CHAPTER 3 — NO NAMES
1354 Words
We were on our third drink when I stopped pretending I wasn't enjoying myself.
It crept up on me. One minute I was a woman sitting at a bar in a stolen champagne flute kind of situation, quietly processing the wreckage of her Tuesday, and the next I was laughing. Actually laughing. The kind that comes from somewhere you forgot you had. It surprised me enough that I sat with it after it passed, turning it over, checking it for damage.
It felt fine.
That was the part I didn't trust.
"You've done this before," I said.
Callum looked at me. "Done what."
"This." I gestured loosely between us. "Sat down next to a woman who clearly wanted to be left alone and made her forget that."
He thought about it with more seriousness than it deserved. "Is that a complaint."
"An observation."
"Hm." He took a sip. "And if I had done it before?"
"Then you're very good at it."
"And if I hadn't?"
I looked at him. He was looking back at me with that expression of his, the one that lived just to the left of a smile and knew exactly where it was going. It did something inconvenient to my ability to think in straight lines and I was blaming the whiskey for that completely.
"Then you're naturally annoying," I said. "Which is honestly worse."
He laughed. Low and sudden, like I had caught him off guard with it. Like he hadn't been expecting me to be funny and was mildly irritated that I was. Something about that felt like a small victory and I filed it away without examining why.
We had not talked about anything heavy. That was the thing I kept noticing. We had talked about the bartender's increasingly judgmental pour face, about the specific cruelty of formal shoes on hard floors, about a nature documentary he had fallen asleep watching and woken up to something completely unrelated. Easy things. Weightless things. The kind of conversation that required absolutely nothing from me.
Nobody was watching me in here. Nobody needed a version of me. I was just a woman at a bar on a Tuesday and that was the whole of it.
It was the most like myself I had felt since I got dressed three hours ago.
"Can I ask you something," he said.
"You can ask."
He nodded at the champagne flute sitting between us on the bar. "What actually happened tonight."
I looked at it. Solen's logo etched into the base. I had walked two streets carrying it without noticing. "I found out something," I said. "About someone I thought I knew."
He waited. Did not push.
"Significant something," I said. "Thirty six hours before a fairly permanent decision kind of significant."
"That's a lot for a Tuesday."
"You have no idea."
A pause. Comfortable in a way that pauses with strangers usually weren't. "Are you okay?"
Nobody had asked me that. My mother had looked at my face and commented on my color. Bisi had texted me an exit route. The bartender had poured without questions. All of it was its own kind of care and I was grateful for every bit of it.
But nobody had just asked.
I thought about it honestly. Tobias's face. The color leaving it. The thing that had settled in my chest in that suite that was not grief exactly. More like the specific quiet of a question you had been half asking yourself for two years finally getting an answer you already knew.
"Yeah," I said. "I actually think I am."
Something shifted in his expression. Small. Like something had confirmed itself and he was deciding what to do with that information.
"Good," he said. Just that one word. Like he meant it without needing to perform meaning it.
I looked at him.
I made a decision I had probably made twenty minutes ago without admitting it to myself.
"I'm not ready to go home," I said.
He went still. The particular still of someone who has heard exactly what you said and is making sure he has it right before he responds.
"Okay," he said carefully.
I held his gaze. "And I don't want to go alone."
The bar moved around us. Somebody laughed on the other side of the room. The bartender walked past without glancing over. Callum looked at me and I looked back and I did not dress it up into anything it wasn't. It was a Tuesday. My rehearsal dinner had happened without me. My whole life was about to change in ways I hadn't started processing yet.
But right now there was just this bar and this man who had sat down next to me and not asked too many questions and made me laugh when I had not planned on laughing and was looking at me now like I was the only thing in the room worth looking at.
"Zara." The way he said my name had changed from an hour ago. Something heavier in it. More careful. "Are you sure."
Not a line. A real question. He wanted a real answer.
I thought about the last two years. The posture. The dress. Every careful considered approved decision that had led me to a suite on the top floor of a restaurant to find something I could not un find.
"Yes," I said. "I'm sure."
He held my gaze for one more second. Then he set his glass down quietly and stood and left enough on the bar to cover both our tabs without counting it out. He held out his hand.
I looked at it.
I put mine in it.
The hotel was two blocks away and neither of us talked in the elevator and I was very aware of how close we were standing. The warmth of him. The way he glanced at me once in the mirrored doors and then looked away like he was exercising a specific kind of patience he did not usually have to exercise.
The corridor was long and quiet and my heels made no sound on the carpet.
He stopped at the door at the end of the hall. Looked at me before he touched the handle. No theatre in it. Just a straightforward question sitting on his face.
I nodded.
He opened the door.
The room was dark except for the city through the windows and he did not reach for the lamp.
He reached for me instead.
One hand at my waist, warm and certain, and one coming up to my jaw, tilting my face toward his, and he looked at me for a moment in the city light like he was paying attention to something before he kissed me.
It was not what I expected.
I don't know what I expected. Something urgent maybe, something that matched the recklessness of the decision. But he kissed me the way he did everything else, unhurried, thorough, like he had the whole night and intended to use it, and something in my chest came undone so quickly I didn't have time to brace for it.
My hands found his shirt. He made a low sound when I pulled him closer and I felt it more than heard it and whatever had been wound tight in me for the last three hours, maybe longer, maybe years, loosened all at once.
He pulled back just enough to look at me. His thumb was moving slowly along my jaw and his eyes were dark and completely focused and entirely on me in a way I was not used to being looked at.
"Still okay?" he said quietly.
I pulled him back down instead of answering.
He laughed softly against my mouth, just barely, and then neither of us was laughing anymore and the city kept doing what it always did outside those windows, indifferent and bright and completely unbothered, while inside that room I existed entirely outside every version of myself I had ever been required to perform.
No posture. No practiced smile... just me.
Which turned out to be enough.
More than enough.
- Writer
