I. The Last Shift
The club called itself PARALLAX in pink neon over the door, and the line outside on a Tuesday in late October had the shape of people willing to stand in a wet wind to be inside a building they would not entirely remember tomorrow. Rich worked the second-floor rope in a black jacket that fit him badly and a face that fit him worse. The bass came up through the soles of his boots and settled into the bones of his jaw. Six hours in. Two more to go.
The crowd told him things their faces would have lied about. Pupils. Sweat at the temples. The twitch a man develops in his right hand around hour three of a binge he hasn’t yet decided is a binge. Rich processed the line the way he processed most things — efficiently, without investment, with the part of his attention that was not occupied keeping track of exits. There were three on this floor. He had counted them his first night on the job and counted them every night since, because that was what the part of him that came back from Vietnam in 1973 did with rooms.
Heavy Weapons. M60. Honorable discharge, technically, the war won, technically. The country he came home to had spent the last sixteen years partying on a victory the men who had done the actual fighting wouldn’t have called by that name. Rich had stopped trying to argue with the country about four years in. He kept his head down. He worked the rope. When his boss made the kind of jokes his boss made, he kept his face out of it.
The boss came up the stairs at eleven-thirty with two girls in tow, neither of them old enough to drink. Marcus, his name was. Three-piece in a club that didn’t require it. The handshake he gave Rich at the start of every shift used three fingers, not four, which Rich had decided was a thing Marcus did to people he considered furniture. Rich could live with being furniture to a man like Marcus. It made the work easier.
“Slow tonight,” Marcus said, which was a lie. The line outside hadn’t gotten shorter in forty minutes. Rich let the lie stand. Marcus moved past with his girls and disappeared into the VIP, and the door swung shut on a wash of bass and a smell of cologne losing its long war against sweat.
Don was on the bar tonight. Rich could see him from the rope, two flights down through the open mezzanine, working the rail with the easy professionalism of a man who had been pouring drinks in this room for longer than Rich had been working the door. Don Hawkins. Bartender. A friendly man, by the standards of the room, which were not high. Rich had been working alongside him for four months and had never been able to place what bothered him about the way Don smiled.
The smile in question was happening now, four flights of vision below him, directed at a woman in a leather jacket who was laughing at something Don had said. There were teeth in it. There was warmth in it, the way a heat lamp has warmth. It didn’t, when Rich looked at it long enough, reach Don’s eyes.
Personality, Rich had decided some time ago, when the question of why Don made the back of his neck go quietly cold first occurred to him. Some men were cold, was all. He had served with men colder than Don, and drunk with them afterward, and liked some of them. He filed the question of Don under personality and moved on. He had, since then, stopped looking at Don directly when he could help it. He didn’t examine the not-looking. He worked the rope.
◇—◇
Midnight came with a change in the room he couldn’t have named if pressed. A pressure, of the kind weather has before it makes itself a fact. The bouncer at the front door — Tony, large and uncomplicated, the man Rich would have wanted at his back in a fight that didn’t require nuance — stepped aside for somebody Rich couldn’t yet see, and a woman came up the stairs without breaking stride.
She wasn’t on his list. By the brief visible negotiation between her and Tony, she hadn’t been on the front list either. Tony wore the face of a man who had decided not to ask, and the face wasn’t one Tony usually wore. Rich watched her come up.
Black silk. Heels that should have been loud on those stairs and weren’t. Her hair was up in something complicated and one strand had come loose in the stairwell, and she didn’t, when she reached the top, fix it. Thirty, maybe. Any age she wanted to be. A face that took the dim of the second floor and put it back at a different wavelength entirely.
She stopped two paces shy of his rope. She studied him the way a person studies a painting they’re considering buying.
“Evening,” Rich said.
“Bonsoir.” The accent was Parisian and was, like the rest of her, wearing itself comfortably. “Am I on your list?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Are you certain.”
Rich considered her. He glanced at his clipboard, briefly, because the job required the glance. He came back to her. The clipboard had been a courtesy for both of them.
“Lady,” he said, “I don’t think you’ve been on a list in a long time.”
Something in her face moved. Not a smile, exactly. The smaller motion smiles come from when a smile is going to be a tactical decision and not a social one. She inclined her head a quarter inch.
“How charming.” She stepped past the rope without him having unhooked it. He had not unhooked it. The rope, when he glanced down a beat later, was still in place. He was not going to think about that for a while.
The door closed behind her. Marcus’s voice came through it briefly, in the bright key of a man recognizing a customer he hadn’t been told to expect, and then the bass swallowed him and the floor went on without her.
Rich looked at the rope.
The rope was hooked.
Six seconds, maybe, of quiet study. Then he lifted his clipboard, made a checkmark next to a name nobody had given him, and went back to processing the line.
That’s not how doors work, he thought, mildly, with the part of him that had spent fourteen months in a country where doors had occasionally not worked the way doors were supposed to. He filed it. He kept his face neutral. The line moved.
◇—◇
She left at three-forty. He clocked her on the stairs going down without seeming to look, the way he clocked everyone who had been in the VIP with Marcus, because that was a thing Marcus paid him a small additional amount per shift to do quietly. She didn’t glance up. She walked out under Tony’s nod and into the wet street and was gone.
Rich’s shift ended at four. He took his cut from the till, signed the sheet, told Tony goodnight, and went back through the door behind the rope to the staff hallway that ran along the spine of the second floor — past the office, past the supply closet, past the back stairs that came out by the dumpsters in the alley. The hallway was where he kept his coat. The hallway was where he smoked, when he smoked, which was lately every shift.
The corridor was empty in the specific way of spaces somebody had cleared.
