CHAPTER 5
1680 Words
I opened the bathroom door.
The first thing I saw was Bella.
She was standing directly outside, arms crossed, one foot tapping against the floor with the rapid energy of someone who had been waiting for exactly as long as her patience allowed and not one second more.
The moment she saw my face, something in her own shifted. The performance of impatience dropped immediately into something real and quiet.
"Hey," she said.
"Hey," I said.
"You look terrible."
"Thank you, Bella."
"Not in a bad way." She reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear the way she had been doing since we were fourteen years old. "In a you've-been-crying-in-the-bathroom-and-pretending-you-haven't way."
I said nothing.
She studied me for a moment. Then she sighed, one of her long, theatrical sighs that somehow managed to communicate both exasperation and deep affection simultaneously.
"Go home," she said.
"I can't. Ethan said the Titan Group…"
"Go home, Amanda."
"Bella…"
"I will handle the meeting."
I blinked. "You're an assistant coordinator. The Titan Group account is…"
"Is a room full of men in suits who want someone to nod at their slides and tell them the projections look great." She smoothed down my collar with brisk, maternal efficiency. "I have been nodding at powerful men's slides since I was twenty-two. I am exceptional at it. Go home."
I looked at her.
She looked back at me with the expression she had perfected over years of knowing me. Steady, certain, completely immovable.
"Fine," I said.
"Good." She handed me my bag, which she had apparently already retrieved from my desk. "Eat something. Not coffee. Actual food."
"You sound like my mother."
"Your mother has excellent instincts." She pointed toward the elevator. "Go. Before Ethan comes looking for you and I have to say something unfortunate to him in the middle of the office."
Despite everything, I almost smiled.
"Bella."
"Mm?"
"I missed you," I said again.
She gave me the same look as before. Confused, a little worried, threaded through with something warm she didn't quite know what to do with.
"You are so weird," she said. "Go eat."
I found a restaurant three blocks from the office.
Small and unhurried, the kind of place that existed in pleasant defiance of the city around it. Wooden tables, afternoon light through fogged windows, the smell of coffee and something baked and warm.
I picked a corner table.
The corner table happened to have a small card on it that said Reserved.
I moved the card to the side and sat down.
A waiter appeared almost immediately, looking mildly distressed.
"Madam, I'm afraid this table is…"
"Soup," I said. "Whatever soup you have. And coffee. Strong."
He opened his mouth.
"Please," I added.
He closed his mouth and left.
I stared into nothing and let my brain do what it had been trying to do all morning. Think. Map it out. I have to bring down Ethan before he puts his action to motion otherwise, The crazy lady would take over my life. I just got this life back so I can’t afford to…
"Madam."
A different waiter this time. Younger. Visibly more nervous.
"I'm so sorry to disturb you, but this table has been reserved for…"
"I know," I said. "I moved the card. I'll be quick."
"The reservation is for Mr. DeLuca," he said, in a tone that suggested this information should mean something significant to me.
It didn't.
"Tell Mr. DeLuca there are other tables," I said pleasantly.
The waiter stared at me the way people stare at someone standing on a ledge. Was this Mr Deluca The president or something?
"Madam…"
My soup arrived.
I picked up my spoon.
The waiter made a small, helpless sound and disappeared.
I ate my soup.
It was good soup. Rich and warm and exactly what I needed. Outside the window, the city moved in its indifferent afternoon way and for approximately four minutes I felt something close to calm.
Then the restaurant changed.
I noticed it the same way you notice a temperature drop. Not a sound, not a movement. Just a shift. The background noise of cutlery and conversation didn't stop exactly. It just became more careful.
I looked up from my soup.
The man who had walked in was tall, dark-suited, and moving through the restaurant with the particular unhurried confidence of someone who had never once in his life needed to check whether a room would make space for him. It simply did. Tables seemed to lean away slightly. Waiters rerouted. Two men had come in behind him and positioned themselves near the entrance with the stillness of furniture that happened to breathe.
He stopped at my table.
He looked at the soup.
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
He had a very good face. Structured, unsmiling, with dark eyes that were currently doing the thing powerful men's eyes did when something had not gone according to plan. A slow, dangerous kind of assessment.
