Chapter 9 Part 4: Mona Lick Returns
857 Words
She went on at nine. The room received her the way the room always received her, with the particular quality of attention that meant Mona Lick was on and the evening had properly begun. She took the pole. Started slow. Let the music do what the music did and let her body do what her body knew.
The thinking part of her mind ran its separate track in the background.
Track one: the warehouse number and the probate dispute and how long she had before circumstances changed in a direction she couldn't counter.
Track two: Bastien Leclair and the twelve month binding period and what a practical management strategy actually looked like for a legal problem she had not yet fully mapped.
Track three: the specific and inconvenient memory of a courtyard and precise patient fingers and the way he had watched her the entire time without looking away once.
She shut track three down. She was working.
She climbed. The pole cold and familiar in her grip, the muscle memory taking over the moment her hands found the metal. She inverted slowly, the red fall of her hair reaching for the stage floor, held the position until the music told her to move. Came down in a slow spiral. Landed in a crouch. Rose with the tempo shift and let her hands do what they did and gave the man in the second row the thirty seconds of focused attention he had been angling for since the first chorus.
It was on her second circuit of the pole that she clocked them.
Two of them. North side booth, which had the best sightline to the stage. Not the VIP section. The regular booths, which blended, which was itself a choice that told her something. They held their drinks with the particular quality of people who were present for a purpose. The purpose was not the performance.
She had seen this quality before. Three nights ago in a different configuration. She had known something was wrong before she could name it.
She knew what it was now.
She did not break. Did not change her pace or her expression or the angle of her attention. She looked at them for exactly as long as she would look at any other table during a set, briefly and with professional warmth, then looked away and came down from the pole and gave the room the rest of what they had paid for.
She finished her set.
She collected her money with the practiced efficiency of someone who had learned early that leaving money on the floor was leaving money on the floor. She walked off like the applause was simply the room acknowledging a fact.
In the dressing room she sat at her mirror and thought about it properly.
They were not approaching. That was information. If the instruction had been to bring her in, the men would not be sitting in a north side booth watching a stage performance. They were watching. Locating and observing. Which meant Bastien knew where she worked and had chosen to know it rather than act on it yet.
Patient. He was being patient.
She understood patience. She used it herself. But patience in a man like him was not restraint. It was preparation. He was watching because he was learning, mapping the shape of her life the same way she mapped the shape of a room when she walked into it, identifying the exits before he decided which ones to close.
He would move when he was ready.
She intended to not be there when he did.
She would go out the back tonight.
She would go out the back every night if she had to. Different routes to the gym. Different spots. Keep moving the way she always kept moving. She was not going to let two men in a booth disrupt the functioning of her life, which she needed to keep functioning because the warehouse number was in her account and the canvas was waiting.
She had work to do.
Priya appeared beside her in the mirror. "They're still there."
"I know."
"You want me to have Harlan move them along."
"No." Moving them along would tell Bastien she was rattled. She was not rattled. She was annoyed, which was different, and she was not going to let the annoyance show in any direction that mattered. "Leave them. I'm going out the back."
Priya nodded. Said nothing further, which was one of her better qualities when she chose to deploy it.
Occy finished taking her hair down, changed into her jeans and shirt and jacket, picked up her bag, and went to find Harlan.
"Back exit tonight," she said.
Harlan, who had been doing this job for eleven years and had learned not to ask questions that had already been answered by the person's expression, nodded once.
She went out the back.
The Tripicity night received her the way it always did. Immediately. Without ceremony. With the specific indifferent warmth of a city that had seen everything and found nothing worth commenting on.
She pulled her jacket closed and walked.
- Writer
