Page 64 of Handful

She went to find her apron, pleased with herself, and that was when Lex sat down two stools from me with a coffee.

“You’re the ex,” she said.

“I’m the consultant.”

“You’re the ex who’s the consultant.” She didn’t make it a thing. “Relax. I’m not here to cause trouble. I just like to know who’s in my building.” She nodded at the bar. “Six years I’ve danced this floor, and Saturday a table I was working bought a forty-dollar bottle for the first time ever. So, whatever you did, it’s working.”

“It’s a door charge and a kick-ass bar.” I shrugged. “I did the bar. Handful did the rest — the door, the men keeping their hands where they belong. That part’s his, not mine.”

Lex looked at me over the coffee a second.

“I’ve been here through four managers, honey,” she said. “Four. Every one of them gave the same speech. Things’ll be different. I take care of my girls.” She set the cup down. “He gave it too. Near enough word for word.” A pause. “Difference is, he’s the only one who went and did a single thing he said he would. And then more. A gate fee and base pay. A man on the floor whose job is keeping us safe. Cameras where we said we wanted them.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that, which she clocked. “And you’ve got a tell,” she added.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Just now. When he handed you the new girl and walked off.” She tipped her head at me, not unkind. “Your face went soft. Half a second, before you caught it. You might be the ex, honey, but you’re not over him.” She stood and picked up her coffee. “And for what it’s worth — he looks at you the exact same way, every time you’re not looking.”

She left.

Handful caught me at the door at ten to four, on my way out before the lights and the lie of the place came down for the night.

“Hey.” Clipboard, again. The man lived behind a clipboard now. “You got a second?”

“For?”

“This.” He turned the board around. Two and a half weeks of numbers. The bar take, the average spend, the champagne line climbing like it had somewhere to be. “This is all you, Austen Wicker. Pure and simple. Revenue’s up forty percent and every point of it is the bar. You walked in, called it, and built it.” No grin. No sell. He just looked at the number, then at me. “You said it’d work. It worked. I wanted you to see it on paper because that’s yours. You did that.”

No move. Just a compliment.

“It’s a good bar,” I said with a shrug. “Don’t let Fewin bruise the gin.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

I gathered my coat. At the door I did the thing I’d promised myself I wouldn’t and looked back.

He’d already bent over a keg order, head down, even as ever. But for the half-second before he felt me watching, his face was doing the exact thing Lex had caught on mine. Soft. Unguarded. Then he glanced up and it was gone, packed away clean, and he gave me the nod a man gives a colleague.

“Night, Austen.”

I made it to my car and sat there a few minutes with the keys in my lap. Not because I couldn’t drive. I sat there because I wanted to be sure that when I pulled out, I’d point the car at my own bar and not right back into this lot. And right now I wasn’t sure which way it would go.

So I waited, and put it away the way he had, piece by piece, until my hands were steady and my face was my own again. I’m good at that. It’s not that I couldn’t have him. It’s that I’d decided not to, and a decision only counts if you keep making it.

And then, because I’d earned it, I let myself have the one thought I’d held off all afternoon — that if things had gone some other way, if I were the kind of woman who’d stayed, I’d be at his place tonight after close. Or he’d be at mine. His mouth at my throat, working down, slow and patient and infuriating the way it used to be, until I forgot every good reason I’d had for leaving.

Then I started the car and drove to work.

Chapter 19

❧

— Handful —

Renner came in every Friday in an expensive suit and tipped like he was leaving a deposit on something.

Front booth, bottle of the good champagne, called every girl who came near him sweetheart. The kind of customer the old owner would’ve named a beer after. The kind I’d been told, more than once, kept the lights on. Fewin had rung him through for eleven hundred dollars the week before and Renner had told him to keep two hundred of it, loud enough for the room to hear.