"The bathrooms are a bottleneck. Move them to the back wall, you free up twelve feet of usable floor space."
"You measured."
"I estimated."
"You brought a tape measure into my bar and measured the bathroom hallway."
"I brought a tape measure into our future second room and measured everything."
I looked at his napkin sketch. It was neat, detailed, annotated with measurements I was almost certain were accurate. He'd been thinking about this. Not in the way he thought about security — angles, exits, threats — but how a man thinks about something he plans to be around for.
"Our," I said.
He glanced up. "What?"
"You said our future second room."
His expression shifted. The easy confidence was still there but something quieter was underneath it. "I meant it."
"I know you did." I leaned my elbows on the bar across from him and studied his face in the warm light. The face I'd memorized in a week and kept learning since. "I love you."
It came out how real things do — mid-conversation, no warning, no preamble. I hadn't planned it. I'd been thinking it for weeks and it had been sitting in my chest getting heavier and more certain, and it came out over a napkin sketch and a disagreement about bathrooms, and I didn't take it back.
His hand stopped on the glass. He looked at me and his jaw did the thing — the tightening I'd first seen the afternoon the drunk grabbed my wrist, the tell he'd never been able to hide from me. His eyes went bright and his throat moved and for a second the smooth, confident man who'd charmed half of New Orleans was gone and the real one was right there, unhidden, looking at me across my own bar.
"Say it again," he said. His voice was rough.
"No. You heard me. Once is what you get."
"Jenna."
"Dane."
"I love you." He said it flat and sure, the same way he'd saidit was realin the truck. No performance. His eyes on mine, his hand reaching across the bar to catch my wrist. His thumb found my bracelet and traced the studs and held on. "I've been trying to figure out how to say it. I had a plan."
"What was the plan?"
"Dinner. A place on Magazine. I made a reservation."
"You were going to tell me you loved me at a restaurant."
"It was a nice restaurant."
"Dane. I'm wearing bar clothes and I've been sweating since six."
"I know." His thumb was still on my bracelet. "This is better."
I turned my wrist so my fingers laced through his. His hand closed around mine and we stood there across the bar with our hands tangled together and the Blanton's glowing on the shelf and the courtyard lights catching the breeze outside. The Thursday crowd murmured. The jazz from the courtyard speaker drifted. Huck was pretending very hard not to see us, which was its own form of kindness.
"Okay," I said. "Now let go. I have customers."
"Yes ma'am."
"And Dane?"
"Yeah."
"The bathrooms aren't moving."
