“Leave them,” a rumbly voice ordered.
If I hadn’t been so inebriated, I would have jumped. Ezra had snuck up on me and I didn’t even notice him standing to my right. “It’s fine,” I told him. “I want to help.”
He dangled my strappy stilettos from his fingertips. Pointing at the tablecloth I was wadding up from the tabletop, he said, “Tell me where they go and I’ll let you handle them, but right now you’re more of a menace than anything else.”
Glaring at him, I continued to ball the tablecloth in my hands. “Obviously they go in the hamper.” It was the first thing that came to mind and I realized how idiotic it sounded. The hamper? Because Lilou also had a laundry room?
“So wrong,” he murmured. “So very wrong. Besides it’s a trick question. When the cleaning crew comes in, they’ll take the linens with them. It would be helpful though if you left them where they are instead of making the nice, hourly-waged people hunt them down.”
Throwing the linens back on the table, I reached for my shoes. He pulled them out of reach and I swayed trying to right my drunken self. “If you’re not going to let me help, then you might as well let me go home and go to bed.”
“How are you getting home?” he asked while holding my shoes in the air where I could not reach them.
I looked up at my shoes, debating on how badly I needed them. It didn’t matter how cold it had gotten outside or that I was pretty sure it was illegal to drive without shoes on in North Carolina.
Just to be difficult, I crossed my arms over my chest and said, “Are you hitting on me, Baptiste? Because holding my shoes captive is a tactic I’ve never seen before. Or maybe it’s old school? Is this how people your age get dates?”
His eyes widened in surprise. He wasn’t expecting snark. “People my age and everyone else that doesn’t want you to die on the way home tonight. I’ll give you a ride.”
“I was going to call an Uber,” I admitted.
He turned around, taking my shoes with him. “I’m cheaper.”
You’re also an asshole. But I didn’t say that out loud. “Seriously, it’s no big deal!” I hollered after him. “I have the app!”
Only, judging by his Lilou website, he probably didn’t even know what an app was. Great. Now I was going to have to explain all of modern technology to him. This night was never going to end.
“I also have your phone,” Ezra shot back. When Wyatt stepped out of the kitchen, Ezra paused to ask him to lock up.
Shoes were one thing, but my phone was vitally important to every aspect of my life. It was basically my soul locked up in gadget form. If he confiscated my baby, he’d have access to allllll of my life—including my very secret, very private Candy Crush obsession.
Ezra disappeared into the kitchen and I hurried after him.
“Is he really giving you a ride home?” Wyatt asked as I zipped by.
“He’s holding my accessories hostage,” I told him.
Wyatt stared at me agape, but I didn’t have time to explain before I disappeared into the kitchen. All the lights were on while Wyatt’s skeleton staff cleaned the remaining dishes and put away food. Ezra waited for me by the side door, holding my shoes and my purse.
“I’ve already cleaned out your bank accounts,” he said when I finally caught up to him. “And destroyed your credit.”
I stilled. “Was that a joke?”
He lifted one shoulder in a barely-there shrug. “I guess we’ll find out.”
“It makes sense,” I told him. “Your restaurants aren’t named after ex-girlfriends. They’re stolen identities.”
His lips twitched once, but he held back his smile. My drunken brain convinced me that I needed to see it. That I needed to witness it one more time just to prove that it was real. I tried smiling at him, hoping to coax something out of him. But he only stared at me and then finally thrust my shoes out like he couldn’t stand the idea of holding them for a second longer.
“I presume you didn’t wear a coat tonight,” he said as way of getting my ass out the door.
With one hand poised against the wall to keep my balance, I bent over just enough to slide each one on. “My weatherman told me it was supposed to be warm this weekend and I stupidly believed him.”
“Your weatherman said it was going to be warmer this weekend and it is.”
Losing control of my motor functions, I reached out and brushed my knuckle over the wrinkled space between Ezra’s consternated eyebrows. “You’re always so serious,” I told him.
He didn’t say anything for a long time, choosing instead to examine my face, and my dress, and the shoes that had already started pinching my toes again.
Imagining what he probably thought of me made me shrink back. I wasn’t like the girls he normally dated. Not that I knew what kind of girls he normally dated. But I had to be so different than what he was used to. With names like Lilou, Bianca, and Sarita, they sounded exotic, interesting. I imagined long-legged pinup models with perfectly coiffed hair and million dollar smiles. They would tie scarves around their heads when Ezra took them for Sunday drives in his red convertible, and smoke cigarettes out of cigarette holders.
He was basically a Cary Grant movie. And I was so different than anything he was used to. My cheeks flushed for the hundredth time tonight, and I contemplated moving out of Durham and North Carolina, and possibly the entire continent of North America.
“If I drive, can you give me directions to your house?” he asked, pulling me from my spiraling thoughts. His voice had pitched low, going extra deep and rumbly in the silence of the empty kitchen.
“Yes. But you can also put me in the back of an Uber and I can give them directions too. I’m very good at giving directions. I can give them to almost anybody. It’s just one of my many talents.”
“You’re drunk,” he said as way of argument. “I’m not handing you off to a stranger.”
He was driving me home for my own protection? I stared at him, trying to make sense of his harsh words on the dance floor and his thoughtfulness in the kitchen. “Okay.” Again, I tried to reconcile his generosity. And failed. “Thank you.”
Holding his elbow out to me, he led me through the big steel door and toward his waiting sleek, sporty, super-expensive black car parked in the alley directly next to Lilou. It sat beneath a rough garage-like structure covered in ivy.
“This is your car?” I asked, dumbfounded. There was obviously no way I could ride in it. It looked more expensive than my entire life. And I didn’t mean that in an accumulated-assets kind of way. I meant on like a physical, existential, me-plus-my-assets-plus-every-other-thing-about-me-past-present-and-future-plus-potential-cats kind of way. This car was insane.
“Pretty, isn’t she?”
I could only nod dumbly.
“She’s an Alfa Romeo,” he told me. “She’s new.”