Epilogue
Jenna
THE COURTYARD WAS HALF full on a Thursday, which three months ago would have been a good night and now was just a Thursday.
I wiped down the rail and watched Huck pull two Sazeracs for the couple at table four.
He'd been doing them his way lately — a heavier absinthe rinse, a longer stir — and I hadn't said anything because they were selling and because the day I micromanaged Huck's Sazeracs was the day he walked out, and replacing a bartender who could pour four drinks at once and intimidate a room without speaking was not a project I needed.
The Mardi Gras decorations had come down in early March.
I'd stripped the last of the beads off the courtyard fence myself, filled two garbage bags, and felt the bar settle back into its real shape: exposed brick, Edison lights, the stage in the corner, the bourbon wall glowing under the warm lights.
Proof in its off-season was quieter and I loved it differently.
The tourist tide went out and the regulars came back and the register slowed to a rhythm I could breathe inside.
I checked my phone. Eight-forty. He'd said nine, which meant nine-fifteen, because Dane Gatlin had never been early for anything that wasn't a threat.
He'd been in New Orleans for six weeks. Took a contract with a private firm downtown — corporate security consulting, the kind of work that used everything the Marshals had taught him without requiring him to chase anyone through a parade crowd.
He had his own apartment on Magazine, ten minutes from the bar.
His schedule, his clients, his mornings — none of them started in my kitchen.
We'd figured that out early: two people with full lives didn't need to collapse into one.
We needed to build a door between them and leave it open.
The door stayed open.
"Jenna." Huck materialized at my elbow with the empty Sazerac tray. "Table seven wants the bourbon flight."
"Which one?"
"The expensive one."
"Bless their hearts." I pulled four glasses and reached for the top shelf.
The Blanton's caught the light and I thought about the last time I'd poured it — the morning in the bar with Dane, two fingers each, the sun through the front windows landing on the wood between us.
It had tasted different that morning. Everything had.
I set up the flight and carried it out and came back to find Huck watching me with the expression he reserved for things he'd decided were amusing but beneath comment.
"What," I said.
"Nothing."
"Huck."
"You're humming." He turned back to the well. "You don't hum."
"I wasn't humming."
"You were humming. It was off-key."
"Go check the keg lines."
He went. I caught my reflection in the back mirror — dark hair loose tonight, the studded leather bracelet, red lipstick holding. I looked like myself. A woman who owned a bar and was having a good Thursday, which was exactly what I was.
The front door opened at nine-twelve. Close enough.
Dane came in the way he always came in: filling the doorframe first, then the room.
He'd ditched the holster — he didn't wear it off the clock anymore, and the absence of it still caught me sometimes, the line of his shoulders unbroken under a gray pullover with the sleeves pushed to his forearms. Jeans, boots, the jaw.
The gray eyes found me across the room before the door shut behind him.
He didn't wave. He just looked at me and the corner of his mouth moved, and the low curl in my stomach was the same one I'd felt the first morning he'd stood in my doorway and grinned and I'd blamed the coffee. I'd stopped blaming the coffee.
He crossed to the bar and took the stool at the end of the rail — his stool, the one the regulars had started leaving empty without being told. He leaned on the wood with both forearms and watched me like he had all night, which he did.
"You're late," I said.
"I'm early. I said nine-fifteen."
"You said nine."
"I said nineish. You edited the ish."
I poured him two fingers of Buffalo Trace without asking because I'd learned his order the first week and he'd never changed it.
He picked up the glass and his thumb ran along the rim and he watched me work, and I let him, because the feeling of being watched by this man had gone from irritation to heat to something I carried around, steady and constant, a second pulse I'd stopped trying to ignore.
Huck passed behind me and gave Dane a nod. Dane nodded back. Three months of this and they'd developed a language made entirely of nods and silences, and I was fairly sure they were both satisfied with the arrangement.
"I talked to the landlord," I said, pulling a glass for a regular at the corner. "He's willing to negotiate on the space next door."
Dane reached into his back pocket and unfolded a napkin he'd already drawn on. "I sketched out the layout."
"Of course you did."
"Two exit points, sightlines to both rooms from a single position behind the bar, and a connecting arch wide enough for foot traffic but narrow enough to control." He smoothed the napkin on the counter. "Also the bathrooms are in the wrong place."
"The bathrooms are fine."
"The bathrooms are a bottleneck. Move them to the back wall, you free up twelve feet of usable floor space."
