The Stranger at the Bar

Las Vegas hit me like a slap.

I stepped out of the airport into ninety-eight degrees of dry desert heat, and the breath punched out of my lungs in a way that almost felt good. Like the city was already telling me to wake up, sweetheart, you are not in New York anymore.

The cab line was long. The driver who finally took me had a thick mustache and a thicker accent and asked me, three blocks into the ride, "You here alone, miss?"

"Yes," I said.

He glanced at me in the rearview mirror with the soft, tired sympathy of a man who had picked up a hundred women like me from this airport over the years.

"You celebrating?"

I almost laughed.

"Something like that," I said.

He nodded once and let me have the rest of the ride in silence.

---

I had not booked a hotel.

I realized this around the time we pulled onto the Strip, and panic rose briefly in my throat before I shoved it back down. I had a credit card I had been quietly building good standing on for two years. I had emergency savings I had never touched. I had Avery a phone call away if everything fell apart.

I had, in short, every grown-up safety net a girl could have.

For the first time in my life, I was going to use them on myself.

I asked the driver to drop me off at the first nice-looking hotel I saw. He took me to a place near the middle of the Strip that wasn't the Bellagio but wasn't a roadside motel either — a four-star with a marble lobby and a fountain and a check-in clerk who didn't blink at the woman in jeans and a wrinkled white t-shirt asking for a room.

"How long will you be staying with us, Miss Lane?"

I opened my mouth.

I closed it.

"...I don't know yet," I said.

She smiled like she had heard that answer before.

"Three nights to start?"

"Yes," I said. "Please."

She handed me a key card. Room 1827. Eighteenth floor. View of the Strip.

I rode up alone, swiped in, dropped my suitcase in the doorway, and walked straight to the window.

The sun was setting over Las Vegas.

The whole city was on fire — gold and orange and a deep, bleeding pink, the kind of sky you'd accuse of being too much in a painting. Down below, the lights were already starting to flicker on. Neon signs. Rolling marquees. Headlights. A thousand strangers with a thousand reasons to be here.

I pressed my forehead against the cool glass.

Okay, Cass, I thought. You are here. Now what.

I had no answer.

Which meant, I supposed, it was time for a drink.

---

The dress I had packed wasn't a Vegas dress.

It was a nice dress — cream-colored, knee-length, soft jersey, the kind of thing I wore to brunches and engagement parties and the occasional client meeting. But I had nothing else to wear that wasn't jeans, so on it went.

I put on mascara for the first time in eighteen hours. I dabbed on a tinted lip balm. I let my hair out of its bun and finger-combed the waves with my hands. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror.

I did not look like a woman who had caught her boyfriend in bed with another woman twenty hours ago.

I looked, in fact, kind of pretty.

The thought startled me.

I grabbed my room key, my credit card, and exactly enough cash to make poor decisions, and I walked out the door before I could change my mind.

---

The hotel had a bar on the lobby level that I had clocked on the way in — dark wood, low golden lighting, the kind of place that played jazz quietly enough to feel grown-up but loudly enough to feel like trouble.

I slid onto a stool near the end of the bar.

The bartender was a tall Black woman in a crisp white shirt and a silver name tag that read MARLA. She had the kind of arched eyebrow that told you she had seen every shade of human nonsense in this town and was ready, professionally, to listen to mine.

"What will it be, sweetheart?"

"Whiskey," I said. "Neat."

The eyebrow went up another half-inch.

"You sure about that, honey?"

"No," I said honestly. "But pour it anyway."

She poured.

I drank.

I had had whiskey exactly once before in my life — at a wedding I had planned where the groom had insisted I take a celebratory shot with him at the end of the night — and I had hated it then. It had tasted like fire and regret.

It still tasted like fire and regret.

But tonight I needed both.

---

By drink number two, I had decided that Marla was my new best friend.

By drink number three, I had told her about Tristan.

"...And the worst part — the worst part, Marla, are you listening — is that it was my shirt. The one I ironed. On Sunday. With the steam setting and everything."

Marla wiped down a glass. "Mm-hmm."

"And the lipstick. Cherry red. He told me cherry red was aggressive on me. He said *stick to the nudes. Marla. Marla, do I look like a nude lipstick kind of woman to you?"

Marla looked at me.

"Honey," she said, "you look like a woman who's about to start wearing red lipstick every day for the rest of her life."

I pointed at her with my whiskey glass. "Marla. Marla. You get it."

