Epilogue 1 Beginning
Sam
The club is dark in the afternoon. It's the only time it belongs to me. No dancers, no patrons, no music. Just me and the inventory and the smell of last night's bourbon worked into the wood.
I'm in the storeroom counting cases of spirits I already counted yesterday.
It's just to keep my hands moving. My head has been useless for weeks, stuck on a woman in a campfire-colored coat who's been coming to my bar, standing too close, looking at me a beat too long, and making me want things I thought I had laid to rest a long time ago.
The front door opens. I know it's her before she's three steps in.
The footsteps come back through the club, past the stage, to the storeroom, and stop on the other side of the door.
She doesn't knock. For a long moment there's nothing but a person breathing on the other side of an inch of wood, working up to something, and me on my side holding a clipboard I've stopped pretending to read.
I open the door.
She's right there. Hand half-raised, caught between knocking and leaving.
And for once in three years I don't think.
I get a hand around her wrist and pull her in.
Into the dark, the bourbon-smell, the stacked cases of spirits.
The door swings shut. I walk her back against it.
I put my face near her shoulder and kiss a line up her neck.
I bring my hand to her jaw, look her in the eye, and place my lips over hers.
We kiss like we've been starving for each other and are finally getting fed.
When we stop, we don't go far. She pulls her head back and rests her forehead against my jaw, her hands flat on my chest. We're both breathing heavy. My heart is skipping beats and jumping around in my chest. She can feel it. She says nothing about it. That's its own kind of mercy.
"Sam." Low. Not quite steady.
"Yeah."
"What is this. Between us?"
There it is. The question we've both been circling for a while. I keep a dozen easy answers within reach for exactly this kind of question.
"I'm not sure yet," I say. "But you intrigue me in a way I'm not used to. And I think about you way more than I should."
She tips her head back and looks at me. There are about four feelings on her face fighting for the front, and I can't tell which is winning, and I find I want very badly to know.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only honest one I've got. I don't do this.
I haven't in a long time, and the last time I did, it cost me everything I'd built.
" I make myself say the rest, because she came all this way for the truth and she's earned it.
"But you're not imagining it. Whatever this is. You're not imagining it."
She breathes out. Some of the fear goes with it. Not all. She's too smart to let all of it go.
"Okay," she says.
"Okay."
She steps back into the thin light under the door. Straightens her coat. Looks at me one more time, and there's a bigger question still sitting in her eyes, the one neither of us is ready to ask out loud.
"I should go."
Neither of us moves.
Outside the storeroom the club is dark and quiet and mine. In here it's dark and quiet and, for the first time in three years, not only mine.
I don't know how this ends. I know it won't be simple, and I'm standing here anyway with the warmth of her wrist still on my hand, deciding to want it.
A beginning, and not a clean one. We're going to have to fight for it.