In his pocket his phone buzzed with a text from Bethany that said,tell him if he hurts you I'll key his car, love you, xoxo.
Amani laughed out loud for the second time in months. The room was full and warm. The bar gleamed under the low lights. He was exactly where he was supposed to be.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Life, it turned out, did not announce its return. It just arrived.
One morning Amani woke up at Nero's place and realized he'd slept through the night without checking the clock once. Another morning, he woke up at his own loft with the curtains open, the morning sun in his face. His first thought was notwhere am Ibutcoffee.Small reclaimings. The nervous system recalibrating by degrees.
The tiny black shorts came back on a Tuesday. Amani wore them to work without ceremony, the way someone puts on a favorite shirt they've missed, and Bethany made the mistake of saying "oh thank god" when she saw him. He threatened to report her to HR. She pointed out that their mother was HR. He threatened to report her to Lady Leo. Bethany laughed so hard she snorted.
Kendrick came in the next Thursday. Amani had been dreading it and had simultaneously been waiting for it. When the bear shifter stepped off the elevator and saw him behind the bar, Kendrick's whole face folded into a complicated expression that Amani recognized instantly. It was the expression of a man who had been told what happened, then spent the weeks since wanting to apologize and not knowing how.
Kendrick walked to the end of the bar, to the stool farthest from anyone else, and sat down. He didn't order. He just sat.
Amani poured his usual, bourbon neat, set it in front of him, and stayed across the bar. The distance was deliberate. They both understood it.
"I'm sorry," Kendrick said. His voice was rough. "Lady Leo told me some of what happened. I didn't know. I never would have—"
"I know you didn't know."
"The word I used. That was his word for you."
"It was."
Kendrick's jaw worked. His hand went around the glass but he didn't drink. "I won't use it again. Not for you, not for anyone. I've been using it for decades because it was my mother's word for me when I was a baby and I never thought about it being anyone else's. I'll stop."
Amani looked at him. The big, lumbering bear with his rough voice and his callused hands, with his genuine grief at having hurt someone by accident. Something in Amani's chest, some knot that had been tight for weeks, loosened a fraction.
"You don't have to stop using it with other people," Amani said. "It's your word too. Just not for me." He reached across the bar and patted Kendrick’s hand.
"Not for you." Kendrick seemed to loosen up a bit.
"That's all I need."
Kendrick nodded. He drank his bourbon. Amani refilled him once and moved down the bar to help Reza with a complicated order, and when he came back Kendrick had left a fifty on the bar for a fifteen-dollar drink and the note tucked under the glass said just:Amani works.It was something Amani's mother used to say when she was introducing him to business associates. This is Amani. Amani works. A simple declaration, his presence, his profession, his place. Kendrick had written it the way other people would write a blessing.
Amani pocketed the note and didn't tell anyone about it, and he was smiling when he turned back to the next customer.
***
Harold came by two weeks later.
He was out of uniform, in jeans and a rumpled button-down, his hair doing its usual thing, looking like a man who had just remembered he owned a comb and then forgot about it mid-thought. He came in around nine and made his way to the end of the bar, to the stool next to Nero's.
"Hound," Nero said.
"Ferret."
"You slumming it tonight?"
"I have news. Figured you'd want to hear it from me."
Amani had been further down the bar, finishing a cocktail. He moved down when he saw Harold settle in. The hound had been instrumental in the case. Amani knew that. He had never properly met the man, but he knew the name and the role, and he knew what Harold had done for him in ways Harold himself would probably never articulate.
"Detective Harold," Amani said.
"Just Harold is fine."