He noticed at the threshold. He kept walking. Stopping at a cleared threshold was the wrong move; the right move was to continue at the same pace and let the corridor reveal itself. He walked through. He pulled his coat off the hook by the supply closet. He fished his cigarettes out of the inside pocket. He turned, and she was there.
Two paces away. She had been behind him the whole length of the hallway. The floor was tile and she had crossed it without making a sound.
“Hello, Richard.”
The use of his full name landed in him in a way he didn’t have time to examine. It was correct. He hadn’t given it to her. She’d pulled it from a place she wasn’t supposed to have access to.
“Lady,” he said, evenly. “You lost?”
“No.” A small smile. The kind that had teeth folded inside it like a knife folded inside a coat. “I am exactly where I meant to be.”
She closed the distance in three unhurried steps. He held still. She came past the line at which he should have stopped her, past the line at which most men would have, into the close half-meter where decisions about other people’s bodies stopped being abstract. She looked up at him. She put her palm, lightly, against his sternum through the shirt.
The cold of her touch wasn’t the cold of a hand on a cold night. It was the cold of something that had been at that temperature for a long time and had no interest in being any other one.
“Do you know,” she said, “I have been watching you for some hours.”
“I noticed.”
“Did you.”
“Some of it.”
The smile widened by a fraction. “Honest. That is good. I prefer honest.”
Her palm slid up the cotton of his shirt slow enough that he felt the shape of each finger as it passed. She found his open collar and traced the line of skin there as if reading something in a language she hadn’t seen for a while and was pleased to find she still spoke. Her thumb hooked the fabric and tugged it open another inch. Her mouth was at his throat before he finished registering that she’d moved.
Not yet. Just the shape of biting, traced with closed lips. Teeth made themselves known through the soft pressure without breaking skin. Warm exhale; cool. Warm; cool. She did this twice, deliberately — a rehearsal of something she was choosing not to deliver here — and lifted her face to study him from a distance of perhaps three inches.
“You are taller than I thought,” she said.
“Most things are taller than people think, up close.”
“That is not a clever line.”
“No, ma’am.”
“And yet I am amused.”
She kissed him. Rich, who hadn’t kissed anyone in some months and hadn’t been kissed by anyone of consequence in some years, met her with a competence that surprised him and a hunger that surprised him more. Her tongue was cold. It warmed. It cooled again. She tasted of something he had no referent for — not perfume, not breath, not the brackish iron of somebody who had been drinking. Something underneath those things. Something cleaner. Something old.
She pressed forward and his shoulders met the wall, an exchange he wouldn’t be able to reconstruct later in any detail more useful than the fact that it happened. Her body settled against his in the close geometry two people make when one of them has decided what is going to happen and the other is still catching up. Her thigh slid between his through the silk. Her hip rocked once, twice, in a rhythm that wasn’t asking. He responded. He had no interest in not responding.
His grip found her waist. Small under the silk, and warm — the warm of skin, this time, alive, the right kind of warm. He let his palms travel. Up the line of her ribs through the thin fabric. One went all the way to the strap at her shoulder. The other followed the silk down to the curve of her hip. She was real. By every signal his nervous system was sending him, she was a woman in a hallway, and he was a man in a hallway, and they were doing what people in hallways occasionally did.
A small sound came against his mouth. Not a word — the sound of someone who had been waiting a while to make exactly that sound. Her fingers worked his belt. Buckle, button, zip — three small bright noises in a corridor quiet enough to hear them.
Her grip went in.
Rich’s breath left him in a way that had nothing to do with combat training and nothing to do with control and everything to do with a stranger’s hand that knew exactly what it had come to do. She had done this exact thing — this exact geometry of bodies and hallway, this exact catch of a man’s voice — many times before, and she did it now with the unhurried economy of a craftswoman who had stopped being surprised by her own competence.
He didn’t recognize that, then. He felt only what she was doing. Her teeth at the line of his jaw, her tongue at the soft place beneath his ear, the carotid pulse drumming against her lips with the slight, deliberate pressure of a promise. Her thigh against his and the silk riding up under his palm. The smell of her hair, which was nothing he had a word for and which, even later, he wouldn’t be able to reconstruct.
Her free hand slid up to the back of his skull and gathered a fistful of hair. She pulled, lightly, the kind of pull that was information rather than aggression — here, this way, this is the angle I want — and he gave her the angle and she took it. Her teeth closed on his lower lip. They closed harder than he had been ready for. The skin gave; he tasted his own iron, brief and bright, and the small clean shock of pain reached him a beat behind the heat of her mouth and never quite landed where pain usually landed. Her grip worked. The corridor stayed empty. Somewhere very far away the bass of the club went on and would go on for another two hours and would have nothing whatsoever to do with what was happening in the staff hallway behind the DJ booth at PARALLAX on a Tuesday in late October.
She broke the kiss. Not far. An inch. Her mouth was wet. Her gaze — he saw it fully for the first time, this close — was the color of something he couldn’t name and that didn’t match any color he had a word for in English or any other language. The expression in it was one he had no frame for.
“Tell me your name again,” she said.
“Rich.”
“Your full name.”
“Richard.”
“Richard.” She tasted the word. ”Richard. I think I prefer the long form. Is that all right with you, Richard.”
“Lady,” he said, “you can call me whatever you want.”
“Yes.” The smile crept back. “I am going to.”
Her hand left him for a moment. She drew it up between their bodies, fingertips glistening. She studied them. She put them in her mouth. Her eyes closed for half a second, in something that was either pleasure or a very accurate impersonation of it, and opened again, and her hand went back down, and she got the waistband of his briefs in the loop of her thumb, and she pulled them down, and she reached in, and she took…
