The bathroom door was open. I'd heard Dane moving in the hallway, the particular cadence of him: deliberate, not heavy,each step placed like he already knew what was on the other side of it. I heard him stop.
I kept my hand steady.
In the mirror, he was in the doorway.
He just stopped, and his eyes found mine in the glass, and neither of us moved for a beat that lasted slightly longer than accidental.
He looked at my mouth. Then back up.
I capped the tube and set it on the counter and met his eyes in the mirror. The air in the bathroom was warm. His face carried the same look from this afternoon — that heat, not quite contained — and I thought: there you are.
"Ready in ten," I said.
"I'll be at the door," he said.
He left. I pressed my lips together and looked at myself in the mirror and said, under my breath, to the woman looking back at me, "Okay."
THE SATURDAY NIGHTcrowd was nothing you could've called a crowd and kept a straight face. It was a force of nature. By eight the room was at capacity, every table turned, the courtyard so packed I'd had to put Huck on the gate, and the noise from Bourbon Street outside had reached a volume where you didn't hear it anymore, you just felt it, a low vibration in the soles of your feet that meant the whole city was moving.
I loved this. I'd loved it before any of this week happened and I was refusing to stop loving it now.
I worked the rail, Huck on my left, the barback running empties. Dane was in the corner by the service entrance with his back to the wall and his eyes on the room, and I was aware of him the way I was aware of the music and the crowd andthe heat, just a constant background thing that lived in my peripheral vision and wouldn't leave it.
Except for when he moved.
He ran the circuit a few times over the course of the night — entrance to entrance, courtyard to hallway, a visual sweep of the alley camera every forty minutes. He moved through the packed room without touching anyone, which at this density I'd never seen. Both times he came back through the narrow space behind the counter I had to shift to let him past. We ended up closer than the square footage required, his shoulder at my eye level, his arm brushing mine when he turned.
The first time it was accidental. I didn't entirely intend the second one, and I wasn't going to examine that too closely.
He went back to his corner. I went back to my end of the counter. The crowd worked around us and I poured four drinks without stopping and didn't look at him, and the room kept building.
"Four-fifty on fourteen," Huck said.
"Got it." I ran the card, closed the tab, handed back the receipt, and turned to restock the well. Dane was standing at the service end of the counter — the crowd had pushed him in from his corner — and I'd already shifted before I registered he was there. I came up against the back bar. He was a foot and a half in front of me.
"Sorry," he said.
"It's fine." I ducked under his arm, grabbed the bourbon from the back shelf, and came up on the other side of him. We did a half-rotation in the narrow space that was one hundred percent situational and zero percent anything else. Except I could feel the heat off his arm through my sleeve, and he smelled like cedar and the bar and underneath that something I was going to stop taking inventory of right now.
"You good?" he said, close enough that I didn't have to raise my voice.
"Always," I said, and went back to work.
WE CLOSED AT TWO.
Staff filtered out. Huck did his lock check on the courtyard gate, gave me the nod, and left. The barback did a final run and I sent her home. The room settled into the particular quiet of a place that had just held three hundred people and was now holding two.
I started the closing routine.
My closing routine, on this specific night, went: sweep the courtyard before the floor, restock the bottles in the back-forward order instead of the front-back order I'd used every other night this week, and then run the register while standing on the left side of the terminal instead of the right.
Dane came in from the alley camera check at the side entrance, shaking the damp off his jacket because the night had turned humid, and stopped.
He looked at me, then at the order in which I was restocking. Looked at the courtyard door. Looked back at me.
I watched him recalculate in real time, and it was the most enjoyable thirty seconds of my entire Saturday.
"Did you change the order," he said.
