Page 32 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
Then the crew remembers I exist, and I find out what an interrogation feels like from the receiving end.
Joss wants to know my intentions, in writing if possible. Stevie asks if I have brothers, then apologizes, then asks again. Crystal tells me four stories about Cynthia in a row, each moredisqualifying than the last, glowing with pride the entire time, and finishes with, “Anyway, she’s the best person alive, so.” A statement with no second half. The second half is understood.
Promise waits until the others wash toward the cake. Then she sits down across from me in the booth, folds her hands, and looks at me the way the women in my grandmother’s village look at a fox by the henhouse.
“I don’t care what you are,” she says. “I’ve known men who thought they were the scariest thing in this state. Every one of them is somebody’s bones in a yard now. That girl behind you packed her whole life into a box tonight and she did it smiling, because of you. So you’ll treat her right, or no wall you ever build will be tall enough. Are we clear?”
There are perhaps four people living who speak to me like this. Three of them are in this bar or at my ranch. I hold her stare, and I give her the only answer the question deserves.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good.” She knocks the table once, like a gavel, and goes to get cake.
Dale, drunk on survival, attempts to give Roma a friends-and-family discount card. Roma examines it, both sides, with the attention he’d give a forged passport, then puts it in his breast pocket and thanks him, which for Roma is practically an embrace. I make a note that my second-in-command now holds a ten percent discount at a bar I could buy with the change in my cars, and that he will never once use it, and that he will also never throw it away.
The night degrades from there in the best way. Somebody feeds the sound system. Dale tells a story about a smoothie that Isuspect loses a great deal in the absence of context. And then Lacey, mid-celebration, attempts a move on the bar top that her shoes were never consulted about.
The sound her ankle makes is small. The sound Lacey makes is not. The room converges, Cynthia gets there first, and inside ten minutes there are paramedics in the Wet Sunset, which sends my men at the doors into a quiet bristle until Roma waves them down.
The ankle is a sprain. The paramedic who wraps it is young, steady-handed, calm in a room full of shrieking dancers in a way that suggests siblings or a war. His partner does the paperwork. He does the talking. Somewhere in the middle of reassuring Lacey that she will dance again, he looks up at the woman holding Lacey’s other hand, which is Stevie. Stevie looks back at him, and the temperature in that corner of my bar changes by several degrees.
I notice it because noticing is the job. Promise has it noticed before the splint is on. She moves with no apparent hurry, refills the man’s coffee without being asked, learns that his name is Nick, that his shift ended twenty minutes ago, that he is not married, and that he is, quote, in no rush at all. She conducts the whole thing like a notary, stamping each fact as it clears.
By one in the morning the bar is thinning. Crystal cries through three separate rounds of goodbyes, hugs me on the third one without warning, an entire collision of balloons, perfume, sincerity, and tells me into my lapel, “Take care of our girl or we’ll be enemies.” Then she’s poured into a ride mid-sentence, waving through the back window until the car turns.
Dale leaves the keys with Promise, shakes my hand again, wetter, braver. The regulars wash out. My men collapse theperimeter to the lot, and Roma raises an eyebrow at me from the door, the full sentence. I tip my head toward the cars. He takes everyone, the whole detail, out front into the dark, and the door swings shut behind him.
That leaves four of us in a dead bar. Promise, with her coat already on, who looks from Cynthia to me, then across the room to the far booth, where Stevie and the paramedic are conducting what is being represented as a conversation about ankle aftercare. She picks up her purse and addresses the room at large.
“Cameras are decorative. Locks are not. Both bolts when you go.” A pause at the door, queenly. “All four of you.”
Then she’s gone, and the Wet Sunset belongs to the night shift.
Cynthia comes across the floor to me with the bar’s master switches in one hand, the cardboard box of her old life sitting by the door, glitter still down one arm from the stage. She reaches past me without explaining herself and starts shutting the place down section by section. The neon dies. The rail lights die. The big overheads thunk off one bank at a time until what’s left is the exit signs, red over the doors, and the small amber glow from the one machine in this building anyone ever maintained.
The sound system, still on, warm with the next record.
“You did this on purpose,” I say, into the new dark.
“I do everything on purpose.” Her voice comes closer, bare feet now, heels hooked in her free hand. The shape of her arrives in front of me, lit at the edges in red and gold. “One last thing before I give Dale his keys back. I never once got to do this here.”
“Do what?”
I hear the smile before the words.
“Stay after close.”
15
CINDY
Here’s a thing nobody tells you about working a bar for seven years. You never see it dark.
You see it loud. You see it ugly at four in the afternoon with the chairs up and the mop water gray. You see it at last call, when the lights come up and everybody turns back into a pumpkin. But the secret version, the after-close version, neon dead, exit signs glowing red over the doors, the good sound system holding the room like a warm hand, that one belongs to nobody. The bar keeps it for itself.
Tonight the bar is sharing.
Sevastian sits in the corner booth where this whole insane story started, jacket off, tie long gone, watching me the way he did that first night, except everything about it has changed owners. Across the dark, way over by the far wall, Stevie and her paramedic are pretending to discuss ankle protocols in a booth with a sightline to exactly nothing, their two shapes leaned closer together than any medical topic requires. Nobodyacknowledges anybody. That’s the deal the room made without a word. Four people, two pools of dark, one bar that has seen everything and notarized none of it.
