The Man With Storm-Grey Eyes

Up close, he was worse.

That was the only word for it. Worse. Because at a distance — at the safe, manageable distance of the other end of the bar — he had been a vague, beautiful threat. A silhouette. A pair of eyes catching gold light. Something I could pretend I was imagining.

Sitting two feet away from me on a barstool, he was a fully detailed problem.

His shirt was black, the top two buttons undone, and there was a sliver of skin at the base of his throat that I forced myself not to look at twice. His jaw could have cut glass. There was a small, faded scar through the arch of his right eyebrow that I wanted, irrationally, to ask about.

His eyes had not left my face since he sat down.

"You're staring," I said.

"I am," he agreed.

"That's rude."

"It is."

He didn't look away.

I picked up my whiskey. I set it down. I picked it up again. I had absolutely no idea what to do with my hands.

"You said you would have him fired by morning," I said. "That was a strange opener."

"Was it working?"

"Define working."

His mouth did the corner-twitch thing again. Up close, it was even more devastating than it had been from across the bar. "You're still sitting here."

"I'm three whiskeys in," I said. "I would be sitting here if you had opened with the alphabet."

He laughed.

It was quiet — barely more than a breath — but it surprised him, I could tell. His shoulders shifted. The hand around his glass loosened a fraction. Like the laugh had escaped before he'd given it permission.

"Damien," he said.

"What?"

"My name. You haven't asked, but I'm telling you anyway."

"Just Damien?"

"Just Damien."

I considered this. "Cass."

"Just Cass?"

"Just Cass."

He inclined his head, the smallest nod, like we had just signed a treaty.

Marla appeared at my elbow with the silent grace of a woman who had been pretending very hard not to listen. She set a fresh whiskey in front of me. She set another scotch in front of him without being asked. She did not make eye contact with either of us. She glided away.

I could have kissed her.

"So," Damien said. "The man you would like fired."

"Tristan."

"Tristan."

"Harrington."

"Tristan Harrington." He turned the name over in his mouth like he was tasting it. "Sounds like a man who owns three sailboats and has never sailed any of them."

I choked on my whiskey.

"That," I said, when I could breathe again, "is the most accurate sentence anyone has ever spoken about Tristan Harrington."

"How long?"

"Five years."

"How long was he cheating?"

I went still.

He noticed. His eyes — God, those eyes, grey in a way I hadn't known eyes could be grey, like weather coming in off the ocean — softened by a fraction.

"You don't have to tell me," he said quietly.

"At least a year," I said. "With his assistant. Who I had coffee with. Twice."

"Ah."

"She was very nice."

"They usually are."

I looked at him sharply. He shrugged one shoulder, an apology and a fact at the same time. "In my experience."

"And what experience is that?"

"The kind that keeps me at the end of bars in Las Vegas at midnight," he said, "drinking alone."

I laughed before I could stop myself.

He smiled — a real smile this time, slow and a little crooked — and the bottom dropped out of my stomach in a way that had nothing to do with the whiskey.

---

"Tell me something," he said.

"Like what?"

"Anything. Something true."

I considered him. The watch on his wrist looked like it cost more than my car. The cuff of his shirt was perfectly pressed. There was a quietness to him that didn't match the bar, didn't match the city, didn't match anything I'd ever encountered before. He was the kind of man who looked like he had walked into the wrong room on purpose.

"I plan weddings for a living," I said.

"That's true?"

"Mostly other people's. I want to plan my own someday. My own company, I mean. Not — not a wedding." I closed my eyes. "I have had three drinks. Don't let me say wedding out loud anymore."

"Noted."

"What about you? What do you do?"

His glass paused halfway to his mouth.

"I run things," he said.

"That's vague."

"It's accurate."

"You are not going to tell me."

"I am going to enjoy," he said, "the next hour of my life with a woman who doesn't already know."

Something in his voice when he said it — the quiet weight of it — made me set my whiskey down and look at him properly. There was a tiredness in his face I hadn't noticed at first. Not a sleepy tiredness. A bone-deep one. The kind of tiredness that came from being known too well, too often, by people who only wanted things from you.

"Okay," I said.

He blinked. "Okay?"

"I won't ask. Just Damien."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"Just Cass," he said softly.

---

We talked for two hours.

I cannot, even now, tell you exactly what about. The conversation moved like water — from my mother's bitterness to his terrible coffee preferences, from a wedding where the dog ate the rings to his theory that no good decision had ever been made before noon. He listened in a way that no one had listened to me in a very long time. He asked me about my company — the one I didn't have yet — and I found myself describing it to him in detail, the boutique studio I wanted, the kind of weddings I dreamed of planning, the way I wanted brides to feel.

He didn't interrupt. He didn't redirect. He didn't make it about him.

At some point, he ordered us food. A burger for me, because I admitted I hadn't eaten since the airport. Something off the bar menu for himself. Marla brought it over with another raised eyebrow and the faintest smile I'd ever seen on a working bartender.

I ate the entire thing.

He watched me with something that wasn't amusement and wasn't admiration, exactly — something quieter than both — and when I finally pushed the empty plate away, he said:

"What would you do tonight, Cass, if you were truly free?"

I looked at him.

The whiskey was warm in my chest. The bar was dim and gold around us. The city outside was a wild, neon thing I had never been part of before and would never have to answer to again.

I thought about Tristan. About the apartment that wasn't mine. About the five years I had folded myself into a shape small enough to fit into someone else's life.

*"I'd do something stupid,"* I said.

He didn't smile this time. He just held my gaze, and for one long, suspended second, I had the dizzying, terrible feeling that this man — this stranger with storm-grey eyes whose last name I didn't even know — was about to let me.

"Define stupid," he said softly.

The whiskey, or the freedom, or the something — I would never afterward be able to say which — answered for me.

"Surprise me," I said.

His eyes darkened. He set his glass down very slowly. He stood up. And he held out his hand.