Two
789 Words
He pulled out the stool beside mine and sat and I looked at him then because not looking would have been its own kind of signal. He was broad and patient and his eyes moved over me with the specific quality of assessment that had nothing comfortable in it.
"You're here alone," he said.
"Waiting for someone," I said. "He is running late."
"What's his name," he said.
I held his gaze steadily. "Why."
His hand moved to the inside of his jacket and I felt my entire body go very quiet, the particular stillness that comes in the second before something bad finishes confirming itself.
Then a hand found the small of my back from the right side and a voice came with it.
"There you are."
A man settled onto the stool to my right with the ease of someone arriving somewhere he had been heading all along. He did not look at the man beside me first. He looked at me, and his expression had something warm and familiar in it that was entirely constructed, and I was close enough to see that it was constructed, and I played along anyway because the alternative was the hand inside the jacket.
"I have been calling you," he said.
"My phone was in my bag," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I deserved credit for.
He glanced at the man to my left with an open, unhurried expression. Nothing confrontational in it. Just the natural attention of someone checking on a situation involving a person they are with. "Everything alright here?"
The man looked between us. "She was sitting alone."
"I know," he said, and looked back at me with the particular blend of patience and exasperation that belonged specifically to people who had had the same argument more than once. "Because she left the room while I was still on a call." He shook his head slightly and looked at the man again with the ease of someone sharing a small, private frustration. "We had a disagreement this morning. She does this when she is upset with me."
The man studied us both. His eyes moved from my face to the man beside me and back again, slow and careful, looking for the seam in what we were presenting.
"She was watching the door," he said.
"She was waiting for me to walk through it," the man beside me said, and there was something so perfectly calibrated in the way he said it, fond and slightly tired, that I almost believed it myself. He looked at me. "Which I did. Eventually."
I looked away from him the way you look away from someone you are genuinely irritated with and said nothing.
The man at my left sat with it for another moment. Then he stood and went back to the window.
I breathed for what felt like the first time in several minutes.
The man beside me settled fully onto the stool and signaled the bartender without consulting the menu. He ordered two sparkling waters, set one in front of me, and kept his hand at the small of my back for exactly long enough to maintain the picture before letting it rest on the bar between us, still close.
"Don't look at the window," he said, quietly enough that it was only for me.
"I wasn't going to," I said.
"The man who just sat back down has someone positioned near the exit to your left," he said. "The bartender has been watching you since before I sat down. And the woman at the table behind us with the phone has not made or received a single call in the forty minutes she has been sitting there."
I kept my eyes on the bar and absorbed all of that. "How long have you been here."
"Long enough," he said.
"You were watching Crane," I said.
A short pause. "Yes."
"So was I." I turned and looked at him properly for the first time since he sat down and his face was the kind of face that made looking at it carefully a mistake because it rewarded the attention in ways that were not useful to me right now. Dark eyes, a jaw that looked like a decision rather than an accident, and a composure so complete it almost read as indifference until you looked at the eyes and understood it was not indifference at all. "Which means we have a problem," I said.
He looked at me with something direct and unhurried in his expression. "Or we have the beginning of something more useful," he said.
"I work alone," I said.
"I know," he said. He picked up his water. "Tell me anyway."
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