Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Rookie
Ellie doesn't ask questions she already knows the answers to.
She's behind the counter at Backroads, unpacking boxes of glassware, when I walk in.
The bar is two weeks from its grand reopening and the place still smells like fresh paint and sawdust. New hardwood floors. New windows.
New everything, built from the bones of what Coin's mess left behind when the firebombing took the original.
Ellie rebuilt it herself. Not with her own hands, but with her own stubbornness, which in this part of West Virginia amounts to the same thing.
"Need something, Prospect?" She doesn't look up from the box.
I lean against the doorframe. "Got a friend who needs work."
"A friend." Now she looks up. Her eyes are sharp, knowing, the eyes of a woman who raised Ruger, survived Striker, and still gets up every morning to open a bar in a town that's tried to burn it down.
"From school. She was bartending at Pint House. Had a situation with a customer and the owner wouldn't back her up."
Ellie sets a pint glass on the shelf. Straightens it. "What kind of situation?"
"He grabbed her. Boss told her to deal with it."
Her hands stop moving. For exactly two seconds, Ellie is very still.
Then she picks up the next glass and places it on the shelf.
"She quit." I say it so Ellie knows the ending before I ask her.
"Good for her." Ellie lifts another glass, inspects it for spots. "She have experience?"
"Yeah, a while at Pint House."
"She reliable?"
"She's the most reliable person in any room she walks into."
The words come out before I've vetted them, and I hear how they sound.
Too certain. Too familiar for a woman I've talked to for a total of maybe forty minutes across six weeks of shared classes.
Ellie hears it too. One eyebrow lifts a fraction. She doesn't comment.
"Tell her to come by in a couple of days." She pulls another glass from the box. "I'll put her on a trial shift for reopening week. If she works out, she stays."
I nod. "Thanks, Ellie."
"Don't thank me." She points a pint glass at my chest. "If she's no good, you're covering her shifts until I find a replacement."
"Deal."
"And Prospect?" She waits until I'm at the door. "This friend of yours. She got a name?"
"Saylor."
Ellie nods once, filing it away in whatever mental cabinet she uses to keep track of every person who's ever walked through her door.
"Tell her to be here in two days. Two o'clock sharp."
* * *
Two days later, she shows up at 1:47.
I know because I'm in the parking lot pretending to check my phone when her car pulls in.
Silver Honda with a dent in the rear fender and a WVU license plate holder.
She gets out and stands there for a second, looking at the building.
Her face does something I haven't seen from her before. Not a smile, but the precursor to one. Interest without guard.
Backroads looks good. Ellie's taste, rebuilt on insurance money and pure will.
The sign is new, hand-painted, the same font as the original. The porch has rocking chairs because Ellie believes a bar should feel like a front porch.
Saylor smooths her flannel, squares her shoulders, and walks inside.
I don't follow. Following would make this into something, and right now it's a favor. A friend helping a friend.
From my bike in the parking lot, I can see through the front window. Ellie greeting her at the bar. Saylor standing straight, hands at her sides, answering questions with the same directness she uses in statistics class.
After ten minutes, Ellie hands her an apron.
Saylor ties it on and gets to work.
Over the next week, Backroads finishes coming together.
Ellie runs the renovation like a campaign. Every surface polished, every chair level, every tap tested twice.
Tildie handles the drink menu. The prospects rotate through kitchen shifts.
Tonight it's Beats, who burns everything but follows Ellie's orders without complaint, which is all she requires.
And Saylor fills in the gaps.
She cleans without being asked. Memorizes the tap layout in one afternoon. Learns the POS system faster than any of us have.
She's good at this. Saylor’s efficient and anticipatory. She sees an empty glass before the customer lifts their hand. Restocks napkins before they run out.
She moves behind the bar with the economy of someone who's learned that being useful is a form of armor.
Ellie notices.
I catch her watching Saylor during a slow stretch on Thursday, and the expression on Ellie's face is one I've seen before. It's the look she gave Tildie during her first week.
Recognition. One survivor clocking another.
I'm behind the bar, restocking bottles because Ellie pointed at the speed rail and said "empty" and that's all the instruction a prospect needs.
Tildie shows up Friday to help with reopening prep. The introduction is brief.
"Saylor, this is Tildie." Ellie gestures between them with a rag in one hand. "Tildie, Saylor. She's new."
