DANGEROUSLY SAFE

Kam

By nine, Morrow House was three deep in places, and I’d stopped keeping track of who’d ordered what and started keeping track of hands instead. Whose were on the counter. Whose were in the air, calling for another round. Whose were somewhere I hadn’t clocked yet.

Deb had claimed her usual spot near the taps an hour ago, rum and Coke going flat in front of her while she worked through whatever crossword she’d brought tonight, same as most Fridays.

The ice machine had been rattling since six, making a low grinding cough every time it dropped a batch. Under it, the radio was doing something with too much bass. Glass hit wood every few seconds, and somebody laughed too long at something that hadn’t been that funny. Friday built like that, noise stacking on noise until you stopped hearing any one piece of it and just felt the whole thing pressing at your back.

“Table six wants flaming shots.” Wanda set her tray down hard enough to rattle the glasses on it. She had a smear of something dark on her forearm, cranberry mixer, probably, and hadn’t noticed it yet. “I told them we don’t do that here. They didn’t believe me.”

“Tell them I’ll be happy to explain it to the fire marshal.”

“I like that. Ominous. I’ll workshop it.”

I poured two rail whiskeys and set them on the bar mat, which had a torn strip along the near edge that somebody’s boot was going to catch eventually. I’d mentioned it to the owner twice. He still hadn’t fixed it.

Marcus was three stools down, finishing his first Miller Lite. I pulled his second before he asked and set it down six inches from his left hand. He always stopped at two, which made him one of the least complicated customers in the building.

He looked at the bottle, then at me. “You keeping count?”

“Occupational hazard.”

“Thought that was the drinking.”

“That’s the occupational benefit.” I wiped a ring of condensation off the bar with the edge of my rag. There was a smear of grease along one of his knuckles, old, worked into the skin rather than sitting on top of it. He didn’t try to hide it. “You always this predictable?”

“Two’s the limit. After that I start telling people what I actually think.”

“Tragic. I was hoping for a third.”

He didn’t smile, but one corner of his mouth twitched before he went back to his beer, and I went back to the rest of the bar.

The guy at the end of the bar had ordered two beers in forty minutes. He’d left the first half-finished and was nearly through the second. Work boots, flannel unbuttoned over a T-shirt, the kind of loud that filled up more space than his actual body did. He’d moved two stools closer to me somewhere between his first and second round. I noticed. I notice most things like that, where people started and where they ended up, and how long it took them to get there.

“You’re fast,” he said when I set his third beer down without spilling it, even with someone jostling my elbow from behind. “Like, unnaturally fast.”

“Ten years of practice.”

“I like a woman who’s good with her hands.”

“Careful. That’s the kind of line people repeat at your funeral.”

He laughed too hard, leaning in on the last of it, and for a second I thought that was the end of the exchange. Harmless, forgettable, gone by Monday. I turned to grab a bottle off the low shelf behind me. My back was to him for maybe two seconds.

His hand closed around my wrist.

It wasn’t hard. That detail would embarrass me later, when I had room to be embarrassed. It wasn’t even hard, just a hand, warm, a little damp from the bottle, wrapped around the bone.

The bar didn’t disappear so much as go distant, the way a radio sounds when you walk into another room and leave it playing. I heard myself laugh. My mouth kept moving. I couldn’t tell you what I said. His face was in front of mine, moving too, and the sound of him reached me a beat behind when it should have.

I was looking past his shoulder at the door. Forty feet, maybe less. Leon stood near it in his usual spot, checking IDs on a group coming in, his attention on them instead of me. I knew I should call his name. I tried. It wouldn’t come out.

“You’re gonna have to let go of the merchandise,” I said. My voice came out light. Easy. I didn’t recognize it.

He didn’t let go. His grip tightened instead, just for a second, enough that I felt it in the bone.

Then the weight on my wrist was gone.

I didn’t see it happen. One second his hand was there. The next, Marcus was between us, even though he’d been three stools down a moment earlier, occupying the space his arm had been in, close enough that I had to tip my head back to see past a shoulder.

Marcus.

I knew him by rhythm more than face. A regular most nights, corner stool, two beers, never three, and not much conversation beyond his order. Big through the shoulders in a way that looked earned rather than gym-built. Forearms with a burn scar on the left one, old, faded pink. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the guy, and he said something low enough I didn’t catch it, and the guy’s face went red, then a paler color, and he mumbled something and dropped back onto his stool and got very interested in his beer.

The noise came back all at once. Bottle on the counter behind me. Wanda’s voice somewhere down the bar, laughing at nothing. I checked my hands. Steady. They were always steady after, which used to scare me more than shaking would have.

“You okay?” Marcus asked.

