The Debt.A MAFIA ROMANCE

Table Six

Chapter Two: Table Six

Avery told herself she wasn't nervous.

She told herself that three times on the walk to Rosalinda's, twice while tying her apron in the cramped back room that smelled like bleach and old cigarettes, and once more standing outside the kitchen doors, which was one time too many for it to be true. She smoothed the front of her apron, checked her reflection in the small mirror bolted crookedly to the wall, and told herself that showing up was simply a matter of practicality. She needed the job. Her aunt needed her to keep it. That was all this was.

She didn't believe herself, but she walked out anyway.

"You're early," the hostess said, eyeing her with the same wary expression from the night before, like Avery had become a small, unpredictable weather system that the restaurant now had to plan around.

"I was told to be."

Avery didn't answer. She didn't need to. The hostess's face did the math for her — table six, the boss, the new girl who hadn't run screaming the first night — and whatever conclusion she landed on made her step back half an inch, like proximity to Avery was suddenly its own liability, something contagious that hadn't fully declared its symptoms yet.

Marco was already there when she came out, jacket off again, sleeves rolled, a folder of paperwork open in front of him that he wasn't reading. He looked up before she'd even crossed half the dining room, as if some part of him had been tracking the door since before she'd walked through it.

"You came."

"You made it very clear I didn't have a choice."

"I gave you a choice. You could've called in sick."

"Would you have believed me?"

"No." He closed the folder without looking at it. "But it would've been a fun conversation."

Avery set the wine down — carefully this time, no risk of a spill giving him an excuse to look at her hands, to comment on nerves she didn't intend to give him access to. "Are we doing this every night? You holding my schedule hostage until I develop Stockholm syndrome?"

"Is it working?"

"Ask me again in a week."

Something flickered across his face — amusement, maybe, or its more dangerous cousin, interest, the kind that made a man lean forward instead of back. He gestured at the chair across from him, an easy motion, like he'd done it a thousand times, though something about the way his eyes tracked her said otherwise.

"Sit."

"I have tables."

"You have one table. Mine. The others can wait."

"That's not how waitressing works."

"It is tonight."

She sat. Not because he told her to — she made a point of taking her time about it, smoothing her apron unnecessarily, pulling the chair out herself instead of letting him do it — but she sat, and some traitorous part of her chest settled the moment she did, like it had been waiting all day for permission.

He didn't touch the paperwork again all night.

Instead he asked her things. Small things, at first — where she grew up, what she'd studied before the money ran out, whether she liked the city or was still deciding. Then less small things. Why she flinched, almost imperceptibly, whenever the kitchen doors swung hard on their hinges. Why she kept glancing toward the two men by the entrance every few minutes, like she was cataloguing exits without meaning to.

"You notice things," he said. "Most people don't, around me. They're too busy noticing me."

"Most people are too busy being afraid to notice anything else."

"And you're not afraid."

"I didn't say that."

He went still, the easy amusement dropping away for a moment, replaced by something more careful. "You are afraid of me."

"I'm careful," Avery said. "There's a difference."

"Enlighten me."

"Afraid means I'd have left already." She met his eyes, and made herself hold there, even though something about his gaze made her feel like he was reading the inside of her ribcage, cataloguing what he found the same unhurried way he'd catalogued her face the night before. "Careful means I'm still deciding."

Marco leaned back slowly, like she'd said something that required recalibrating the whole conversation, the whole evening, maybe more than that.

"Deciding what?"

"Whether you're worth the trouble."

"And the verdict?"

"Ask me at the end of the night."

His mouth curved — not the almost-smile from before, but something fuller, something that made the two men by the door glance at each other like they'd never once seen it happen, not in all the years they'd apparently spent watching him.

"I look forward to it," he said, and meant it in a way that unsettled her more than any threat could have.

Near the end of her shift, he caught her in the narrow hallway near the kitchen, one hand braced against the wall beside her head — not trapping her, not quite, but close enough that the space between them had developed a temperature of its own.

