We shake on it like it’s business.
For me, that’s all it can be.
Because if she keeps coming back to this table, I can keep her close enough to watch. Close enough to protect. Far enough that she still thinks I feel nothing for her.
I finish my drink and stand.
Amber’s eyes track me. Guarded now. Wary. Like she’s filing my movements away, building a case in her head.
Good.
Let her see me as an enemy.
It’s better that way.
She can’t ever know what I really feel when she looks at me. She can’t know how quickly I would tear the world apart if someone tried to take her from it. She can’t know that the most dangerous thing near her isn’t the stalker, or the mafia, or any enemy with a gun.
It’s me.
Not because I would hurt her.
Because I would do anything to keep her safe.
Even from myself.
11
AMBER
Ikeep telling myself these aren’t dates.
They’re meetings. Check-ins. A truce held together by bourbon and mutual distrust. I refuse to call them anything else, even in my own head.
Still.
I find myself watching the clock at work. Not in a hopeful way. In a vigilant way. Like if I don’t keep an eye on time, it might slip past me and I’ll miss something important.
The pub is always the same when I get there. Dim lights. Sticky tables. The same bartender who never remembers my name but remembers my drink. Giovanni is usually already seated, back to the wall, jacket draped over the chair beside him like he owns the place without needing to prove it.
He never waves me over.
He doesn’t have to.
At the pub, the nights blur together.
“You always sit with your back to the wall,” I say one evening, nodding at his chair.
“Habit,” Giovanni replies.
“From what?”
“From living long enough to keep it.”
Another night, I gesture toward the jukebox crackling in the corner. “If I have to hear this song one more time, I’m smashing it.”
“You won’t,” he says.
“And how do you know that?”
