
I felt how much he wanted to.
He said nothing physical and he meant it and he held himself to it even when holding cost him something visible.
I finish closing the bar alone.
Wipe down the bar top.
Check the register.
Turn off the neon.
My body is still humming.
I pick up the business card on my way out.
My fingers are still unsteady.
Tomorrow I will walk into Cole Vestri's office and fight for every person in this building.
Tonight was something else entirely.
I tell myself that all the way upstairs to 6B.
But his mouth is still on mine.
And fair is still turning in my head.
And the ache between my legs hasn't faded by the time I reach my door.
I lock it.
Lean against it.
I don't think about what his restraint means or what it cost him.
I think about how I let a man who owns my building into the bar I close at night and let it become just a room.
I opened the gate.
I poured the good whiskey.
I said something true when he asked for it, which I never do.
And then I kissed him.
Like it was my idea.
Which it was.
I'm furious about all of it.
None of it changes what's under my skin right now.
I already know I'm not going to sleep.
I already know I'm going to eight o'clock tomorrow.
That's the problem.