Chapter 5
Holly
The photo loads on my laptop in strips, top to bottom, slow enough to make me grind my teeth. The harbor first. Then the boats. Then the dock and the men hauling crab pots under a sky the color of a week-old bruise.
I click to the next image. A waitress at Betty's leaning out the service window, cigarette between her teeth, steam from the kitchen rising behind her head.
Next: Griz in the Anchor's doorway with the neon sign throwing red across the flat planes of his face.
I shot that one last Tuesday and he didn't flinch.
Four years as Sal's bouncer and I've never seen the gargoyle flinch at anything.
All that red light against a man who doesn't move.
The back office is small enough that my knees touch the filing cabinet when I scoot the chair forward. One desk, one lamp, Sal's ledger books stacked in a column that hasn't moved since I started here. The laptop's fan whirs and the screen throws blue light across my hands while the uploads crawl.
I scroll past the harbor shots and the Betty's series and land on the Toy Run folder.
Forty-eight images from December. Knox at the front of the column, bike loaded with wrapped boxes.
Finn with a stuffed bear strapped to his handlebars and that grin Jess pretends she doesn't love.
Colt lifting his daughter Lily onto the back of his bike, her little arms wrapped around his waist, her helmet too big and her smile bigger.
The whole MC riding through Nightfall Cove with toys piled in the trucks behind them, and the sidewalks lined with kids who didn't care that the men on those bikes had tusks and green skin.
The cursor lands on the one I keep skipping.
Rex, crouched on the curb outside the fire station with a girl no older than five.
She picked him. Walked right up to the biggest orc in the lineup, tugged his leather cut, and held up a drawing she'd made in crayon—a motorcycle with wings.
Rex took it from her with both hands like she'd handed him something precious, and that's the moment I caught: his head bent over the paper, the gold tusk caps catching winter sunlight, a grin so unguarded it cracked his whole face open.
I haven't deleted it. I haven't printed it either. Looking at it hits the same spot a deep breath can't reach, right under my ribs. I close the folder and push the laptop back on the desk.
I stow the camera in my bag, pull my hair back with the elastic on my wrist, grab my apron from the shelf, and head out for my shift.
The Anchor's front window has a hole the size of a grapefruit and a web of cracks radiating from the center like a frozen splash.
I stop at the bottom of the stairs with my apron half-tied.
January wind cuts through the gap in the glass and lifts a napkin off the closest table, sending it to the floor in a lazy spin.
The rock sits on the hardwood under the window, grey, the size of a man's fist. The kind you'd pick up from any beach in Oregon.
I photograph the window from inside first. Then I push through the front door to get the exterior angle, and the spray paint stops me on the sidewalk.
Red letters, block capitals, fresh enough that the edges haven't bled yet.
MONSTER LOVERS. Three shots each, different focal lengths, evidence before cleanup because the instinct kicks in faster than the anger.
Inside, Sal stands behind the bar with a broom in her hands and an expression I've never seen on her face before: four hundred years of keeping the peace pressed down into a single exhale through her nose.
She looks at the window and then at me and then back at the window, and the broom handle creaks in her grip.
"Happened overnight," she says. "Griz found it at five."
Griz kneels by the wall with a dustpan, sweeping glass into a pile without a sound. His stone hands move through the shards and they don't cut him. Nothing cuts him. But he's pressing each shard into the dustpan like he wants to crush it back to sand, and that's the closest Griz gets to angry.
I pull the pamphlet from my jacket pocket. The one from my first week, the Humans First tri-fold with the fist logo and the clean margins. I smooth it on the bar top and look at the window.
"Is this connected?"
Sal picks up the rock and turns it over in her palm. Her grey-green skin makes the stone look pale. "The paint's the same red as their flyers."
I tuck the pamphlet back and grab a roll of packing tape and a trash bag from behind the bar. The tape over the crack will hold for a night. Sal watches me do it and doesn't argue.
The Monday evening crowd trickles in sparse.
Carl and Micky take their booth and don't mention the window, which means they've already talked about it outside and decided not to bring it up where Sal can hear.
