Jenna
BY SATURDAY AFTERNOON, we had a routine.
An uneasy one, the kind you build with a person you're doing twenty rounds with every day and haven't knocked out yet. He had his stool. I had the rail. There were unspoken rules about the coffee and the bathroom and the narrow space behind the bar where we kept ending up at the same time, and neither of us had broken any of them, which I chose to read as a draw.
Proof was running at half-capacity for the afternoon shift, which was still twice what I'd have called a crowd two years ago. Mardi Gras brought the tourists out in waves, and by the time Saturday hit, the waves had started crashing. Outside, I could hear the second lines rolling down Bourbon in slow, brassy surges, the crowd noise rising every time the doors swung open. Inside, the ceiling fans were losing the fight against the body heat and I'd been sweating through my work clothes since noon.
Dane was on his stool at the service end of the counter with sightlines to both doors and the hallway. His thermal was the same shade of dark blue I'd seen him in all week, and he had his phone face-down on the wood in front of him, which meant he was watching the room, not the screen. I'd caught him at it twice already. He had a way of going still that most people couldn't manage. Not tense, just present, the kind of stillness that saw everything without looking like it was trying.
I'd noticed it. I'd noticed it and kept working anyway, because noticing things about Dane Gatlin was turning into a full-time occupation and I already had one of those.
"Refill?" I said, passing him.
"I'm good."
"You've had half a coffee since noon."
"I've also had a granola bar and two antacids and I'm not complaining about those either."
I grabbed the carafe anyway and topped him off, because the man was going to be functional if I had to force the issue. He picked up the cup and watched me over the rim with those gray eyes and didn't say thank you, which I'd already learned was just how he was. Not rude. Just efficient. He said exactly what was necessary and not one syllable more — and then sometimes, with no warning, he'd say considerably more, and you'd be laughing before you noticed you'd been redirected.
I'd caught that too.
"Huck," I said, sliding toward the middle of the counter. "I'm going to do a floor check. You've got the bar."
Huck looked up from the back bar, looked at Dane, looked at me, and said nothing. Which was Huck for fine.
The afternoon crowd was loose and good-natured, nobody in that particular gear-shift zone that happened around eight or nine when the fun started going sideways. I worked the floor, checked in at the tables, ran a ticket to the courtyard. Throughthe French doors I could see the Edison lights already on, though it was still daylight, and the jasmine along the back wall was in full bloom, the smell of it thick and sweet over the fry oil and bourbon. I pulled a dead bloom off the trailing vine and stood there for a second just breathing it in.
Okay, so maybe I wasn't entirely unaffected by the week.
I went back inside.
THE GUY AT THE FARend of the rail had been nursing the same beer for forty minutes and getting louder about it, which told me two things: he'd started somewhere else and he was going to be a problem. I watched him for another ten minutes to be sure, then cut him off.
"You're done," I told him. "I'll call you a cab."
He didn't like that. He grabbed my wrist when I reached for his glass.
The grip of a man used to making things stop when he wanted them stopped, short and certain.
He was wrong about that.
I broke the grip with the rotation I'd learned from a self-defense class I'd taken three years ago because someone had left a similar bruise on my bartender's forearm and I'd decided we weren't doing that anymore. His hand came free. I set the glass behind the counter out of his reach and looked at him with patient, level calm that said I'd done this before and I wasn't angry, just done.
"Cab," I said. "Or walk. Your choice. But you're finished here."
He decided to walk. They usually did.
I turned around and Dane was two feet behind me.
He'd crossed from his end of the bar to mine without making a sound — in whatever four seconds it had taken for the grab andthe break — and he was standing with his weight forward, jaw set, eyes on the guy's retreating back. The look on his face was one I hadn't seen before.
It wasn't the professional assessment or the scanning attention he kept trained on the room. This was hotter than that and a lot less controlled. When he tracked back to me the heat didn't go anywhere — just shifted targets. For one full second I felt it land, direct and warm, square in my chest.
He covered it. His face shifted, smoothed back into neutral, and the whole thing probably lasted four seconds start to finish. But I'd already seen it, and we both knew that, and neither of us said a word about it.
"I had it," I said.
