3. Ash
Determined to get through to her, and now oddly fascinated by this woman, I kept going. “Tell me something about yourself.”
“Like what?” Olivia’s dark brows pinched together again.
“I don’t know…” I glanced around the dim room, searching for inspiration. When nothing came to me, I thought about what little I knew about her. “Where do you work?”
“Hurst Labs. It’s a contract industrial chemical lab.”
“So, you blow stuff up?” That sounded cool, at least.
“ Er . No. I work with…” The sigh she let out drew my gaze back to her from where they wandered to the next table.
Our neighbors perused the wine menu, harassing the poor server for samples as if this was a tasting.
“You work with…?”
“Industrial lubricants.”
“ Come again?” I nearly snorted.
“Oh, ha ha. Very funny. I work with lube, and you had to go and make a sex joke.”
“It was right there. I had to slip in the joke.” The pinch of her mouth and the very pointed rip right down the center of her bread frightened me a little. “You’re serious?”
“Deadly.”
“ Mm … and what, pray tell, do you do with industrial lubricants ?” I lowered my voice, leaning forward as if we shared a scandalous secret.
“Whatever you’re thinking, stop it. Industrial lubricants are for machines .”
“It’s like the jokes write themselves.” I tried not to laugh at the angry way she handled her butter knife. “Seriously, though, tell me about it.”
“No more jokes?”
“This is the most entertained I’ve been in months, so I can’t promise to stop with the jokes. But I promise not to laugh at you. If that helps.”
“Whatever. It is pretty funny.” Quirking her lips as she hid a smile made her kind of… cute. “Okay, so the stuff I work on is called, no shit, SlipSlide 3000.”
“No!”
“Yes. The names for this stuff are way worse than like… Swiss Navy or KY. Anyway, I do research and testing. Our lab is contract-based, so if a company doesn’t have space or manpower, they send us their stuff.”
“Does it come in a handy squeeze tube?” The visual nearly had me doubled over. Olivia in an official-looking lab coat and goggles, pumping out precise amounts of slippery fluid.
“It comes in fucking barrels .”
I leaned forward so hard I knocked into the table. “It does not .”
The quirk of her lips let another half-smile escape. “Okay, not when they sell it, no. But if you’re amused now, that’s not even the best part.”
“It cannot get better than machine lube called SlipSlide 3000?”
“The instrument I use most…” she leaned in, mirroring my posture. “Is the penetrometer.” Olivia coughed, disguising a laugh. Clearly, the wine was getting to her, loosening her nerves and her lips, but there was a sense of humor hiding underneath her icy ‘you don’t want to know me’ exterior.
“Explain. Immediately.” How do you even get into that industry?
“Well, we do a lot of temperature testing. Some of the company’s clients are in extreme climates, so their product has to stand up to… rigorous use.”
I waited for her to go on after she took a sip of water. Seriously, this was way more interesting than I anticipated.
“We put samples in the ultra-low freezer, then apply friction to test performance, and we use the penetrometer to be sure they still withstand all those extremes.”
“Wow.” I set my wine glass down with a clink, accidentally drawing the attention of the server.
“My sentiments exactly when I took the job. And my boss is about a million years old, so imagine him explaining my job description.”
“Barnes, you went from the best job to the worst job in point three seconds flat.”
“Barnes?” One brown eyebrow flicked upward at my use of her last name.
“Is your name?”
“No one has called me Barnes since middle school gym class. And it was hell.”
“If I call you Barnes, it’ll erase those memories. It’s settled.”
Olivia considered my proclamation long enough for me to wonder if she’d retreated back into her silent self again. “Fine,” she said, then she muttered low enough I probably wasn’t meant to hear, “Better than sweetcheeks.”
After that, our food arrived, so we didn’t talk much.
I did have the pleasure of seeing Olivia enjoy her meal.
The expressions she’d shut down on meeting me slowly expanded across her face with her single-minded, methodical attack on her food.
Each bite seemed to be a little burst of ecstasy on her tongue, and her face reflected that.
Joyful rolls of her eyes that were so at odds with the sardonic expression she had no trouble directing at me, though she stifled the expression when our eyes met across the pristine white tablecloth.
The silence at our table was no longer tense and awkward, but companionable and… short lived.
Miranda, the PR rep for the Knights, materialized. With no warning, she took a photo of Olivia and me, the flash so bright it’d leave an imprint in my lids for the next five minutes.
“Hi!” she sang, rearranging the table without asking. “Okay, now lean in and smile this time!” Another flash.
“Excuse me?” Olivia began, the same pissed, pinchy expression she’d worn in the box office on her face.
“This is Miranda. She does PR for the Knights. They need photos for the raffle, or whatever.” Had I slept with Miranda?
Probably? For the most part, I remembered everyone I had sex with, but a few of the wilder Wilder parties evaporated from my memory.
