Chapter 2: A Stranger Who Paid

By nine o’clock I had spent forty dollars I didn’t have at a bar called Halloway’s, and the bartender had stopped pretending to like me.

It was the kind of place I’d never have walked into on a normal Monday. Dark wood, leather booths, and men in loosened ties talking about mergers. The bartender had a man-bun and a smirk, and he’d taken one look at my puffy eyes and wrinkled skirt and decided I wasn’t going to tip well. He was right. I ordered whiskey because Jordan hated it, and every time I finished a glass I ordered another, just to prove some point I’d lost track of somewhere around the third one.

My mother called twice. I let it ring both times.

“Same again,” I said, sliding my glass across.

The bartender didn’t move. “Card first.”

I handed it over. He ran it, frowned at the machine, and pushed it back to me with two fingers as if it might be contagious. “Declined.”

“Try it again.”

“I tried it twice.” He leaned on the bar. “Look, sweetheart, it’s Monday. You’ve had your cry and you’ve had your whiskey. Why don’t you call somebody to come get you?”

A couple at the end of the bar laughed. My face went hot, and I was reaching for my purse to leave with whatever dignity I had left when a hand set a black card on the bar beside my glass.

“Put hers on mine,” a voice said. “And bring her water first.”

I turned.

He was tall, really tall, the kind of height that makes a crowded room rearrange itself without anyone noticing. He was broad through the shoulders and chest, and his charcoal suit fit him the way suits only fit when someone has measured you for them. He wore no tie, and his collar was open at the throat. His dark hair was cut short and going grey at the temples, and a trimmed beard framed a hard mouth. I put him somewhere near forty. His eyes were grey too, and they were studying me with a calm interest that made me sit up straighter on my stool.

The bartender suddenly couldn’t move fast enough. “Yes, sir.”

“I don’t need you to rescue me,” I said.

“I’m not rescuing you. I’m buying you a glass of water.” He sat on the stool beside mine, close enough that I caught his cologne, something warm and expensive. “The whiskey is a separate negotiation.”

I should have left. Instead I drank the water, because I was thirsty and because he watched until I’d finished it. When the whiskey came, I wrapped both hands around the glass and stared at the bar.

“Bad day?” he asked.

“I got fired this morning. Laid off. Whatever they call it now.” I laughed, and it came out wrong. “Absorbed. That’s the word they used. Then I went home and found my fiancé on my couch with some blonde princess whose daddy apparently owns South Valley. He took the ring back. He actually asked for it back. And then I found out he’d emptied our savings on his way out the door.”

The stranger was quiet for a moment, and something moved behind his eyes, there and then gone. “Did he.”

“He did. And you know what the worst part is?” I turned on my stool to face him, and my knee brushed his thigh. I didn’t move it. “I paid for everything. The rent, the groceries, his stupid monitors. I made myself small for three years so he’d feel big, and he still left me for someone with a nicer car.”

“Then he’s a fool.”

“You don’t even know me.”

“I know a fool when one leaves a woman like you alone on a Monday night.” He said it plainly, without any flirt in it, and somehow that made it hit harder. His gaze dropped once, down the line of my throat to the open collar of my blouse and the curve of my breasts under the cotton, then lower to where my hips met the stool, before it came back up to my face. He didn’t apologize for looking. “Half the men in this room have been watching you for an hour.”

I knew what I looked like. Thick dark curls that never behaved, brown skin, a mouth my mother called too big, and a body that had always been more curve than I knew what to do with. Jordan used to say I was a lot. He’d meant it as a joke at first, and then after a while he hadn’t.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Does it matter tonight?”

“I suppose not.” I finished the whiskey, and it burned all the way down. “I’m Ivy.”

“Ivy.” He said it as if he were filing it away somewhere safe.

We talked for an hour, and I don’t remember all of it. I remember that he asked real questions and waited for the answers. I remember that he laughed once at something I said about my mother, and the sound seemed to surprise both of us. I remember that his hand rested on the bar near mine and never quite touched it, and that he didn’t tell me a single thing about himself. When I asked what he did for a living, he said, “I make difficult people do what I want,” and I told him that sounded expensive.

“It is.”

“Could I afford you?” I was joking. Mostly.

He looked at me for a long moment. “For one night? Maybe.”

The bar had thinned out by then. The bartender kept wiping the same spot on the counter and pretending not to listen. I thought about going home to that apartment, to the champagne glasses still sitting on the coffee table and the dent in the couch cushion. I thought about Jordan in Crestview Heights tonight, in a bed I’d never see, with a woman who’d keyed my car for fun.

“I want one night,” I said, “where I’m not the one who gets left.”

He didn’t answer right away. He studied my face, and I made myself hold his eyes.

“You’ve been drinking,” he said.

“I’ve had three whiskeys and a glass of water you forced on me. I know exactly where I am, and I know exactly what I’m asking. If you say no, I’ll go home and hate you a little bit, and that’ll be fine.” I took a breath. “But I’d rather you didn’t say no.”

Something shifted in his face. He stood, buttoned his jacket, and held out his hand.

His car was waiting at the curb with a driver already holding the door open. We didn’t speak during the ride, and he didn’t touch me until we were alone in the private elevator of a glass tower on the north bank of the river. Then he turned, put one big hand on my waist, and backed me against the mirrored wall until I could feel the heat of him through my clothes.

“Last chance to change your mind, Ivy.”

I grabbed his collar and pulled his mouth down to mine.