Page 13 of Ruthless Daddy
She turned, just once, and looked back at the door. She checked the bouncer, then the rail above where we sat, and then she tracked every exit on the far wall in a single pass. Her face never changed. She just logged the information and stored it.
I felt my heart knock once, hard, in my chest. I knew her. I did not know her name, but Iknewher. She was the same kind of animal as me.
Tonio caught the shift in my face and whooped. “Oh,” he said, leaning in so close his breath was wine and aftershave. “Oh, who is that? Fantasma, look at him—Sal, look at his face!”
Sal did not smile, but his mouth did the thing it did when he was amused. “Leave it,” he said. But Tonio was not leaving it.
“Look at her,” he said, all teeth. “Look at how she’s looking at him, look—“
And I watched her look up and see me.
And I watched her decide, instantly, that I was one of them.
She didn’t flinch. She didn’t look away. She just looked right at me, and in her eyes was the cold calculation of a woman who had already mapped out what to do if I came over.
I felt it in my teeth. I felt it in my chest and lower.
I drank, bbecause if I didn’t, I might have stood up and crossed the room that second.
She held my eyes across the whole floor. The music, the red lights, the crowd—it all blurred out. Just her, and the way her mouth was tight at the corners, and the way she stood, scared, fragile, alone.
I wanted to know who had made her like this. I wanted to know who she was hiding from. I wanted to know how it would feel to touch her.
I watched her until she broke the line of sight.
And then she was gone.
My chest was tight. The club air was heavy and sour, all sweat and melted ice, and still I could taste the back of my own tongue. She had held my eyes across the whole fucking floor and it felt like someone was leaning a thumb on my larynx. I could not look anywhere else.
Tonio kept on me. “Jesus, Fantasma, you seeing what I’m seeing? That’s a woman who wants to eat your bones.” He jabbed my ribs, missed, sloshed his drink and didn’t care. He looked over at Sal for backup. “Tell him, Sal. Tell him that’s a thing you don’t see every night. Not here, not anywhere.”
Sal regarded the scene with the slow, judgy calm of a man who did not get moved by anything, let alone a girl in a threadbare coat. He tipped his glass in the girls’s direction, just enough to acknowledge, and said, “You ever see a wolf not know it was in a trap?”
Tonio whooped, delighted. “See? It’s like the two of you got dropped out of the same helicopter and forgot to pick up your parachutes.”
I ignored them. The music was nothing in my ears, just white noise under the freight train in my head. The girl hadn’t moved. She was still posted up by the wall, hands white-knuckling her bag, face like she was waiting to get called for a jury. Every so often the door would open and someone would stumble in, or out, and her eyes would track them, log the approach, then slide back to the exits and the bouncers and—yes, fuck, me.
She looked at me again. I did not look away.
Tonio leaned in, stage-whispered, “What do you think, she thinks you’re a cop or a hitman?”
I sipped the wine, kept my eyes on her, said nothing. The truth was, if you lined up every person in this place and asked who was hiding, I would have picked her in half a second. I knew that look. I had seen it on the faces of men in Catania.
There was a pressure behind my sternum, a hard pulse that made my right hand ache.
Sal was watching me now, not the girl. He set his glass down, made a noise in his throat, and said, “Leave it alone, Pietro.”
I almost laughed. As if I had ever been able to leave anything alone. “You think I want to do something?”
“You look like you’re about to eat the table.”
I shrugged, which was as close to a yes as I could get with them in the booth.
Tonio’s attention span, which usually burned out after thirty seconds, had now locked onto the drama like a terrier on a tennis ball. “Go down there,” he said. “Talk to her. You used to be good at that. The old Pietro, he’d have her at the bar inside three minutes. The new one, I don’t know. Maybe the ghost doesn’t like company.” He made a spooky face, stuck his tongue out. Thegirl at his side, Marta, giggled and tried to nuzzle his neck. He didn’t notice.
I should have been annoyed. But it was better than the usual bullshit.
I did not move. The girl did not move. We were two points of stillness in a sea of people who thought movement was what mattered.