From the undercurrent of polite hostility I always received from the redhead, I assumed I slept with her and was too afraid and ashamed to ask.
At least she was happily dating Allen, now, so I didn’t have to worry about a repeat.
And yes, I knew how shitty it seemed.
“Oh. Hello?—”
Miranda’s phone flashed again, catching Olivia in the middle of her sentence.
I would bet a month’s salary that photo would end up on the Knights’ socials.
When Miranda asked for photos of us standing together, Olivia flat-out refused, and I was grateful when she put her foot down.
Unlike me, I had to do what Miranda told me to do.
Olivia’s mood improved greatly as a decadent domed mousse appeared between us and Miranda disappeared, obviously satisfied with the photos she’d taken.
In a few more bites, the dinner would be over and after the ride home, I'd likely never see Olivia again.
Emptiness blossomed at the thought. Maybe I wanted to see her again.
Maybe I liked talking to her about lube and not having friends, anything other than tits and hockey.
Maybe I wanted to learn more about this enigma of a woman.
We finished and rose to leave. Olivia slipped on her coat and pulled her long brown hair from the collar. She was taller than I’d realized.
As I accidentally lost myself in admiring the woman across from me, from out of nowhere, someone appeared from the depths of the room, barreling right into me.
Reflexes honed from over two decades of being body checked into walls kicked in, my hands darting to spin my accidental assailant and I around.
Except Olivia was closer than I’d realized, and my choices suddenly dwindled to either letting this person with zero spatial awareness knock Olivia down or letting the stranger fall.
I chose the latter.
Miranda’s earlier arrival drew the attention of the rest of the patrons of Le Reve, but our little fall incident seemed to snap whatever kept them in their seats.
Some of them hung back, but enough people recognized me and stepped forward to invade our space that several others followed, probably not even knowing why they were following the crowd.
Olivia’s spine jerked straight as strangers pushed past her to get to me, shoving napkins and phones in my face. Their grasping hands gripped and squeezed, forgetting that I was just some dude in a jersey, not some kind of saint they wanted to tear a piece off to keep as a relic.
And I did nothing but smile and laugh and sign.
With every swoop of the Sharpie, the walls crushed my lungs, every photo cracked my ribs.
So much time passed since I’d been unprepared for a situation like this, though I should’ve been.
Miranda’s calculated timing and her photos were the first wave in this stupid PR stunt; the gushing fans the second.
“Sorry, folks, but that’s all the time we have!” Olivia’s voice cut through the low murmuring sounds of the small crowd. “Ash, we have to leave right now, or we’ll be late. We have a… thing… to do.”
“A thing?” I almost asked what she meant, but I caught on, something in her eyes making me redirect. A slapshot instead of a backhand. “The thing. Right.”
Probably the most surprising occurrence of the night was Olivia Barnes stepping into my personal space, tucking her hand in mine, and steering me away.
“If you don’t take us out the back door right now ,” she said under her breath to Jordan, “you’ll hear from the Knights’ legal team tomorrow.”
Jordan nodded frantically, seemingly as nonplussed by all of this as we were, and maybe a little afraid of Olivia’s wrath.
Through the kitchen we escaped, dodging waiters and sous chefs. Olivia nearly slipped, her flat shoes made for an office rather than the slippery kitchen floor, but her fingers still tangled with mine, so I kept her from falling.
We waited outside as Jordan went to send the car around to pick us up. Rough slabs of stone dug into my shoulders and back as I leaned against the wall, sucking down enough air for the first time since Miranda appeared half an hour ago.
Encounters like these always took so much out of me; adrenaline curled my fingers and flexed them back and forth against the leg of my jeans.
A glow lit up Olivia’s face as she scrolled on her phone.
Did she know she worried her bottom lip with her teeth while she concentrated?
When she finished, she dipped her chin, sending the mass of her brown hair falling over her face.
“Are you okay?”
No one asked me that anymore.
I shook my head, squeezing my eyes closed to avoid the bright lights of passing traffic. Rushing cars and the low thrum of the restaurant’s air compressor provided dull background noise, soothing the pounding in my head from relentless voices.
“Does this happen a lot?”
“It’s been a while since it caught me off guard. Usually, I can fake my way through it. Part of the job.” I shrugged. “Expecting it makes it easier.” Gravel caught in my throat; forcing the words past it burned.
“That makes sense. Do you need water? Or gum, or… something?”
I laughed, startled at the offer.
“I thought it might help.” Her voice sounded miffed, so I cracked my eyes open to find she indeed looked affronted. Her shoulder jerked upward as she turned back to her purse. “We’re friends now. I assume helping is something friends do,” she explained.
“It does, thank you. You surprised me.” I held out my hand and accepted the water bottle she offered. My heart sank as the limo’s headlights rounded the building.
No matter how badly it began, now, I didn’t want this night to end.