Old Gene settles into the window seat, folds his hands on the table and stares at the tape like it's a personal insult.
Frank from the barbershop comes in around eight. He orders his usual pilsner and leans both elbows on the bar, the way he does when he's got something to say and is pretending he doesn't.
"Heard about the window."
"It's hard to miss, Frank."
"The Humans First crowd," he says, lowering his voice even though nobody at the bar is close enough to hear.
He picks at the edge of his coaster. "They've got a new guy running things.
Dale Rickman. Moved down from Portland last year, bought the old Weatherford house up on the bluff.
Money. Real organization, not like the jokers who used to hand out leaflets at the grocery store.
" He takes a long pull of his pilsner. "They're holding meetings at the community center. Thursday nights."
"The community center?" I set his second pilsner down harder than I need to. The center sits two blocks from the Anchor, sandwiched between the library and the Methodist church. Betty takes Lily there for craft mornings on Saturdays. "Since when?"
"Since November, at least. Maybe longer." Frank shrugs with one shoulder. "Nobody paid attention because they kept it quiet. But the window—" He tilts his chin toward the tape.
I pull out my phone and type the name into my notes. Dale Rickman. Portland. Weatherford house. Community center Thursdays.
The door opens at nine fifteen and every thought I have about Dale Rickman drops to the floor.
Rex doesn't look at the bar. Doesn't look at me.
He walks straight to the taped window and stops, arms loose at his sides, studying the crack and the hole behind it.
His shoulders pull tight under his cut and his head turns in a slow sweep: window, ceiling corners, the front awning where Sal's camera mounts to the fascia board.
He pulls out his phone and photographs the hole.
Then walks outside and photographs the spray paint.
I watch through the taped glass as he crouches on the sidewalk the way I did an hour ago, angling for the same shot I already took, and my chest tightens because of course he did.
Of course he came here and of course the first thing he touched is the damage.
He comes back inside and checks on Sal. She waves him off with the broom. He checks on Griz. The gargoyle shakes his head once. He's fine. Rex nods and turns around, his eyes find me behind the bar.
"We need to talk."
I drag the rag across the bar top in front of Carl's seat, keeping my face neutral because I've had two years of practice serving drinks to a man who makes my pulse do things it has no right to do.
"No, we don't."
"Holly."
"You don't get to skip my bar for a week and a half and walk in here like you've got something to say." I drop the rag in the sanitizer bucket. "You want a drink, sit down. If you don't, there's the door."
Rex's nostrils flare. I hate that I notice, hate that the amber glow against his green skin still registers in the part of my brain that sees composition in everything. He's a photograph I can't stop taking and can't bring myself to develop.
Carl glances between us and picks up his beer and heads for the booth. Smart man. Old Gene sleeps through it. Sal drifts to the far end of the bar. The garnish trays get very interesting all of a sudden.
"I saw what they did to the window." Rex's voice sits low in his chest. "Orc scouts have been watching this building for two weeks. Now Humans First is targeting it. That's two threats on the same location, and you work here every night."
"I know where I work."
"This isn't about us."
"Everything with you is about us, Rex. You just won't say it out loud." I grip the bar edge. "You came in here because of the window? Fine. You checked the cameras and took your photos. Gold star. Now get out of my bar."
Rex flattens both palms on the bar top. The veins in his forearms stand out under the ink, and his fingers spread wide. I recognize the gesture because I've seen it a hundred times.
"Tyler." His voice drops. "Is he still—"
"Don't."
"I need to know."
"You don't need to know anything about Tyler.
You don't need to know anything about anyone I see or don't see, because you gave up the right to know when you walked out of my apartment at three in the morning for the last time.
" My voice doesn't shake. I won't let it.
"You don't get to show up when someone else wants me and call it caring. That's not love, Rex."
"You decide everything. What time you show up, what time you disappear, how much you give and how much you keep.
You've done it so long you think that's what this is.
" I step closer to the bar. Close enough that his scent hits me—leather and motor oil and that sharp green edge underneath, the orc pheromones that settle low in my gut and pull.
"I'm not a pit stop, Rex. I'm not the last bar before the highway. "
Rex closes his eyes, fingers curling on the wood. The bar between us is three feet wide and it might as well be a canyon.
