“I missed it,” he said.
“No you didn’t.” She drank her gin. “Talk to me.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“You’re painting him.”
The cloth stopped.
Nina set her glass down and waited. She’d been reading his hands for seven years. She knew what the cloth stopping meant.
“I’m working on a large canvas,” he said.
“With a figure.”
“Figures are a legitimate subject.”
“The figure has his posture. I’ve seen him from across this room twice now. The way the shoulders pull forward like he’s bracing for something.”
He went back to wiping. It accomplished nothing and they both knew it.
“Is he out?” she said.
The cloth stopped again.
He made himself move it. “I don’t know.”
Nina’s thumb traced the rim of her glass. She picked up the drink and turned it in her clay-stained hands.
“Omo mi,” she said. Low, the Yoruba she used when she meant it. “You know what you’re doing, right?”
He did. That was the problem with Nina, and the thing that made her necessary: she never asked questions he didn’t already know the answers to. She just made him say them out loud.
“I know,” he said.
“Is it the same thing?”
“No.” A beat. “I don’t know.”
She looked at him. “What’s different?”
He opened his mouth. Couldn’t find the sentence.
The door opened.
Adrian turned before he finished the thought. He knew who it was before the man cleared the threshold. The weight of the door, the speed of it. The direct line to the third stool.
Milo came through and crossed the room. Head down, no scan, hair damp at the temples from a shower. He sat. Clocked Nina, two stools over, and nodded once at Adrian.
Adrian reached for the bourbon. Poured without measuring. Set it on the ghost ring.
He did not look at Nina.
He went to the other end of the bar and found something to do there.
* * *
She stayed for an hour. Two gins. She talked about her ceramics show and the gallery owner who kept mispronouncing her surname. She didn’t talk to Milo. Didn’t look at him. She sat with her back to the third stool and talked about kiln temperaturesand clay shrinkage rates and Adrian could feel her paying attention to the man behind her the entire time.
