The look.
I'd been looked at before. I was aware that I was the kind of woman people looked at, had been aware of it since I was old enough to notice how the world responded to how you moved through it.
I'd learned to carry my body like something that belonged to me and nobody else, which had required some practice in my early twenties and now just was. But this had been different. Not the looking of someone cataloguing what was available or deciding whether to approach. Something quieter and more alarming—the look of a man who saw something he hadn't been expecting and wasn't sure he was glad about it.
Like I was a problem.
Yet the way he'd looked at me hadn't felt like problem in the bad sense.
It had felt like problem in the sense of something that required his full attention. Something he couldn't file away.
I finished my bourbon. Ordered another, because the evening was young and I was in no particular hurry and the duck hadn't arrived yet and the restaurant smelled like wood smoke and good cooking and I was content.
My phone buzzed. I looked at it.
Izzy D—sourdough and intel:How was the rest of your first day?
I smiled before I could stop myself.
Good, I typed back.Walked the Battery. Ate shrimp. Currently having a bourbon at a restaurant on Queen Street.
Her response was immediate:Alone?
Contentedly.
Good answer. That means you're settling in. City's already working on you.
I thought about the armchair nap and the bruised pink light and the gardenia smell amplified in the dusk.Maybe, I typed.
What are you doing later?
I looked up from my phone at the restaurant around me—at the birthday table and the suits and the comfortable couple—and then at the window, beyond which the city was doing its evening thing.
Nothing planned, I typed.Why?
Three dots. Then:Have you ever been to a rodeo?
I stared at that for a moment.
I'm from Kentucky, I typed back.I've been to plenty of rodeos.
There's one tonight. North Charleston Coliseum. Ryker has a box—he won't use it, he hates crowds, and I have two tickets I was going to let go to waste. You should come. It starts at seven. I can meet you outside.
I looked at the time. Five fifty-two.
The duck arrived. It was beautiful—lacquered, fragrant, the skin rendered to a crisp dark amber, served over something creamy and green that turned out to be a corn grits with ramp butter. I looked at it, looked at my phone, and made the executive decision that I was not leaving this plate unfinished for any reason, rodeo included.
I’ll come as soon as I can, I typed.
Deal. Text me when you're close.
I ate the duck with the focused efficiency of a woman with a timeline. It deserved better, but I gave it what I had and it was still extraordinary.
I paid, flagged a rideshare, and stepped out onto Queen Street into the warm, salt-threaded Charleston evening.
The city was something else again. The third version—neither the soft morning nor the golden afternoon but something darker and more alive, the gas lanterns doing their amber work on the old facades, music coming from multiple directions and none of them competing, just layering into the general hum of a city that knew how to be itself.
The car came in four minutes. I got in, gave the address, and sat back while Charleston moved past the windows—the historic district giving way to wider roads, the density of the old city loosening as we moved north and east toward the newer, more functional parts where arenas and stadiums and the infrastructure of large events lived.
