“Tell me everything,” she said.
“I don’t know what you’re—”
“You just poured tonic water into a glass that already had tonic water in it. Stop quibbling and tell me everything.”
I rolled my eyes and shoved the double tonic aside, then told her everything.
Mia listened with the intensity of a woman receivingintelligence critical to national security.
“Hesaidhis hands were shaking?” she said.
“I could feel them . . . against my face. He said he hadn’t done any of it in years, the kissing, the wanting, or the showing up at someone’s door. He said he was out of practice.”
“And then what?”
“And then I said for someone out of practice it was a pretty definitive kiss, and he said he’d had time to prepare, and I asked how long, and he said since the night I sat on his floor with Hiro, which wastwo monthsago, Mia.”
“Two months?”
“Two months of Post-it notes and French press arguments and blanket folding while internally wanting to kiss me. The man has a poker face that should be studied by scientists.”
“Or by the CIA.”
“The CIA would recruit him. He’d be their best operative. He’s been running a covert emotional operation in his own apartment for two months and I had no idea. None. Zero. Nada.”
“You had some idea. You bought him conditioner.”
“The conditioner was a humanitarian intervention—”
“The conditioner was exfoliating foreplay and weboth know it.”
I opened my mouth to argue, closed it, and conceded the point with a silence that Mia accepted with the gracious restraint of a woman who had been right about something for weeks and was choosing not to be insufferable about it.
Finn arrived at 2 p.m. for his pre-shift walk-through. He found me reorganizing the garnish station for the third time, which was not a task that required three iterations but which was keeping my hands busy in a way that prevented them from doing the thing they wanted to do, which was press against my own face in the spots where Peter’s fingers had been.
“You okay?” Finn asked.
“Great. Fucking wonderful. Having a very fucking normal and most fucking productive day.”
Finn looked at Jacks.
Jacks made a small gesture that communicated, in the shorthand they’d developed over months of working together, the essential facts of the situation.
“Ah,” Finn said. “Peter.”
“Why does everyone—”
“About time,” Finn said, and blew past me to check the beer lines.
Dante arrived at 4 p.m. for the evening shift, book in hand, and took his position by the door with thecalm, observational focus that made him excellent at his job. He watched me work for a quarter hour, during which I dropped a shaker, overpoured two drinks, and had to remake a Rescue Sour because I’d forgotten the honey, which was an ingredient I’d been making this drink with for weeks.
“You’re off tonight,” Dante said during a lull, the time he wandered to the bar for a Coke or ice water because he never drank while on duty.
“I’m fine.”
“You put simple syrup in that man’s beer.”
I looked down.
