Page 71 of Dominion's Guard
"I'm looking forward to it."
She stares at me. Behind her, a row of bottles catches the amber light in a way that makes the whole wall glow, and the woman standing in front of it with her jaw set and her eyes bright with a fear she can't quite keep out of them is the most honest version of herself I've seen since the night she told me about a dead man's face.
"If you bore me," she says finally, "I'm gone."
"Fair."
"I'm not moving back into your guest room."
"I wasn't offering the guest room."
The words land exactly where I aimed them. Her breath catches and the bravado collapses into the raw openness that she hates showing and can't stop showing me. Her gaze drops to my mouth before she catches herself and drags it back up, and that slip tells me everything her next sentence is going to try to unsay.
"You can't just," she starts, and then she stops, because the sentence she was building required a composure she doesn't currently have access to. She swallows. "You can't say that to me while I'm working. I have two more hours behind this bar and you just made it very difficult to think about glassware."
"Think about it anyway. I'll be here when you're done thinking."
"That's obnoxious."
"I know."
The corner of her mouth twitches. She fights it and loses, and the almost-smile that breaks through is the realest thing she's given me tonight.
She picks up the rag and goes back to wiping the bar, and her shoulders are steady but her breathing is not, and the flush at her throat hasn't faded.
"Go sit in the lounge," she says. "You're taking up prime real estate and you're a terrible tipper."
"I tip twenty-five percent."
"You tip twenty-five percent because you think it buys you the right to stare at me while I work. It doesn't. It buys you adequate service and a cocktail napkin."
"I'll take the napkin."
"Go. Sit. Lounge. I'll find you when I close out."
I take my bourbon and relocate to the lounge seating at the edge of the main floor. The leather catches the heat from the sconces and the seat gives me a sight line to the bar, which is a sight line to her, and she knows it. She moves through the remaining hours of her shift with the efficiency that has defined her work since the first night I watched, building drinks and clearing glasses and managing each member with an attention that never loses track of the room.
She doesn't look at me. The refusal to look is louder than any glance would be.
At one, the last members settle their tabs. Terrence finishes his section and heads out with a wave. Renata starts the breakdown, the practiced routine of restocking and wiping and organizing that transforms a working bar into a locked-down station ready for tomorrow's shift.
I stand and walk back to the bar. She doesn't tell me to leave.
"Ice bucket's heavy tonight," she says, her head down, occupied with the bottles.
I carry the ice bucket to the back. She follows with a rack of glassware, and the narrow corridor between the bar and the dishwasher station puts us in a proximity that the main floor never allows.
Her shoulder brushes my arm when she passes. She smells like citrus and bourbon and bitters, the residue of a full shift, and underneath it there's a warmth that is just her, clean and unnamed, a scent I've been carrying in my memory since the mornings she padded through my kitchen in bare feet and my stolen shirts.
She reaches past me to set the glassware on the drying rack and her hip grazes mine and neither of us steps back.
"Stop hovering," she says. "You're enormous and this hallway was not designed for people built like refrigerators."
"Is that a complaint?"
"It's a spatial observation." She ducks under my arm to reach the storage shelf, and the movement puts her face level with my collarbone for a beat that she lets stretch longer than it needs to. "You take up a disproportionate amount of any room you enter. Someone should study it."
"You seem to study it plenty."
