“You ready to get out of here?” Cowboy asked.
I blinked, reorienting. The world restarted. Now I could hear Guns N’ Roses blaring from the jukebox, but my internal song had stopped. I was done dancing. I gave him a rueful smile, and waved my phone at him.
“Yeah, I’m going to have to cut out. This isn’t going to happen.”
“I’m sorry?” Cowboy said, his voice gone higher than he had been speaking. A little edge of pissed-off had come into it. “Are you serious?”
“Stand down,” I said, uninterested in temper tantrums. I was thinking of Candace again. Not her skill set or her propensity for misdirection, but her hungers. At least she’d known what she wanted. “I’ve burned less than thirty minutes of your evening, and the pool table is going on my tab. Have a nice life.”
I walked to the rail and finished off my beer, picked up my bag.
“Wait, hold up,” he said. He’d seen that the pissed-off-baby thing wasn’t working. He tried another tack, walking around the table toward me, leading from the hip. “We’re having a good time, yeah? Let’s not stop. I’ll get us some shots, or, hell, we can move this back to your place.”
I think I blanched, and I knew I’d made the right call. I’d imagined our bodies intersecting, but I hadn’t pictured it in my loft. I couldn’t picture it, not in any setting where I lived my life. If by some miracle we found Hana soon, the last thing I wanted was this traveling man’s CK One lingering on my sheets.
“Gotta go,” I said.
I walked away, already thumbing at the call button under Birdwine’s name.
“Are you kidding me?” he called after me, back to pissy. “Hey! Are you fucking kidding me?”
I kept walking, disappearing into the hallway that led to the bathrooms and the back way out. It was quiet enough here for me to hear the phone, ringing and ringing. Damn Birdwine, he let me go to voicemail. I waited for the beep.
“So I’m at McGwiggen’s,” I said, with no preamble. “I met this guy. Could’ve left with him, but no. I blew him off. I wasn’t even nice about it, and you have no idea how bad I want to lie to you.” I was talking loud, making myself be heard over the music. I slipped out the back door into the quiet alley. “I want to say, ‘Hey Birdwine, I’m calling from the top of reverse cowgirl.’ Then I’d get to hurt you without the risk of bad sex or chlamydia.” Ye gods, but it felt good to yell at him, though. Crazy good. If I had only thought to call Kai like this, back in the day, I could have saved so much money on birth control, maybe skipped a solid third of all that therapy. There was no one to hear me except the row of old-school silver trash cans where McGwiggen’s unfinished wing platters came to die. It smelled sour, like hot sauce and bones, with the nasty tang of ranch dip going wrong. “I ditched him like I owed it to you. Why is that? Why do I still feel like I owe it to you, when you are so patently an asshole? When you are—”
Light spilled into the alleyway around me, and I whirled to see that Cowboy had followed me. I stepped back as the door swung shut behind him.
“Are you running off on me,” he said, but it didn’t lilt up on the end into a question. It was a statement, both proprietary and weirdly emphatic.
I hit the button to close my call and slipped my phone back in my bag, instantly wary enough that I wanted both hands free. I wished I’d thought to palm my mace when I stepped out, but I couldn’t very well go digging for it now. I straightened up, tall enough in my high shoes to have an inch or two on him.
I made my voice cold as I could, which was pretty close to arctic. “I told you, it’s not on. Go back inside.”
“You don’t want to piss me off,” he said, as if something was at stake here.
Very intense, considering we weren’t even the cost of a drink to each other. Adrenaline began leaking into my bloodstream. I could feel myself swelling with it. The air around us had charged, and it was charging still.
He took one step toward me, not quite into my space, but closer. He was between me and the door, and I’d be giving him an opening if I tried to duck around him. If he knew how to fight, if he leveraged his much greater upper-body strength, I didn’t stand much chance. But a guy like this—gym-made muscles, capped teeth, and a fresh, expensive haircut—he might start soft, a testing slap or grab. I could go after his soft bits, immediate and hard. Disable him long enough to get inside.
He took another step into me. I held my ground, because prey retreats, and hunger follows anything that runs. The lights above the door made his hair a yellow nimbus. A shadow fell across his eyes, so I could see them only as a gleaming. The light bounced off his sculpted nose, his narrow jawline. Elegant. Familiar.