"You've been avoiding table six for the last twenty minutes," he said.

"I've been working."

"You've been avoiding me."

"Those aren't mutually exclusive."

"Why?"

Avery looked up at him. This close, under the flickering hallway light instead of the dining room's careful dimness, she could see what the ambiance usually hid — a thin white scar through one eyebrow, a tightness at his jaw that had nothing to do with her, old evidence of a life she hadn't been invited into yet.

"Because every time I sit at that table," she said quietly, "I like you a little more than I meant to. And I don't think that's a safe thing to do around a man like you."

She expected him to smile at that, to turn it into something easy the way he turned everything else. He didn't.

"It's not," he said. "You're right about that."

Marco's hand moved — not to her face, not yet, just to the wall behind her, close enough that his sleeve brushed her shoulder, close enough that she could smell the clean, sharp scent of him underneath the restaurant's kitchen smells. The air between them had gone thin and electric, the kind of quiet that came right before something changed permanently, the kind she'd have run from if her feet had cooperated.

"Because I tried," he said, voice low, rougher than before. "For about four days. I'm not built for patience, Avery."

"That's not my problem."

"No," he agreed. "It's about to be."

He didn't kiss her. That was the worst part of it — the almost of it, the way he let the moment stretch until her pulse was loud enough to hear, until she thought she might actually close the last inch herself, and then he simply stepped back, leaving cold air where his warmth had been, like he'd changed his mind at the very last second on purpose, just to prove he could.

"Goodnight," he said. "Table six. Tomorrow."

Avery stood in the hallway long after he'd gone, one hand pressed flat against her own collarbone, trying to remember how to breathe like a person who hadn't just been quietly, thoroughly undone by a man who hadn't even touched her.

Her aunt was waiting up when she finally got home, sitting at the kitchen table with two mugs of tea going cold, one poured for herself and one poured out of habit for a niece who was clearly, obviously late.

"You smell like his restaurant," her aunt said, not looking up from the mug she was turning slowly between her hands. "Wine and that awful cologne he wears."

"I work there. That's what the job smells like."

"Don't do that. Don't act like I don't know the difference between a job and whatever this is turning into." Her aunt finally looked up, and there was something in her expression that wasn't quite anger — closer to fear dressed up as frustration, the way fear so often was in that family. "I asked him for a job for you. Not this."

"Not what, exactly?"

"You know what."

Avery sat down across from her, wrapping her cold hands around the mug that had been left for her, more for something to hold onto than because she wanted the tea. "He hasn't done anything wrong."

"Yet," her aunt said. "That's the word you're missing. Yet."

"You make him sound like a storm."

"He is a storm, Avery. Men like that always are. They're calm right up until they're not, and by the time you notice the wind picking up, you're already standing in the wrong field." She reached across the table, briefly, and squeezed Avery's wrist — a small, worn gesture, the kind mothers gave daughters, aunts gave nieces who had no mothers left to do it for them. "I just don't want you standing in his field when it happens. That's all I'm asking."

Avery didn't have an answer for that, not one she trusted enough to say out loud. She thought about the hallway, about the cold air where his hand had almost been on her face, about the particular quality of the silence that had stretched between them right before he stepped back instead of closing the distance.

She thought about how much she'd wanted him not to step back.

"I'll be careful," she said finally, which wasn't a promise, not really, but it was the only honest thing she had to offer at midnight with cold tea in front of her and her aunt's worried eyes across the table.

Her aunt studied her for a long moment, the way people study something they already suspect is a lost cause, and then simply nodded, tired, and carried both mugs to the sink without another word.

Avery sat alone at the table a while longer, staring at nothing, replaying the hallway again despite every instinct telling her not to — the low rasp of his voice, the warmth of him even without contact, the promise wrapped inside table six, tomorrow that had sounded less like an invitation and more like a certainty neither of them had the power to argue with anymore.