3. The Open Door
Chapter three
The Open Door
Ialmost didn’t go in.
I sat in the car outside the Velvet Lounge for ten minutes, both hands on the wheel, watching beautiful people drift past the velvet rope. The dress was new. Navy, a deep wrap style that crossed over the bump instead of hiding it. I’d bought it that afternoon, knowing I’d need it for my plan.
Now, in the dark of the car, that plan was rapidly falling apart.
She’s huge and hormonal. Who’s lining up for that?
It was Elliott’s voice in my head, uninvited, and it had been living in there for days, narrating. Every time I caught myself in a mirror, it was his eyes I looked through.
“Stop it.” My own voice startled me in the quiet of the car. “Not his voice. Not tonight.”
I’d picked this place on purpose. Not because Elliott would steer clear of it, though he would.
Because I had always wanted to come and never let myself.
It was too expensive, too grown-up, too much.
A place I’d talked myself out of for years, because I’d decided I wasn’t the kind of woman who went to places like that.
I was done deciding who I wasn’t. I could do this.
I got out of the car.
Inside, the Velvet Lounge was all gold light and dark wood. A long marble bar, hushed conversation from people who never once glanced at a price. The hostess took my name without her eyes flickering to my belly. She offered me a table. I asked for the bar instead.
A table felt like waiting for someone. The bar felt like a woman who’d come out on her own and meant to.
The walk to it was its own small gauntlet.
The room was full of polished, unhurried people.
I felt every step, one hand going to the bump as I crossed.
A man in a good jacket tracked me the whole way.
I refused to care why. I kept walking. I didn’t fold my arms over myself, though every old instinct begged me to.
I climbed onto the stool with as much grace as a woman five months gone could manage. Then I ordered a virgin something with pomegranate and lime. The bartender slid it over without comment. I wrapped both hands around the cold glass and let out a long, unsteady sigh.
The bump pressed against the lip of the bar. I felt it like a spotlight I couldn’t step out of. Every other woman in the room was slim and unencumbered. And here I was, hugely, obviously pregnant, taking up a width of the world I’d spent months apologizing for.
A pair of women near the end of the bar glanced my way.
One of them said something to the other, low, and they both smiled.
The smile might have meant nothing at all.
A month ago it would have meant nothing.
Tonight Elliott’s voice supplied the subtitles for me.
What’s she doing here? Look at the state of her. Who let her out?
I ignored it, sitting up straighter instead. Rather than taking a sip, I turned to my own reflection in the mirrored wall behind the bottles. I tried to see what was actually there, instead of what Elliott had taught me to see.
Dark hair I’d left down for once. A face people used to look twice at, before I let the fatigue take over. A woman who had desires, not just anger.
It was a start. It didn’t quite hold. But it was a start.
“That’s a serious face for a Monday.”
The voice came from my left, deep and relaxed. I turned.
A man had already sat down on the stool beside me.
His black hair was arranged in that look people liked to call ‘deliberately messy’.
The cut of his expensive suit made his broad shoulders look elegant instead of intimidating.
His jaw was rough with stubble, and his eyes caught every scrap of available light.
He was also looking straight at me. Not past me, not at the room over my shoulder, not at the door for someone better. At me.
“You’ve stirred that drink for ten minutes,” he continued. “I’ve been watching. You haven’t taken a sip.”
He was right, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I narrowed my eyes at him. “You’ve been watching me for ten minutes?”
“I notice things. It’s most of what I do.” His attention dropped to my glass, and I had the unsettling sense of being analyzed down to the seams. “That’s not the drink of a woman enjoying her night out. That’s the drink of a woman talking herself into something.”
I turned to face him properly then. He’d read me in one pass, top to bottom. Elliott had never read me that fast, or maybe he’d simply stopped bothering to look. Three days ago I’d have folded under it. Tonight I held his eyes instead.
“Maybe I came here to be left alone.” It was a lie, but I wasn’t quite ready to tell him the truth, not yet.
“Then I’ve misjudged it, and I’ll go.” But he made no effort to leave. He only waited and watched me, like he apparently had been for ten minutes.
I said nothing. I’d told myself in my kitchen that I was prepared for another man’s interest. But in hindsight, maybe I hadn’t been.
