CHAPTER TWELVE #2
He never asked me first. He took my name out of my own mouth in front of forty people and made it a thing men would have to decide about. I would have put a glass through his face for it if my hand had come off that rail.
And here is the part I have not said out loud to anybody since.
A man who has never had his hands on me put my name in his mouth in front of forty strangers and made it his to defend.
Half of me wanted to walk out the back door past the folding chair and keep walking.
The other half went hot from my jaw down to my knees and stayed there while a man bled on the floor eight feet away, and I did not try to make it stop.
Bex put her hand between my shoulder blades and left it there.
“Breathe out,” she said. “In is easy. Out is the one people forget.”
“There’s a hose on your floor.”
“There’s a hose on my floor,” she agreed. “And a table. And a man’s tooth, probably. I’ve had worse Saturdays.” Her hand stayed where it was. “You didn’t duck.”
“I didn’t think of it.”
“I know. That’s why I said it.”
Adrian came around the end of the bar. His right hand hung open at his side and dripped onto the boards, and he did not look at it.
“Look at me,” he said. “Not at him.”
I looked at him.
“You’re not going back behind that bar tonight. Tomorrow you can.”
A drop came off his hand onto the toe of my shoe. I watched it land there and soak in.
“My shift isn’t finished.”
“It’s finished.”
“Bex is out here on her own.”
“Bex has worked worse rooms than this one,” he said, “and she’ll tell you so herself.”
“She’s standing right here,” Bex said. “And she will.”
I opened my mouth to tell him exactly what I thought about being decided over like a crate with a seal on it. “Done talking.” He took my elbow in his left hand and walked me out through the yard where our breath was showing, and he did not wait to find out whether I was.
At the gate he said it over my head to a man I did not know.
“She’s under this pack’s hand. Anybody who doesn’t like it brings it to this gate.”
Nobody said anything back. I stood in the cold being discussed like weather with my face going hot.
?
We took the truck out for a circuit of the block while Karim cleared the bar. The heater roared, but a rind of frost kept returning along the windshield. September had been hot all day. This cold had come in with Rennick.
Luca drove. Marcus had the front seat and the acquisition folder on his knee, open to the guarantee we had looked at the night before. Adrian and I had the bench in back, and the vinyl was so cold it took the heat out of the backs of my legs.
The bench was not wide. His leg was against mine from knee to hip and neither of us shifted it, and neither of us pretended not to notice. Luca took a corner and put us together harder than it needed.
Luca kept both hands on the wheel high and drove slower than the street wanted.
“I cut a good hose,” he said. “I want somebody to write that down. That was a good hose.”
“You cut it because if you hadn’t, one of those women by the door goes home with a nail in her,” Marcus said.
“I know why I cut it. I’m allowed to like the hose.”
“Marcus, tell her the hose was good. Tell her it’s the best hose I ever cut.”
“The hose was good,” Marcus said, to the windshield.
“That’s a hostile witness.”
I laughed once, in a truck with a man’s blood on the seat, and nobody said one word about it.
“You all right back there, trouble?”
“Yes,” I said, and it came out flatter than I meant.
Marcus put his head back against the rest and talked to the roof of the truck.
“He didn’t come for a fight. He came for a room, and we gave him a good one.”
“You’d rather we let him—” Luca said.
“I’d rather we know what we spent. Forty people, and every one of them has a brother or a bar or a cousin who buys.” He turned the folder over on his knee without opening it. “By noon it’s in three bars and a body shop, and after that I can’t buy it back at any price.”
“Then it’s in three bars,” Adrian said.
“It is. I’m not fighting you. I’m adding it up.” Then, over his shoulder, easy, like he was remarking on the weather: “Your hands are shaking, little courier.”
“Fine.”
“They’re not,” he said. “But that’s a good answer.”
Nobody said anything for a while. Luca did not do the thing he always does, which is tell the truck what his hands are doing.
“How long have you known who she is?” Luca asked the mirror. “Not the book. Her.”
The wipers went once across the frost and did nothing to it.
Adrian answered without turning his head. “Since Tuesday.”
Marcus turned his head. Only his head, not his shoulders.
“Say that again for me.”
“Tuesday. When Marcus brought her in.”
I was watching him when he said it, which is the only reason I can tell you anything about it. He answered on the beat. He did not swallow first and he did not look at the mirror and his hands stayed where they were, open on his knees, the right one bleeding into the seam of his jeans.
I have read men across a counter for six years. I read weight, provenance, whether a thing is what the paperwork says it is. I looked straight at him and there was nothing to see, so I believed him, and I sat back against the cold vinyl and let it go.
“He needs her writing willingly,” Luca said. “That much we know. I’m asking what you knew before she signed anything.”
“And I’m asking why you answered so fast,” Marcus said. “There’s an old guarantee in Kadir’s file. Your grandfather’s name is on the original. We need all of it, Adrian.”
“That’s worse.”
“That’s worse,” Marcus said.
He did not ask a third time. He faced front again and put his rings against the window and left them there.
Nobody had said anything for a while when I started, low, under my breath, at the glass. It is not a thing I decide to do. It is a thing that is already happening by the time I notice it.
The frost on the window had lines in it and the lines had branches, and I went along them.
Nobody interrupted me. Luca did not turn the radio on. Marcus did not ask what I was doing. Adrian sat there beside me with his ruined hand open on his knee and let it run all the way out.
“…thirty-eight. Thirty-nine. Forty.”
I stopped. The heater filled it in.
“Victoria,” Adrian said. “Give me your hand.”
I gave it to him. He turned it over and laid his knuckles against the inside of my wrist, split side down, wet, and the sting of it went up my arm and into my chest, and I did not pull away. I pressed back into it.
What I wanted right then was not comfort. I want to be honest about that, because everything after it depends on it. He claimed me in front of forty people and I liked it, and I know what that makes me. I wanted him to stop the truck.
“Eleven years,” Luca said to the mirror, and Adrian’s eyes came up into it. “I’ve never once heard you lie about anything.”