Frank's watching his pilsner like it holds the meaning of life. Carl and Micky have gone suspiciously quiet in their booth. I untie my apron and toss it on the hook. "Stockroom. Now."
He opens his eyes.
I grab my keys off the hook, walk out from behind the bar, and push through the stockroom door without checking to see if he follows.
The stockroom is twelve feet by ten, lined with shelving on three walls, cases of liquor stacked to head height, the air cool and close and saturated with the smell of cardboard and bourbon.
One bare bulb on a pull chain. I yank it on and turn around.
Rex fills the doorway with his shoulders brushing both sides of the frame.
I shove the door shut behind him. The latch clicks. The room shrinks.
"Say it." I step into his space. "Whatever you came here to say, say it now, because I'm done having this conversation across a bar where Sal has to pretend she isn't listening."
"You think I planned this?"
"I think you've been circling this for a month.
I think you sat on your bike in the rain and watched my windows.
I think you came back to your stool the night I went out with Tyler and sat there drinking until I came home so you could smell his cologne on my jacket and make yourself miserable, and I think you're standing in my stockroom right now because you heard someone threw a rock through Sal's window and the first thing you thought of wasn't the glass.
" I put my hand flat on his chest. His heart hammers against my palm through the leather and the cotton underneath. "Tell me I'm wrong."
He doesn't. His breathing turns ragged under my palm and his pupils blow wide in the dim light, gold-green swallowed to a thin ring around black.
"I'm not good at this." His voice scrapes the walls. "I don't know how to do what you're asking."
"I'm not asking you to do anything. I've stopped asking.
" I shove him with the heel of my palm, and he gives one step, his back hitting the shelving.
A bottle rattles behind his shoulder. "I told Tyler I'd see him again.
I told him yes because he asked. That's it.
That's the whole bar for entry, Rex—asking. "
His hand closes around my wrist. His thumb settles into the groove of my pulse and I know he can feel it racing because orc senses don't miss that kind of thing, and the unfairness of loving someone who can read your heartbeat makes me want to hit him.
"Tell me to leave." The words come out so low I feel them more than hear them. "Tell me you don't want this."
I should. Every rational cell in my body lines up and screams it—push him out the door, lock it, go upstairs, call Tyler back, choose the man who asks instead of the one who takes. Every smart decision I've ever made points toward that door.
But I've never had a rational thought about Rex Flynn.
Not the first night he sat on that stool and watched me pour drinks with those eyes.
Not the first time his mouth found the base of my throat and I forgot my own name.
Not now, standing in a stockroom with my palm flat against his heartbeat and his scent soaking into my clothes, my hair, everything I'll take upstairs with me tonight.
"I want everything," I say. "And you can't give me that."
He kisses me.
His mouth covers mine and his free hand fists in the back of my hair. I grab the collar of his cut and pull him down to me, kissing him back, tasting smoke and salt and the desperate heat of a man who doesn't know how to stay but can't make himself go.
The kiss turns savage. My teeth catch his bottom lip and he growls, a vibration that rolls through him into me, through my palms, down through my ribs where it settles low and hot.
His tusks drag across my chin, the gold caps smooth and warm, and I tip my head back and let them track down my jaw to the side of my throat.
The scrape of tusk pulls a sound out of me I don't recognize, and his grip tightens at the small of my back, hauling me up onto my toes.
I lock the stockroom door without breaking the kiss. He grips my thighs and lifts me, I wrap my legs around his waist, and the shelving rattles against the wall when my back hits it. A box slides off the top shelf and lands somewhere behind us and neither of us care.
His mouth drags from mine to the hinge of my jaw, down the side of my neck, and his tusks scrape the tendon where my pulse hammers. My head falls back against the shelf.
"I'm still angry at you," I say to the ceiling.
His teeth graze my throat. "I know."
The bulb swings on its chain above us, throwing shadows that rock across the walls. The stockroom smells like bourbon, cardboard and Rex, his fingers dig into my thighs, and mine twist in his hair, neither of us is okay and neither of us is stopping.