"You measured."
"I estimated."
"You brought a tape measure into my bar and measured the bathroom hallway."
"I brought a tape measure into our future second room and measured everything."
I looked at his napkin sketch. It was neat, detailed, annotated with measurements I was almost certain were accurate. He'd been thinking about this. Not in the way he thought about security — angles, exits, threats — but how a man thinks about something he plans to be around for.
"Our," I said.
He glanced up. "What?"
"You said our future second room."
His expression shifted. The easy confidence was still there but something quieter was underneath it. "I meant it."
"I know you did." I leaned my elbows on the bar across from him and studied his face in the warm light. The face I'd memorized in a week and kept learning since. "I love you."
It came out how real things do — mid-conversation, no warning, no preamble. I hadn't planned it. I'd been thinking it for weeks and it had been sitting in my chest getting heavier and more certain, and it came out over a napkin sketch and a disagreement about bathrooms, and I didn't take it back.
His hand stopped on the glass. He looked at me and his jaw did the thing — the tightening I'd first seen the afternoon the drunk grabbed my wrist, the tell he'd never been able to hide from me.
His eyes went bright and his throat moved and for a second the smooth, confident man who'd charmed half of New Orleans was gone and the real one was right there, unhidden, looking at me across my own bar.
"Say it again," he said. His voice was rough.
"No. You heard me. Once is what you get."
"Jenna."
"Dane."
"I love you." He said it flat and sure, the same way he'd said it was real in the truck. No performance. His eyes on mine, his hand reaching across the bar to catch my wrist. His thumb found my bracelet and traced the studs and held on. "I've been trying to figure out how to say it. I had a plan."
"What was the plan?"
"Dinner. A place on Magazine. I made a reservation."
"You were going to tell me you loved me at a restaurant."
"It was a nice restaurant."
"Dane. I'm wearing bar clothes and I've been sweating since six."
"I know." His thumb was still on my bracelet. "This is better."
I turned my wrist so my fingers laced through his.
His hand closed around mine and we stood there across the bar with our hands tangled together and the Blanton's glowing on the shelf and the courtyard lights catching the breeze outside.
The Thursday crowd murmured. The jazz from the courtyard speaker drifted.
Huck was pretending very hard not to see us, which was its own form of kindness.
"Okay," I said. "Now let go. I have customers."
"Yes ma'am."
"And Dane?"
"Yeah."
"The bathrooms aren't moving."
His grin came back. The full one, slow and warm, the weapon he'd aimed at me the first morning and kept deploying every day since. "We'll revisit."
"We won't."
"We'll see."
I pulled my hand back and went to pour the next round. He stayed on his stool and drank his bourbon and watched me work the bar for the next hour, and every time I passed his end of the rail his eyes tracked me with a focus that made my skin warm under my clothes.
At ten-thirty the crowd thinned. I leaned across the bar to collect his empty glass and he caught my wrist again, thumb on the bracelet, and pulled me close enough that his mouth was near my ear.
"What time do you close tonight?"
"Midnight."
"That's ninety minutes."
"You can count. I'm impressed."
"I've been thinking about what I'm going to do with you after those ninety minutes." His voice was low, just for me, and it hit the base of my spine and stayed there. "I have plans."
"You had plans for the I-love-you and look how that turned out."
"These are better plans." His thumb moved on my wrist, slow. "These involve your apartment and significantly less conversation."
"Bold of you to assume I'm inviting you over."
"You're already blushing."
"I don't blush. It's the bar heat."
"Jenna." He pulled back just enough to look at me, and the gray eyes had gone dark, and the grin had gone from warm to dangerous. "It's not the bar heat."
I laughed. I couldn't help it — the confidence, the absolute certainty he wore when he wanted me, how he could make my pulse jump with four words while I was holding a dirty rocks glass in a room full of people. He was impossible and I was going to keep him.
"Midnight," I said. "Don't be late."
"I'll be at the door at eleven fifty-nine."
"You'll be at the door when I unlock it and not a second before."
He picked up his fresh glass and leaned back on his stool and gave me that grin — slow, devastating, a promise — and I turned back to work and felt him watching me from his stool at the end of the rail, the same way he'd watched me that first Thursday night.
The same gray eyes, the same steady focus.
Except now when I looked back, I didn't turn away.
I held his gaze across my bar and let him see exactly what was on my face and his smile widened.
THANKS FOR TAKING A ride with us down Bourbon St.!