The man’s lips twisted into a small smile. “Roman.” He turned on the stool to face me fully, as if I was the only person in the room worth his attention. He smelled of bergamot, leather, and salt.
Finally, I remembered how to speak. “I’m Maeve.”
“Maeve,” he repeated slowly. “So what brings you here tonight? What answers are you looking for in that drink you haven’t touched?”
I should have given him the easy answer. The safe deflections I’d been handing people for years. But the safe answers were Elliott’s training, and I was trying to unlearn him.
“I’m wondering whether I’m allowed to be here,” I admitted.
“Allowed by whom?”
“That’s the question.” I turned my glass on its coaster. “Myself, mostly. I talked myself out of places like this for about a decade. I’m trying to talk myself back into one.”
He didn’t laugh, and he spared me the reaction I braced for, the quick flick of the eyes down to the belly and back up, the recalculation. He just held my gaze, steady. “And how’s that going?” he asked. “Talking yourself into it?”
“Better the last two minutes than the last ten years.”
The words gave him pause. Perhaps he hadn’t expected the blunt admission. But his steady focus faltered, just for a fraction of a second. He lifted two fingers off the bar, and the bartender materialized like he’d been summoned by name.
“Another of whatever she’s having,” he said without raising his voice. “And the same for me.”
“You don’t have to match me.” I tipped the glass toward him. “It’s a mocktail. I’m—” I gestured at the obvious.
“I can see that.” His eyes did go to the bump then, but not how I’d dreaded. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you.” It came out smaller than I meant. People said congratulations all the time. I’d stopped hearing it as anything real, because the man it should have meant the most to had stopped saying it months ago.
“You don’t believe me,” Roman said. He didn’t sound offended. More… curious?
I shrugged, not sure what to make of this strange man. “I believe you said it.”
“But not that I meant it.” He had set his own glass down to match mine, mirroring me without seeming to mean to. “Who taught you to take a compliment like it’s a trick?”
The answer had a name and a wedding ring. And I doubted Roman wanted to hear me rant about my cheating husband. “It’s a really long story.”
“I’ve got nowhere to be.”
I laughed before I could stop myself. I hadn’t laughed in days. “All right. But just so you know… You might be here awhile.”
It started small. He asked what I did. I gave him the line I gave everyone, the one that turned me into a footnote in my own life.
“I used to do graphic design. Freelance. Branding, mostly. I stopped when we got married. So… here I am.”
“That’s not what I asked.” There was no edge in it, which was the only reason I let it pass. “I asked what you do. You answered what you stopped doing.”
“I don’t know how to answer that anymore,” I admitted. “It’s been a while since anyone asked me a question that wasn’t about Elliot or the baby.”
“Then I’ll have to be the first.”
That was how the next hour unfolded. He asked real questions and listened to the answers. When I deflected, he noticed. Sometimes, he pushed, but never in a way that made me uncomfortable.
“What do you do?” I asked him, somewhere in there. “When you’re not buying drinks for women arguing with mirrors?”
“I build things. Towers, mostly. Developments.” He shrugged and toyed with the rim of his glass, the exact same way I had. “It sounds more interesting than it is. Usually I sit in rooms and tell people ‘no’.”
“You’re good at that. Telling people ‘no’.”
“I’m the best in the city at it,” he said without any particular pride.
What struck me most was that he never made it about himself, not even in passing.
Elliott, even at his best, had narrated himself constantly, performing the role of ‘charming husband’ for an audience of one.
Roman did none of that. He just paid attention, with an intensity that should have been too much and somehow wasn’t.
“Tell me something,” he whispered. He’d angled closer over the course of the hour, his forearm on the bar near mine, not quite touching. “A woman who looks like you, talks like you—where’s the man who should be sitting where I’m sitting?”
It was a clumsy line, and I think he knew it, because he winced very slightly after he said it, like something had slipped past his usual control. It was the first imperfect thing he’d done all night, and it made him more real, not less.
“At home.” I kept my eyes on my glass and congratulated myself for not flinching. “I’d imagine.”
“You’d imagine. You don’t know where your own husband is on a Thursday night?”
“I know what my marriage is.” It came out flatter than I intended. “That’s the complicated part.”
“We have an arrangement.” The words felt strange in my mouth. I’d never said them out loud to anyone. “It’s his idea of one.”