"Mm-hmm. Drink your water, sweetheart."

She slid a tall glass of ice water across the bar at me. I drank it dutifully. She refilled my whiskey at the same time, because Marla, I had decided, was a woman who understood balance.

It was somewhere around drink number — three? four? — that I felt it.

You know that feeling. The prickle on the back of your neck. The soft, animal awareness that someone, somewhere in the room, has been looking at you for a while.

I didn't turn.

I am proud of this. Past-Cassidy might have whipped around immediately and made eye contact and probably blushed and apologized for nothing. Three-whiskeys-deep Cassidy took a slow, deliberate sip from her glass, set it down, and waited.

"Marla," I said quietly. "Don't look. But there's a man at the end of the bar who has been staring at me for the last ten minutes."

Marla didn't look.

She also didn't pretend she didn't know what I was talking about.

"Mm-hmm," she said.

"Is he a creep?"

Marla considered this. She picked up another glass to polish.

"Not the kind you think," she said.

"What does that mean?"

"It means," Marla said, "that man has been sitting at this bar for two hours, drinking the same scotch, refusing to talk to anyone, ignoring three different women who tried to buy him a drink. And then you sat down."

I blinked.

"And?"

Marla smiled — a slow, knowing, honey-you-have-no-idea smile.

"And honey, he hasn't looked at anything else since."

---

I turned my head.

I tried to do it casually. I am almost certain I failed.

He was sitting at the far end of the bar, half in shadow, one elbow on the wood, a heavy crystal glass cradled loosely in his hand. He was wearing a black dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and even from across the bar I could see the lean line of his forearm, the heavy silver of an expensive watch, the way his fingers — long, elegant, almost musician's fingers — wrapped around the glass.

His face was harder to make out in the low light. Dark hair. Sharp jaw. A mouth that wasn't smiling.

But his eyes —

His eyes were on me.

And they did not look away when I caught him looking.

That, more than anything, was what made my stomach drop.

A normal man — a polite man, a charming man, a Tristan — would have looked away. Smiled awkwardly. Raised his glass in apology. Pretended, the way men have been pretending forever, that they hadn't been looking at all.

He didn't.

He just held my gaze across the dim bar, calmly, steadily, the way a man might watch a storm rolling in over the desert.

Like he had all night.

Like he was interested in seeing what the storm did next.

I turned back to my whiskey.

My pulse was suddenly, ridiculously loud in my ears.

"Marla," I whispered.

"Mm-hmm."

"Who is that."

Marla's lips twitched.

"Couldn't tell you, sweetheart."

"You're lying."

"I really couldn't," she said. "He hasn't given me a name, hasn't shown me a credit card, paid in cash, tipped me four hundred dollars on a hundred-dollar bar tab."

I stared at her.

"Four hundred dollars?"

"Mm-hmm."

"Marla."

"Sweetheart."

"Is he a serial killer?"

Marla finally laughed — a low, rich sound from deep in her chest.

"Honey," she said, "if he is, he's a *

very well-dressed one."

I made the mistake of looking at him again.

He was still watching me.

This time — this time — the corner of his mouth lifted. Just slightly. The barest, faintest suggestion of a smile, like he was amused by the entire conversation he couldn't possibly hear.

My stomach did something that I was going to need to have a serious talk with it about later.

I turned back to my whiskey. Took a long, slow sip. Pretended my hands weren't unsteady.

"He's coming over here, isn't he," I said.

"Mm-hmm," Marla said softly.

"How do you know."

"Because, sweetheart," Marla said, polishing one last glass and setting it down, "a man like that doesn't waste two hours staring at a girl in a cream dress and then let her walk out the door.

I heard the soft scrape of a barstool.

I heard footsteps — slow, unhurried, expensive — coming toward me along the polished wood floor.

I did not turn around.

I lifted my whiskey, swirled it once, and took the deepest, slowest breath of my entire life.

Whatever spectacularly bad decision I was about to make in Las Vegas —

It had just sat down on the stool beside me.

A low voice spoke at my shoulder.

It was quiet. It was rough at the edges. It was the kind of voice that made every single bone in my body sit up and pay attention all at once.

"Tell me his name," he said.

I turned my head.

Up close, his eyes were grey. Storm grey. Almost silver in the low gold light.

He was even more devastating than I had feared.

He held my gaze for a long, weighted moment, and then — slowly, deliberately, like a man placing the first piece on a chessboard — he smiled.

"I'll have him fired by morning."