Tildie extends her hand. Dark hair in waves, amber eyes assessing without intruding. "You pour or mix?"
Saylor shakes it. "Pour. Never been good at the fancy stuff."
Tildie grabs a case of limes from behind the bar. "Good. The fancy stuff is for people who charge twelve dollars for a gin and tonic. We charge six, and we're honest about it."
The corner of Saylor's mouth twitches.
Tildie catches it and doesn't push. She sets the limes on the cutting board and hands Saylor a knife. "Wedges, not wheels. Ellie's picky about it."
They work side by side in a silence that isn't uncomfortable.
Two women who understand each other's perimeters without being told where the lines are.
I watch from the end of the bar where I'm installing a shelf bracket Ellie asked me to mount three days ago.
My excuse for being here. Prospect work.
The real reason is standing behind the bar in a black Backroads t-shirt Ellie gave her, sleeves rolled to her elbows, cutting limes with a precision that shouldn't be attractive and is.
We fall into a pattern.
Statistics three times a week. She explains regression. I pretend to understand it.
The penis pen makes her laugh twice more before I finally retire it for a regular ballpoint, and she looks almost disappointed.
After class, sometimes we walk in the same direction. Not together. Adjacent. Two people heading toward the parking lot who happen to be having a conversation.
She's a social work major. I learn this on a Wednesday when Dr Petrov assigns a paper connecting statistical methods to a field of study and she mentions hers.
I tell her mine is cybersecurity and she raises an eyebrow. "You don't seem like a computer guy."
I turn my hand over, showing her the grease under my fingernails from working on bikes at the clubhouse that morning. "I contain multitudes."
She laughs deep and hard.
Short, surprised out of her, like a bird startled off a branch.
Her hand comes up to cover her mouth and then drops, and for one second she looks like someone who forgot to be guarded.
The sound sits in my chest for the rest of the day.
At Backroads, we overlap on Thursday and Friday nights. I'm there because Ellie still needs help and because prospects go where they're needed.
Saylor's there because she works.
Behind the bar, the space is narrow. Two people moving in it means proximity, and being close means I learn things about her I didn't know from sitting one seat away in a lecture hall.
The way she smells. Something clean, not perfume, like soap and citrus.
The way her hands move. Confidently, no wasted motion. The opposite of how they look in class when she's gripping her pen too tight.
The way she holds space. Aware of where I am at all times without looking, the way you're aware of a wall or a counter.
And the way the air between us is starting to change.
It's not sudden. It's tidal. A slow pull, incremental. You don't notice until you look down and realize the water is at your ankles.
A brush of fingers when she hands me a glass. Eye contact held a moment longer than the sentence requires.
The way she moves around me behind the bar, close enough to touch, close enough for me to feel her warmth without contact, and neither of us mentioning the gap or closing it.
I don't act on it. Acting on attraction is the behavior of a man who trusts his instincts, and I am not that man.
My instincts told me Kinsey was safe. My instincts told me her questions were innocent.
My instincts are compromised witnesses and I don't put them on the stand.
But Saylor isn't Kinsey. The thought surfaces unbidden, again and again, and I push it down because the thought itself is an instinct and I don't trust those either.
Friday night after the soft reopening. Backroads is closed, the last customers gone, the parking lot empty except for her Honda and my Harley.
Ellie left an hour ago and Tildie before that.
Beats is in the kitchen finishing cleanup, his headphones on.
Saylor is behind the bar, wiping down the taps. I'm stacking chairs.
We've been alone before. In the statistics classroom after everyone leaves, in the parking lot between our vehicles.
But this is different. Closed room at midnight with low lighting and nobody watching, the distance between us reduced to a bar counter and a decision.
I carry the last chair to its stack and turn around.
She's at the sink, her back to me, rinsing a rag. The overhead light catches the line of her neck where her hair is pulled up.
I should say goodnight. Walk out, get on my bike, ride back to the compound where my laptop is waiting with access logs I need to review because the anomaly from eight days ago has happened twice more and each time the intruder stayed longer.
I should do a lot of things.
Instead, I cross to the bar and reach past her for the spray bottle on the shelf behind the sink.
She turns at the same time.
And we're there. Six inches apart, my arm extended past her shoulder, her face tilted up, her eyes on mine.
Neither of us moves.
Her breath is warm on my chin. Her eyes are brown and wide and the guard is down. Not all the way. Not enough to call it open.