Not loud. He hadn’t touched me. He was standing at a distance that respected the width of the bar between his side and mine, like it was a line he had no plans to cross.

“I’m great.” I grabbed the bottle I’d been reaching for and set it down harder than it needed to. “Third time this month a man’s touched me like I’m a vending machine that owes him a refund. I should start charging for it.”

He didn’t laugh. His jaw tightened, like he was filing the line away instead of dismissing it.

“Want me to walk him out?”

“He’s mine to deal with. Not yours.” I said it sharper than I meant to, then didn’t take it back.

I walked down to where the guy was still sitting, still red around the ears, his third beer two-thirds full in front of him. I picked it up before he could reach for it.

“You’re done.”

“I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“What you meant doesn’t change what you did.” I set the bottle on the back counter, out of his reach, and looked past him at Wanda. “Close out his tab, no refund on the last one.”

“Come on, that’s not—”

“House policy. Harass the staff, lose the drink, leave with Leon.” I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t need to.

I caught Leon’s attention near the front door and pointed at the customer. Leon came over without hurrying, broad enough that people usually reconsidered their options before he reached them.

The guy looked at Marcus once, like he was hoping for a different ruling. Marcus gave him nothing.

“You heard her,” Leon said. “Time to go.”

The guy left an extra ten on the bar before Leon escorted him outside.

My stomach was still tight after the door shut behind them. Nobody could’ve told from my face. That was the part of this job I was best at.

I squared a stack of napkins that was already straight. Wanda’s tray clattered somewhere behind me, and I flinched.

“When I asked if you were okay, you made a joke,” Marcus said.

“Usually works.”

“You want people around, or you want some space?”

No man had ever stepped in and then asked what I wanted afterward. Wes would’ve decided for me and made the whole thing about him. Marcus waited.

“Nobody close,” I said, before I thought better of admitting it. “Just give me the corner for a minute.”

He didn’t nod. Didn’t make a thing of it. He picked up his beer and moved two stools down.

It took me a second to understand what that did. His new seat put him between the door and the rest of the room, not blocking it, not standing guard, just there, in a way that meant if anyone else came through it wrong, he’d see them a full second before I would.

Nobody had told him about the door. He’d just moved.

“You’re staring,” Wanda said, appearing at my elbow with a tray under one arm and cranberry mixer drying on the other. “At the quiet mechanic.”

“Doing inventory.”

“Uh-huh. What’s the count?”

“Says table six still wants flaming shots and I’m two seconds from giving them the fire department’s number instead.”

She grinned, wide, unbothered, the grin of a woman who knew a dodge when she heard one and had decided not to fight it tonight. “Charging cover next Friday. This place is basically dinner theater and I want a cut.”

“Sell tickets. Split it with me.”

“Deal.” She bumped her hip into mine on her way past, the closest thing to a hug I let anyone give me mid-shift, and disappeared back into the noise.

I glanced down the bar. Marcus wasn’t watching me, exactly. Or he was, but not the way the guy from twenty minutes ago had been. Not like I was something to get to. He worked through the rest of his second beer at the same pace as always, elbow on the bar, eyes moving over the room every so often and coming back.

I picked up a rag and started on the counter I’d already wiped twice, because my hands still wanted something to do and there wasn’t anything left that needed doing.

Two stools. That was all it had taken. He’d moved before I said a word about the door, before I’d fully worked out that I needed it.

I told myself that didn’t mean anything. Guys noticed doors all the time. It was probably a habit, the kind you picked up doing whatever it was he did before he started fixing cars for a living.

I refilled Deb’s rum and Coke even though she hadn’t asked, and didn’t look down the bar again for a while.

By close, the crowd had thinned to the regulars who always stayed too long and the two guys in the corner arguing about a football game that wasn’t even on. Leon finished his last sweep of the parking lot and waited near the front door while Wanda flipped the remaining stools onto the counter.

“I can walk out with you,” she said.

“I’m parked right by the door. I’ll be fine.”

“Didn’t ask if you’d be fine. Asked if I could walk out with you.”

“Leon’s right there.”

“I can see Leon. I’m still leaving with you.”

I looked at her, and she looked back with the particular stubbornness of a woman who’d already decided the answer and was just waiting for me to catch up to it.

“Fine. We leave together.”

“Was that so hard?”

“Yes.”

She snorted and went back to sweeping, and I wiped down the last stretch of bar, working my way toward the spot where Marcus had been sitting. He’d left not long after his second beer, before the crowd even started thinning. I remembered clocking the empty stool sometime before ten and telling myself it didn’t mean anything.

I checked the front door twice while I cashed out my drawer. Nobody came through it either time. That was fine. That was the point of a door. Most of the time nothing came through it at all, and you only noticed the ones that did.

I didn’t look for him again after that. At least, that was what I told myself.