Page 2 of Smoke and Glitter

I'm mid-sentence when Summer pulls open the door to Vibes, and I stop talking.

That almost never happens.

I had it wrong. I had it so wrong. I'd pictured a basement with a sticky floor, a fog machine, and six sad men nursing the same warm beer while they gawked at people dancing onstage.

Nope.

It's full. Every seat taken, people standing two deep along the back wall, and up on the stage a woman in green sequins is doing something mesmerizing with a folding chair. She isn't revealing herself so much as controlling exactly how much of her the room gets to have. Every face is tipped toward her. Nobody's leering. They're watching like she's made the entire room forget there was ever anything else to look at.

She's got them. She knows she's got them, and she is in absolutely no rush about it.

Power. That's what she has up there. Sex isn't where it comes from. Sex is just what she's chosen to do with it, and I have never seen a woman that in charge of a room while wearing so little.

The whole place is humming with her. You can feel it rising through the floor.

"Oh," I say. "Oh, this is amazing."

Summer grins. "Told you."

"No, babe, you undersold it. You have been criminally underselling it. I asked you three times, and you said it was a club."

"It is a club."

"It is not a club. It's a coronation."

Summer laughs, head back and wide open, filling the doorway while the cold comes in behind us. I haven't heard her laugh like that since before everything went down in Charleston with Colt.

She says hi to the girl taking coats, then to a server, then to somebody at the end of the bar who calls her by name.

I have known this woman since we were nine, and I don't know one person in this building.

We're halfway to the bar when I see him, and my entire brain goes offline.

Absolutely not.

Because that is not a bartender. That man is a structural hazard.

Tall. Dark hair shoved back from his face like he did it once and couldn't be bothered to check the result. Black shirt, sleeves pushed to his elbows. Tattoos down both arms, across the backs of his hands, more ink disappearing beneath his collar.

I want to know where it stops.

That is the first complete thought I manage.

He has both palms flat on the bar, leaning toward a woman on a stool while she talks with her whole body. He's listening like she's the only person in the building, except his eyes keep moving.

Not to the stage.

To the door. The dark corner where a man is one drink past charming. The girl sitting alone with a soda water she hasn't touched. A server weaving through the crowd with too many glasses balanced on one hand.

He catches everything and brings his attention back to the woman before she realizes it ever left.

He's running the room, and nobody in it seems to know.

Reading people before they know they're being read is literally my job, and I'm watching a man do it in a black shirt without breaking a sweat.

Competence has never done that to me before.

Then he pushes away from the bar and spots Summer coming through the crowd. Something in him loosens for a beat before he reaches for the bourbon, and I catch it. He's glad to see her.