Page 60 of Handful

He looked up. Saw Indira. Started to nod. Then he saw me.

His face gave me everything, too fast for him to catch it. The blank half-second where I didn’t register. Then the half where I did — and what crossed it wasn’t guilt, or charm, or any of his usual moves. It was surprise, flat and real. He hadn’t known I’d be here. Nobody had told him. His eyes cut to Indira and stuck, and I saw him work it out a second behind me — she’d done this on purpose. Walked us both into the same gutted room and called it a job.

“Austen,” he said. Even. Just my name.

“Handful.” He flinched, the way he had on the sidewalk — smaller this time, but I caught it. He’d been hoping a couple of weeks might’ve earned him Tyler back. It hadn’t.

“Indira’s brought me in to fix your bar,” I said, getting in ahead of the silence before it could turn into anything. “Daytime. As a consultant. I won’t be here in the evenings and I won’t be in your way, and the bar will, when I’m done, make you an obscene amount of money, because right now it is the single worst-designed piece of hospitality I have encountered in my professional life.”

He grinned. “Yeah. I figured it was bad. I don’t know bars.”

“You know one bar,” I said. It hit exactly where I sent it — the months, the stool, the paperback, the notes he’d apparently been taking the whole time. For a second, it sat between us but neither of us was willing to say a word about it in front of Indira, who’d drifted ten tactical feet off to study a perfectly uninteresting stretch of stripped wall.

“I’ll send you the layout,” he said finally. “Whatever you need. You run the bar, it’s yours. I won’t —” He stopped. Started over, plainer. “Thank you for doing it.”

“I’m doing it for the money. And the resume. Indira’s very persuasive.”

“She is.”

“It has nothing to do with you.”

“I know,” he said.

And he meant it. A man who’d told me to my face we weren’t finished, and who then stood in a gutted room and made sure I knew this job had nothing to do with that. No charm, no second run at me, not one of the moves I’d spent all those careful days bracing for. Whatever “we’re not done” meant to him, it didn’t come with pushing. He’d thanked me and let me go.

“Right,” I said, picking my bag up off a sawhorse. “Send me the dimensions and the budget. I’ll have you an outline by Friday.”

“I knew you would,” Indira said, serene as the actual First Lady of the USA, and walked me out.

I didn’t call her on it. But in the car, pulling out of that sad lot in the afternoon sun, I caught her smile in the side window. Handful and I had definitely been played.

Chapter 17

❧

— Handful —

Fewin could make an Old Fashioned. I found this out our third night back open, when I came around the end of the new bar and there he was — Fewin building a drink like he was defusing it. Sugar, bitters, a slow stir, an orange peel he expressed over the top and dropped in. He slid it down to a customer without looking up.

“Since when do you do that?”

“Three years behind a hotel bar before I prospected.” He wiped down the bar. “Nobody ever asked.”

Huh. How about that. We’d put him behind the new bar because he was a brother I trusted with a register and a wall of top-shelf, and it turned out the man could actually pour. And just like that, the bar did a thing it had never once done in ten years — make money. Good money.

The bones of it were Austen’s. She’d had an outline to me by Friday, like she’d promised — a tight menu, and a diagram showing where every bottle went so a man could pour a drink without crossing his own feet. The club built from there, fast. We paid for everything to happen in three days instead of three weeks — overtime, rush fees, a second crew when the first ran out of hours, the new electrical signed off with an expedited inspection that cost the club plenty. Turns out a permit office finds the time when Venom’s the one asking. The bar went in Saturday, got wired Sunday. Austen called in favors to get her suppliers to roll a truck out on a Sunday too. Monday morning the new sign went up — VENOM VIRTUES — and we opened the doors that night.

“Your girl had me down to Velvet on Saturday.” Fewin said it to his oranges, not to me. “Her and two of her people stood there tasting everything I made and telling me what was wrong with it — too much vermouth, wrong glass, slow down. Then she put me on the floor for the night shift to see if I’d hold up.”

“Don’t let her hear you call her my girl.” It came out rougher than I meant it. “She’d skin you alive.”

Fewin shrugged, unbothered. “You’ll win her back.”

I didn’t argue with him. Couldn’t. But knowing she was mine to win back and having a spare hour to go do something about it were two different animals right now. Dutch had my cut sitting on the table, metaphorically speaking. Every hour I owned went into not losing it. Not because the cut mattered more than her — nothing mattered more than her. But the man who’d hurt her and the man about to lose his cut were the same man: the clown who made everything a joke. Show up on her doorstep now, still him, and I’d only be proving her right — handing her every reason she’d had for walking. Get my feet under me first. Turn into someone worth it. Then go to her — not second, but whole. She’d earned that much.

“You want my advice,” he said, not waiting to find out if I did, “you take her. Sling her over your shoulder, bring her back to the clubhouse. Or there’s the private rooms right here, nobody’d bother you—”

That got a laugh out of me.