Page 9 of Mischief

Cortado, the way he likes it, two ounces and no fuss, and I carry it to the far booth where he's already crouched with his fingers on the grout line that is, infuriatingly, a little uneven.

I set the cup down and slide into the seat across from him, and I keep my voice light and bright, and carry the customer voice in case Kayla's got ears.

"What's wrong?" I lean in close over the table, keeping the words low.

He doesn't look up from the floor. "Nothing's wrong."

"You sat in my parking lot for ten minutes. Sophie timed you." I wrap both hands around the warmth of the cup I brought him and didn't bring myself. "You've gotthelook on your face. The one from before you tell me something I'm not going to like. So. Out with it, before the rush walks in and I have to pretend to argue with you about something."

Now he looks up.

And whatever's in his face, it's not the usual weight, the club, my father, the exhausting arithmetic of loving each other in the dark.

This is heavier. This has a bottom I can't see.

"I have to go out of town," he says. "A few days. Business."

I wait for the rest. There isn't any.

"That's it? That's the face? Men in this club leave on business every other week." I tilt my head. "Where?"

"Doesn't matter." He turns the cortado a slow quarter-circle on the table and doesn't drink it.

"Bodul." I catch his wrist to still his hand.

"It's not club business. It’s personal." He says it too smoothly, and I've known enough men in cuts to hear a lie flatten out even when I can't see what it's covering. "Nothing you need to worry about. I'll be gone for maybe five, six days. I wanted you to hear it from me before you noticed I wasn't around."

Five or six days.

He's never been gone for five or six days.

In nine months, the longest he's disappeared is a weekend run, and he texted me from every gas station between here and Pensacola.

Now he's telling me a week, giving me no details, and he's got a face on like he's saying goodbye at a train platform in a movie about a war.

A chill starts at my nape and crawls down between my shoulder blades.

My pulse kicks up under my jaw where he can probably see it, and I do what I've always done when my body tries to tell me something I don't want to hear.

I talk right over it.

"Fine. Go do your mysterious business." I push the cortado an inch toward him. "Drink your coffee. Text me so I know you haven't wrapped that bike around a tree. And bring me something stupid from wherever you're pretending you're not going, I like a good souvenir."

The corner of his mouth moves. Not a smile. The ghost of where one lives.

"Yeah," he says, quiet. "A souvenir."

He drinks the coffee.

He fixes the grout, because he actually does fix it, kneeling on the floor of my shop with a tube of caulk like a man who'd rather have his hands full than empty.

And the whole time I refill cases and ring up regulars and teach Kayla that no, we don't have a pumpkin thing in July.

Some part of me stays snagged on the back of him, on the set of those shoulders, but most importantly, what he isn’t telling me.

He leaves at eleven with a nod at me across the room that means nothing to anyone watching and really means he’s going to come see me tonight.

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