by M. O'Keefe
“Is there something else?”
“Jack—”
He looked up fast, his eyes slicing right through me. “What about him?”
“Did you fire him because of what… because of me?”
“He’s not fired.”
“Is he in trouble?”
“I can understand why he is attracted to you,” he said, and the compliment gave me the creeps. “And I can understand his attraction for you. But consider this a friendly warning. He is not like you, and he will drag you down to his hell.”
“Drag—”
He bent his head back over his phone, completely dismissing me. I opened my mouth to push for more.
“Leave or you’re fired,” he said, without looking up, no longer a butler type guy. Totally a gangster type guy.
I turned and scurried down the stairs.
Shelving that entire conversation to the back of my head for dissection later, the first thing I did was head straight across the dance floor to the sound booth.
“Hey,” I said to the mixer, who I could tell was trying his best to mitigate the disaster of the horn section.
“Yeah?”
“You need to pull the sound on the band. Put on some dance music.”
His eyes narrowed. “No shit,” he said. “But I’m not pissing anyone around here off.”
“No, Bates told me to do it. This is from them.” I pointed up at the second floor.
“Really? In that case.” In one swift move he killed the band’s mics and pressed play on some track he had cued up on his laptop.
Dance beats flooded the club and the crowd roared, charging the dance floor. The band looked up at the sound booth and gave us the finger.
Sound guy and I winced but high-fived.
Next, I told all the servers to pause on table service and we set up an auxiliary bar on the other side of the club. A giant icy tub of bottled drinks. Bottles of mix and booze for the VIP sections.
The line at the main bar thinned out. Patty shot me a relieved smile.
I was gathering up the nerve to handle the VIP section myself when I felt a buzz in the air. A buzz that was so familiar and so brand new all at the same time.
Please, I thought, closing my eyes for second. And I couldn’t say whether I wanted him to be there, or I wanted it to be someone else.
I turned.
And it was Jack behind me. Like my body had known.
This can’t be possible.
And yet…it was.
His face, quiet and still, gave no clue to what he was thinking. He was like a deep lake on a cold day. Ominous and compelling all at once.
He wore a trench coat, and rain drops glittered in his dark hair like diamonds.
And he was watching me. Just like I watched him.
I tried to imagine what he saw when he looked at me. The dress, sure; my hair at this point was falling down a little around my face. My lipstick was gone.
I was sweating from setting up the auxiliary bar, and the giant tub had snagged my stockings so there was a hole in the knee.
I was a mess. Like some street urchin in the BBC shows Charlotte forced me to watch.
But I felt like I was glowing. I felt like I was a million feet tall. And I felt like he saw that.
I expected him to head upstairs, but instead he came toward me and my body woke up in a long, slow sizzle. A wave of awareness.
“Hi,” he said. Bending toward me so I could hear him over the noise.
“Hi.”
There was an awkward pause, the dance music beating like a heart between us.
“Bates brought me in,” he said. His breath brushed over my neck and I curled into the sensation.
As a Prince Charming he was a dark knight, but he was my dark knight.
“You’re my muscle?”
“I’m your muscle,” he said into my ear again. I turned a little toward him, catching his scent, which was odd.
A heavy kind of incense. My parents were Catholic, and we spent every Sunday at St. Michael’s, and he smelled like mass.
I leaned back. “Where did you come from?”
“Does it matter?” he asked. “What do you need me to do?”
Not be this man, I thought. I need you to just be a guy I met at a bar without the blood and the darkness. And I need you to kiss me. I really really need you to kiss me. Like you did yesterday. I need you to tell me that you don’t want me to leave you alone. That you feel this thing between us as much as I do.
“Abby?”
“VIP,” I said quickly.
“What happened?”
“Couple of guys are getting a little grabby with the servers. Maria—”
“Is she all right?”
“Rattled.”
“Who touched her?”
Man, I did not want this to be exciting. I tried to resist the caveman charm of a man who would stand up for a woman he didn’t know.
“VIP couch two. Guy in the stupid shirt.”
“Anyone else?”
“I think if you get rid of him, things will settle down.”
“Anyone else gives you a hard time,” he said, “come to me. Sorry I wasn’t here earlier.”
He lifted a hand as if to touch me. As if to give me a kind of friendly squeeze of the shoulder, and I twitched out of the way. Because I wasn’t interested in friendly, and he’d told me to leave him alone. There was no in between for me.
His eyes flared for a moment and he sucked in a quick breath like I’d surprised him.
Hurt him.
Adult, I told myself. Be a goddamn adult.
“I’m not scared of you,” I told him, imagining what he was thinking. “But…it’s better if we don’t touch.”
His smile was the saddest thing I’d ever seen. And the hook of it sunk deep into me, through my body and into the memories of a sad childhood I did my best to forget. And when he walked away I felt myself tugged along in his wake. The hook in my chest held in his hand.
