Page 72 of Dominion's Guard
"Professional awareness. I track large objects that might knock over my glassware."
I hand her the mop and she takes it, and our fingers overlap on the handle.
Neither of us lets go. The mop handle sits between us and her knuckles are warm against mine and the whole moment is absurd and charged and she knows it, because the look she gives me over the handle is exasperation burning off into a heat she's been trying to bury since I walked onto the floor in leather and linen.
"You are making it very hard to mop," she says.
"I'll hold the door while you lock up."
She mops. I hold the door. She sets the alarm. Every task is offered without comment and accepted without argument, and the quiet domesticity of closing a bar together is laced with a tension that turns every incidental touch into a negotiation andevery shared glance into a conversation that neither of us has the vocabulary for yet.
We take the service elevator down to the underground lot. The fluorescent lights buzz overhead, washing the concrete in the blue-white pallor that turns every parking garage into a memory she carries whether she wants to or not. I've walked her through this lot before, and my body finds the position without thinking, half a step to her left, angling myself between her and the darker section where the lighting thins toward the maintenance corridor.
She notices. She always notices. The look she gives me is brief and complicated, gratitude she'll never voice wrapped in the stubborn refusal to admit she needs it.
Her MINI Cooper sits in the employee section where it always does. She digs her keys out of her bag and holds them without unlocking the door.
"Tuesday," she says.
"What about Tuesday?"
"You're taking me to dinner. Somewhere that isn't a crime scene or a federal building or your kitchen. Somewhere I can't smell your cedar." She turns the keys over in her fingers. "I want to find out if you can hold a conversation that doesn't involve evidence bags or dead men or the structural integrity of my emotional walls."
"I can hold a conversation."
"You haven't demonstrated any range." She unlocks the car and opens the door, then pauses with one hand on the frame and looks at me over her shoulder. The parking garage light catches the line of her jaw and the fading scar on her forearm and an expression that has shed every layer of defense she put on tonight.
"Tuesday," I say.
She holds my gaze. Then she drops into the driver's seat and pulls the door shut, and the engine turns over, and the MINI Cooper pulls out of the employee section and takes the ramp toward the exit, taillights glowing red as she rounds each turn.
I stand in the fluorescent light and watch her go. The taillights disappear up the ramp and the lot goes quiet.
I can wait until Tuesday. I've been waiting longer than that, and the woman I'm waiting for just invited me to dinner with the defensive hostility of someone who wants me to show up badly enough to be furious about it.
I take the pedestrian exit to the street. The Warehouse District is quiet at this hour, the block empty, the air warm and heavy with jasmine and river water. My car sits at the curb where I left it, and the walk is short and unhurried, and the New Orleans night holds me the whole way.
18
RENATA
The scar on my forearm is healing into a thin white line that catches the light when I reach for the top-shelf bottles. Patricia Moreau's knife left a souvenir that will sit on my skin for the rest of my life, a permanent record of the night I walked into a room with a killer because Dominion needed protecting and my common sense was on vacation.
The scar doesn't bother me. Scars are honest. They mark the places where the body did its job and kept going.
The other wound is the one I've been avoiding, and it doesn't have the courtesy to sit on my skin where I can track it healing.
Tuesday's dinner went well enough to terrify me. Andy held a conversation that didn't involve evidence bags. He asked about my mother, about how I learned to mix drinks, about whether I'd ever been to Café du Monde at three in the morning when the tourists are gone and the beignets taste like they're meant for locals. He listened the way he always listens, with that thorough, unhurried attention that strips away every defense I've built. When he walked me to my door afterward, he kissed me against the frame and left without asking to come in. The restraint was worse than the kiss. Restraint from Andy Broussard is foreplay, and he knows it.
That was days ago. Since then we've texted, we've talked, and we've arranged what I'm about to do, which is scene with him at Dominion with full protocol and the kind of structured vulnerability that I've spent years avoiding.
I'm in Margot's office an hour before the floor opens, standing in front of her desk with my apron already tied and my hands clasped behind my back in a posture that I realize, too late, looks like I'm reporting for sentencing. Margot is at her desk with her laptop open, and she watches me the way she watches everything, with a patience that lets you choose your own trap.
"You wanted to see me before the shift?" she asks, although I'm the one who asked for the meeting, and the phrasing is Margot's way of handing me the rope.
"I need to tell you about the break-in."
"You told me about the break-in. We discussed it when I offered you the new position."
