Chapter Two — Coffee Instead of Champagne
By one in the morning the VIP room had thinned into the last-call version of itself — half-empty bottles, a few groomsmen slumped and glassy, Ty somewhere down at the main bar buying shots for strangers because that was apparently what a man did the night before he supposedly got married.
Kamiko had cashed out two other private dances and come back to close out the room, which was really just an excuse, and she knew it, and judging by the way Zaire's whole body seemed to reorient toward the door when she walked back in, he knew it too.
"Your friend's a mess," she said, nodding down toward the stairs, where Ty's laugh could be heard over the bass.
"He's celebrating."
"Getting married tomorrow and he's down there flirting with my coworker like it's audition night."
"It's his last night of a certain kind of freedom," Zaire said. "Men do stupid things with freedom when they know it's got an expiration date."
"You don't seem like the type."
"The type to do something stupid?"
"The type to run out the clock on freedom," Kamiko said. "You've been sitting up here all night like a man doing time."
He looked at her a long moment, and something about his face in the low gold light made her feel, for the first time all night, like maybe she'd said something true without meaning to.
"Maybe I am," he said, quiet.
"You getting married too, Zaire?"
The question sat there for a second too long. She watched something move behind his eyes — a decision, quick and private, the kind men made when they'd rather lie by omission than lie outright.
"No," he said finally. "Not tonight, anyway."
It wasn't an answer. She noticed. She filed it away the way she filed away every half-answer men gave her, a professional habit built from years of learning which lies mattered and which ones didn't cost her anything to let slide.
This one, she'd think later, cost her everything. But that night it just seemed like the practiced dodge of a rich man protecting his privacy, and she let it go because the rest of him felt so unguarded that the one locked door didn't seem worth kicking down.
"Well," she said, standing, brushing invisible lint off her thigh, all business again because her shift wasn't over and Big June didn't pay her to sit in one man's lap all night no matter how good the conversation was. "I gotta close out some tables. It was nice talking to you, logistics man."
"Wait." He said it fast, for him — the first unguarded thing he'd done all night. Then, slower, like he was talking himself into something: "Can I get your number?"
Kamiko had heard that question maybe four thousand times in her career, in every register from pathetic to threatening, and she had a whole system for handling it, mostly involving the word no delivered with a smile that didn't reach her eyes.
She didn't do that this time. She didn't fully understand why until later.
"I don't usually," she said instead, which was true, and which was also, she realized as she said it, an opening.
"I know." He didn't push. That was the thing that got her — he just sat there, hands loose on his knees, giving her every chance to say no and not making it weird if she did.
"I'm not asking for anything. Not — " he gestured vaguely at the room, at the club, at the whole economy of wanting that the room ran on.
"Not that. I just liked talking to you. That doesn't happen to me a lot.
People wanting to talk instead of—" He stopped himself.
"Instead of what?"
"Instead of getting something from me," he said, and there was something old and tired in the way he said it, something that made her wonder, briefly, what it must be like to walk through the world always wondering what the smile in front of you was actually pointed at.
She thought about her mother's hospital bracelet in the ziploc bag.
She thought about the business plan folder on her laptop, three years of careful notes on lease rates and liquor licenses.
She thought about every man who'd ever looked at her like a transaction and every man who'd looked at her like a warning.
She took the pen out of her garter — force of habit, every dancer at Velvet kept one there — and wrote her number on a cocktail napkin instead of asking for his, because some instinct told her that giving felt safer than taking, tonight.
"If you ever want coffee instead of champagne," she said, sliding it across the table, "you know where to find me."
He looked at the napkin like she'd handed him something rarer than it was. He folded it once, careful, and put it in his breast pocket instead of his phone, which she noticed, and which she'd think about more than she wanted to admit on the drive home that night.
"No promises," she added, because she believed in protecting herself more than she believed in fairy tales. "No expectations. I'm not holding my breath for a bachelor party guy."
"No promises," he agreed. "Just coffee. If you'll let me."
Downstairs, Ty's voice rose in another round of laughter, something about my man Zaire, quietest groomsman in Atlanta history, and Kamiko caught the flicker that crossed Zaire's face at the word groomsman — there and gone, fast enough that she told herself she'd imagined it.
She hadn't. She just didn't know that yet.
She thought about him the whole drive home, which annoyed her, because Kamiko James did not think about men the whole drive home.
She had a rule about that, built over three years of learning the hard way that the club and her actual life needed a wall between them thick enough that neither could bleed into the other.
But the wall had a door in it that night, and she couldn't quite remember shutting it.
She replayed the conversation instead of the money — unusual, for a closing shift, when her mind was usually doing math about tips and gas and how much closer she'd gotten to next semester's tuition.
Instead she kept circling back to the way he'd said depends who you ask about owing Ty something, the specific, careful economy of his sentences, like a man who'd learned early that every word cost something and had trained himself to spend as few as possible.
Her phone buzzed with a text from Neveah before she'd even parked. Girl who was that man in the corner? You were up there a whole HOUR.
Just a client, Kamiko typed back, and then sat in her car in the dark outside her apartment complex for a full minute before she made herself get out, because some small, honest part of her already knew that was the first lie she'd told about him, and it wouldn't be the last one either of them told.