I told myself I was following to make sure he got the right man, so that he didn’t go bull in a china shop and scare people into taking out their phones and uploading video of him beating someone up onto YouTube.
But my worry was superfluous. He was a black sword cutting through the crowds of people, relegating them to inconsequential. Relegating them to nothing. For most of the would-be bad guys, just the sight of him—a real bad guy, his trench coat sweeping behind him like some kind of bad-guy cape—was enough to make them sit up and take notice.
But couch two was a total shit show.
I didn’t need to worry that he wouldn’t know which guy was the right guy. He walked up to the man in the red and black silk paisley shirt that looked like a costume from Scarface.
“Hey!” Jack said like they were old friends.
Scarface had a moment of confusion, and he was holding the knee of the girl next to him so hard her skin was white around his fingers.
“Hey,” Jack said into Scarface’s blank confusion. ”We’re waiting for you.”
He grabbed Scarface by the shoulder, the other hand grabbing his elbow, and he pulled the guy up off the couch. The woman whose knee he was squeezing sighed with relief. He shuffled the guy down the short hallway between the couches, past me and out into the main club.
“Dressing room door,” Jack said as he passed and I hustled ahead to open the door for Jack. It was obvious now that the way he was holding Scarface was causing the guy some pain. And the way he was swearing at Jack would confirm it, but Jack just kept walking, keeping up this kind of hilarious “we’re old friends” face. Smiling the whole time.
Honest to God, it looked like Jack was giving the guy the Vulcan Death Grip.
Jack marched him down the hallway, past the bathroom, toward the door that opened out onto the alley. I squeezed ahead of them and opened that door too.
Jack all but pitched the guy out into the rain-slick alley.
“For fuck’s sake, man!” the guy yelled, catching his b
alance against a dumpster and shaking out his arm. “You can’t do this!”
“I just did,” Jack said.
“What are you? Some piece of shit—” Scarface charged the door, and in one fast move Jack had a gun out and pointed at the guy’s face.
A gun.
I jerked backward, tripping on the step and sitting down hard on the ledge of the doorway.
Scarface stopped just inches from the barrel.
“You,” Jack said in a quiet voice. “Are not welcome here.”
The guy backed up, his hands up, but his face set with anger.
Jack helped me to my feet and then pulled the door shut on the alley. The heavy click of the door shook me loose from the sudden shock the sight of that gun had put me in.
I started backing down the hallway.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Fine. All good.” I sounded so fake to my own ears, but I couldn’t stop. “Thank you.”
“Abby,” he said in that quiet voice that didn’t seem to belong to a man who carried a gun. “I’m sorry if I scared you.”
“I’m not scared,” I said. But I was lying and we both knew it. “I’ve got to get back to work.”
He nodded like that was what he expected. Like it was his due. “I’m here if you have more problems.”
And then he was walking past me out into the bar, leaving behind a trail of incense clinging to the edge of his coat.
The next few hours were gruelling. Managing the crowd was like trying to ride a bull. Not that I’d ever ridden a bull, but it felt like I was white-knuckled through the whole thing.
And the thing I didn’t want to think about was how it really wouldn’t have been possible without Jack. There was only so much of that club I could control, and he controlled the rest. Coming to my aid without me even having to ask. It was as if he knew what I was worried about and handled it before it became a problem.
All I had to do was think something and he was there, as if I’d radioed him. As if I’d called out. As if he was the only one who could hear me.
I realized at one point that I was dying of thirst and suddenly he was there with a bottle of water.
I didn’t know what to do with him. Or how I felt. I didn’t know how to keep it to myself, a white-hot coal I was attempting to hold in my bare hands.
When it was finally closing time and Jack helped the last of the stragglers through the door, I nearly collapsed against the bar.
“You killed it tonight,” Patty said. “This shit would have gotten ugly without you.”
“I could say the same about you.”
“Yeah,” Patty smiled. “But I wasn’t wearing that fucked-up outfit.”
I laughed, weary and sore but proud of myself. “I can’t wait to take this off.”
Sun and Maria had already split, having sold out of the last of the vodka, and I changed by myself in the dressing room. So glad I had leggings, Converse, and an old slouchy sweater to go home in.
I nearly wept when I took off my heels.
I washed my face and took down my hair, only to put it back up in a sloppy bun. The BART station wasn’t far and it was a pretty quick ride to my neighborhood, and I’d made this vow to save money for the future and the dream, but the idea of walking there and then waiting…
Tonight deserved an Uber.
But I said that a lot of nights.
I wasn’t very good at saving for the dream.
I put my bag over my shoulder, the dress crushed up in a heap in the bottom. Honestly at this point, I couldn’t imagine putting it on again. I felt like I’d outgrown it in the span of a few hours.
I pushed open the door and walked through the bar, thanking the cleanup staff, whose job I did not envy, and headed for the door.
“Abby?” Jack stepped out of the shadows.