I looked back at my soup.
"You're in my seat," he said.
His voice was low. The kind of low that didn't need volume.
"There are other seats," I said.
A pause.
"This is my table."
"It's a table," I said. "It doesn't have your name on it."
Another pause. Longer this time.
"There was a reserved card."
"I moved it." I gestured with my spoon at the card, which was sitting politely to my left. "It's right there. Perfectly safe."
Silence.
I ate another spoonful of soup.
Across the restaurant, I was dimly aware that nobody was eating anymore. Cutlery had stopped. Conversations had stopped. Even the background music seemed to have made a quiet decision to lower itself.
"Do you know who I am?" he asked.
"Mr. DeLuca," I said. "The waiter mentioned you." There was something familiar about the name, but I can’t exactly remember where I have heard the name but I do know he gives off a dangerous vibe.
"And you're still sitting there."
"I ordered soup," I said reasonably. "I can't just leave soup."
I heard something from behind him that might have been one of his men making a very small, very suppressed sound.
When I glanced up, the man in front of me was staring at me with an expression I genuinely could not classify. It was somewhere in the territory of disbelief, but it had aspects of something else in it too. Something he was working very hard to keep off his face.
"Move," he said.
"In a minute," I said.
"Now."
"The soup is hot." I pointed at the chair across from me. "You can sit. I won't be long."
The silence that followed was the loudest silence I had experienced since arriving back in 2018. I was fairly certain the two men by the door had stopped breathing.
He pulled out the chair across from me.
He sat down.
I blinked.
He had actually sat down. I hadn't expected that. I had expected more negotiation, possibly an escalating series of warnings. Not this.
He leaned back in the chair and looked at me across the table with those dark, unreadable eyes and said absolutely nothing.
I ate my soup.
He watched me eat my soup.
"You're staring," I said.
"I'm trying to understand," he said, "whether you are extraordinarily brave or extraordinarily unaware."
"I'm having a bad day," I said. "I just need five more minutes and then I will move and you can have your table back and we can both pretend this didn't happen."
"Nobody sits at my table."
"I did," I said. "And I moved your card carefully. I didn't throw it on the floor or anything. I was respectful about it."
Another silence.
"You were respectful," he repeated.
"About the card," I confirmed. "Yes."
He looked at me for a very long moment.
Then he picked up the menu.
He actually picked up the menu and looked at it like a man who had decided, for reasons best known to himself, that this was simply where he was having lunch today.
A waiter materialized instantly, vibrating with confused relief.
"Mr. DeLuca, what can I get…"
"Coffee," he said, without looking up from the menu. "And whatever she's having."
I looked up from my bowl.
He was looking at me over the top of the menu with an expression that was still mostly unreadable but had something in it, some very faint, very controlled thing at the corners of it, that looked almost like amusement.
Almost.
"You're going to eat with me?" I said.
"I'm going to eat at my table," he said. "You happen to also be at my table."
I considered this logic.
"Fair enough," I said.
The waiter fled.
We sat in the strange, loud silence of the restaurant slowly remembering how to function around us, and I ate my soup, and the most dangerous man in what I was beginning to suspect was a very large radius drank his coffee and said nothing.
It should have been uncomfortable.
It was, inexplicably, not.
Four minutes passed.
I set down my spoon, picked up my bag, and stood.
"Thank you for the table," I said.
He looked up at me.
"You're welcome," he said. Like that was a normal thing. Like I had borrowed a pen.
I turned to leave.
"You didn't finish your soup," he said behind me.
I stopped.
Turned back.
He was looking at the bowl, which was admittedly still about a third full.
"I said I'd be quick," I said.
"You said five minutes."
"It was approximately five minutes."
"It was four."
I stared at him.
"Are you," I said slowly, "arguing with me about soup?"
Something happened to his face. Something fast and quickly suppressed, like a light switched on and off in a room you weren't supposed to see into.
"Eat the soup," he said.
"I have to go."
"Eat the soup."
"I don't take instructions from strangers."
"You took my table."
I opened my mouth.
Closed it.
He had a point.
- Writer
