Page 70 of Dominion's Guard
The pour is exact, measured by feel rather than jigger, the ice cracking as the bourbon settles over it. She sets the glass on a cocktail napkin, centered, as usual. Her fingertips land close to mine on the bar top, and the gap between them stays open.
"Miss me?" she asks. Her voice is light, controlled, and the smirk that accompanies it is the one she deploys when she's testing whether a Dom is paying attention.
"Every day. The precinct coffee is terrible and nobody insults me with the same commitment as you."
"That sounds like a personnel issue. You should file a complaint."
She moves to serve another member, and the shift of her hips as she turns has the deliberate quality of a woman who I suspect is fully aware of where my eyes go when she moves. The black shirt she wears behind the bar is fitted in a way that Ihave noticed every shift and that tonight, without a case file or a badge between us, I stop pretending I don't.
I track the line of her waist, the pull of fabric across her shoulders when she reaches for a top-shelf bottle, the collarbone visible at the open collar. That same stretch of skin kept my hands locked around my coffee mug across the kitchen table on mornings when the only thing preventing me from touching her was the knowledge that doing so without invitation would make me the kind of man I've spent my career putting in handcuffs.
I wait until she finishes with the other customers. Terrence is working the far end, handling the overflow, and the brief window when her section empties gives me what I need: her attention without an audience.
"We need to talk about what happens now," I say.
Her hands still on the bar rag. The pause barely lasts a beat, and then she's moving again, wiping the counter in a pattern that gives her body occupation while her mind works.
"Now? Now I finish breaking down the bar and I go home to an apartment that reeks of cedar because your house apparently infects everything it touches." She folds the rag with unnecessary care. "I had to wash my work shirts twice. They still smell like I'm sleeping in your closet, which I realize sounds like a metaphor but is a literal laundry complaint."
"Renata."
"There is no us, Andy." She says it fast, rehearsed, delivered in the clipped rhythm of a sentence she's been practicing on her steering wheel and her bathroom mirror. "The case is closed. You don't need a witness and I don't need a bodyguard. We go back to what we were before. You sit at my bar and order your drink and I make it and we pretend we didn't spend weeks sleeping down the hall from each other while I wore your shirts and you pretended not to look at my legs."
"I never pretended not to look at your legs."
The words land before she can build the next wall. Her mouth opens and closes. The admission sits between us on the polished bar top and neither of us can take it back, and I don't want to take it back because it's true, and the truth of it is the least complicated thing about this entire situation.
"That's," she starts, and then she stops. "That's a terrible negotiating strategy. You're supposed to deny it so I can call you a liar and we can argue about it for twenty minutes."
"I looked at your legs every morning you walked into my kitchen. I looked at your neck when you put your hair up at the bar. I watched your hands every time you made a drink because they are the most precise instruments I've ever seen and I have spent my career watching people for a living." I hold her gaze and I don't soften it. "That's not a negotiating strategy. That's a fact."
The flush starts at her throat and moves upward, and the speed of it tells me she wasn't prepared for direct honesty. She was prepared for the dance, the deflection, the push and pull that lets her control the distance. She was not prepared for a man who cuts through the choreography and puts his cards face-up on her bar.
"What do you want from me?" she asks, and her voice has dropped low, beneath the bravado, into the tone I've only heard in my kitchen at three in the morning.
"I want to see if this works outside of a crisis."
"It won't." The answer comes fast, automatic, the reflex of someone who has tested this theory before and concluded that the data supports failure. "I'm too much. I push people away. It's my whole thing. I'll pick a fight about your dish towels or your case files or the way you fold your shirts, and it'll escalate because I need it to escalate because escalation is the only way I know how to test whether someone is going to stay or leave. I'llmake you miserable until you go, and then I'll tell myself I was right all along."
"That's a thorough self-assessment."
"I've had years of practice and a string of men who'd all agree on the diagnosis."
"You've been trying to push me away since the night I stopped being just another member at your bar and showed up with a badge and a dead man's name." I hold her gaze. "I'm still here."
She pulls her lower lip between her teeth and bites down, and the small violence of the gesture sends a pulse of heat low through my abdomen that I absorb without moving.
The bar sits between us, the same polished surface where she's served me drinks for months while both of us pretended the distance was professional. I want to reach across it. I want to close my fingers around her wrist and feel her pulse trip under my thumb, except this wouldn't be performance and the bar between us is the only reason I'm not testing that theory right now.
"I'm a brat," she says, and the word carries weight. At Dominion,bratis a role, a dynamic, a negotiated part of a scene that starts and ends with safewords. Here, in the quiet bar with the last members drifting toward the exit and Terrence pretending not to listen from his end of the counter,bratis a confession. "I will make you lose your mind. I will push every single boundary you set because I need to know they're real. I will test you until you're exhausted and then I'll test you again because the first round wasn't convincing enough."
"I know."
"You don't know. You think you know because you've seen me do it in scenes, but scenes end. This doesn't end. It will be me at three in the morning picking a fight because you left a coffee mug in the sink and I decided that the mug means you don'trespect my space, which really means I'm terrified that you're going to leave and I'd rather blow it up on my terms than wait for you to walk."
"Renata."
"What?"