“Jesus,” I said, backing away from him. “You scared me.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, so formally. Like we hadn’t been practically reading each other’s mind all night. But the lights were on and room was mostly empty and completely quiet, and everything felt different.
“Do you have a ride?” he asked. “A car?”
“No. I was going to call an Uber.”
“I can take you home.”
I blinked, that gun a solid real thing. A sharp reality I couldn’t ignore.
“That man we kicked out, in the Scarface shirt,” he said. “He hasn’t left the area. Bates has Sammy taking care of him. But considering everything you’ve done tonight, let me take you home. On behalf of the club.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.” I was being an adult. My sister would be so proud.
“Because of the gun?”
He said it. Just like that. Naming what I’d been too scared to name.
“Because of a lot of things. But yeah… the… gun doesn’t help.”
He leaned forward as if to tell me a secret. We were in the coat check area, a small foyer, so there was no place for me to go.
It was me and him and the dark and everything I knew I shouldn’t want, but did anyway.
“The gun is empty,” he whispered.
“Empty?”
“Shhhh.” He pulled me by the elbow away from the door, further into the shadows. “I don’t need everyone knowing that.”
“That you carry around an unloaded gun?”
“Yes.”
“Is it always unloaded?”
He sighed. “Yes.”
That made zero sense.
“So…you’re just pretending to be a bad guy?”
The white of his teeth gleamed. “I’m a bad guy. And nine times out of ten an unloaded gun does the exact same job as a loaded one.”
“Which is?”
“Scare people.”
I blinked, imagining that was true. It certainly worked on Scarface shirt guy. And me. It really worked on me.
But what happens the tenth time?
“Let me take you home,” he said. “All Uber does is increase credit card debt.”
I laughed at him.
“Credit card debt? That’s what you’re worried about?”
“No. I’m worried about how exhausted you are and how I’d like to take care of you. Just a little.”
He’d read my mind all night, and now he cared. The webs of connection between us were thick and impossible to ignore.
“You can sit in the back seat,” he said. “Have me drop you off at the corner so I don’t know where you live.”
It was like he not only knew the parameters of the cage I would build for him, but he was actually helping me build it so I could feel safe.
That, more than the confession about the gun, convinced me.
“Okay,” I said. “I would love a ride.”
He nodded, his face so carefully still. But somehow I knew I’d made him happy. It was like his chemistry changed, some internal light that only I could see binged on.
Chapter Six
ABBY
BEFORE
We went out the side door into the chill of San Francisco. We were South of Market, a little further south than the really hip places. It was seedier here, the smell of salt water thick in the air.
He hit the button on his key fob and the lights on a black sedan across the street blinked on and off. He opened up the back seat for me and I rolled my eyes.
“I don’t think that’s totally necessary,” I said, and he shut the door with a nod and a small smile. It was like my attraction was a banked fire and the fear that had doused it was gone, and I could feel the heat coming back.
My promises to try and be an adult felt like empty threats against the power of this feeling.
The inside of the car smelled even more like church.
“Why does your car smell like Mass?” I asked after he sat down in the driver seat and started the car.
He put the car in drive. “I was at church when Bates called me for help.”
“Church?” I asked. “Really?”
&n
bsp; “Church. Really. Where am I taking you?”
I gave him the address for my place, a good twenty-minute drive away.
“So…what exactly are you?” I asked.
He glanced over, his eyebrow raised. “What am I?”
“You carry a gun. But it’s not loaded. You work for Lazarus, who is—”
“Nothing you should say out loud or to anyone. Ever.”
His scowl meant business, but I was too tired and too high from my night to be entirely cowed.
“You read books in bars.”
“You listen to them at the gym.”
He said that like there was no difference between us.
“But we’re talking about you. Yesterday you were covered in blood and today you go to church. I can’t keep up with all these pieces of you.”
“I’m a man, Abby. Just a man.”
The way he said it put a lance through my stomach, pinning me to the seat, making it hard to breathe. It was a warning in a way, a declaration.
I am a man.
My hormones turned over like some dumb dog looking for a belly scratch. The attraction was back and better than ever. It was attraction with a vengeance.
This ride home might not have been the best idea if my intention was to stay away from him.
And then as if to make everything worse, in the silence of the car, my stomach absolutely roared. Like in three-part harmony, for at least five seconds.
My stomach growled so loud that Jack looked at me, shocked.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “Is there… a dog in your backpack?”
“No. It’s my stomach.”
“That wasn’t a dog?”
“No, I just haven’t eaten—”
“Ever?”
“Okay, let’s not get carried away.”
“Would you like some breakfast?” he asked. “Or dinner. I guess.” He glanced at this watch. “It’s two a.m. You could pick.”
Weighing the pros and cons, gauging my bravery and possibly my stupidity, took a long time. So long that the light faded from his face and it was sad to see it go. It felt rare and it felt precious and I wanted more of it.
“I would love breakfast,” I said. “There’s a Denny’s not too far.”
