Who: Hal and Wren What: A meeting and a sleepover and Hal’s sexy accent Where: A bar, a restaurant and Hal’s apartment When: Yesterday Warnings: Nothing graphic, but definitely explicit sexual situations
The bar was loud, crowded and smoky. It was the kind of place that existed just outside the rule of law. It was located on the edge of a long, dark highway, the kind that generally only saw motorcycles and big trucks coming through, and the entire thing was made of shades of woodgrain. There were card games being run at various tables throughout and the pool tables were full-up with a tournament of some sort. Creedence Clearwater Revival was playing from the jukebox in the corner, the one that operated on a heavy fist rather than quarters, and the bartender was serving up beer and whiskey; if you were looking for sweet drinks or things made in blenders, you’d come to the wrong bar.
Wren was at one of the pool tables, her hip perched on the corner, the cue chalk between her fingers. She had on a red wig, curls and hairspray, and her attire was more biker and less street-walker than normal - a hip hugging skirt and a black vest. She was following a lead from the previous evening, but she hadn’t had any luck yet, and she was beginning to think the evening was going to be an expensive bust. There were too many women working the tables for her to stand out, even with her youth, and she wasn’t a regular, so no one trusted her as far as they could spit. She hadn’t tried to walk the truck line outside, because she didn’t think she’d find what she was looking for there; she wasn’t looking for a transient.
Smoking in bars had been illegal for a good handful of years now, but in this particular bar, at this particular hour, it was late enough in the evening that if you objected to a cloud of second-hand cancer you weren’t there. Most of those within had more to worry about than the distant spectre of lung tar nobody could see, and Hal was one of those that sank in deep to the smoke and still came out clean. If anything, he had a little bit of honey in this particular beehive, the allure of the exotic from just a few states (and one world) away. He had something of a reputation, even here, and it was not the type or reputation that had people running the other way.
Hal had several disastrous relationships (if you could call them that) and for some reason he never dated the kind of women that were likely to go quietly. Accusations ran the gamut from the sweetest gentleman to the worst sort of predator, and it was hard to separate fact from fiction, bitterness from disillusionment. Friends were hailing Hal’s arrival and the bartender handed him a cold domestic as he wandered over to the pool tables to greet players and bystanders alike. From three tables down, he caught the long line of the redhead and (like half the room) took a pleasant eyeful with a relaxed honeyed grin.
Wren had taken to watching the traffic around the tables in an idle way, as if she was looking for something that looked particularly tasty. The fact that she was looking for something entirely unappetizing wasn’t visible in expression or carriage, and her gaze swept the room idly. When she found Hal in the crowd she almost looked past him - almost. The way he swaggered over to the pool tables (she was sure he would have called it wandering) made her grin; confident men always did, as long as they kept their fists to themselves. The swagger also put him firmly on her radar.
She didn’t think he was what she was looking for, but he was the closest thing to walk in the door all night, so she pushed herself off the edge of the pool table and wandered in his direction. Once she got close enough, she took the the beer from between his fingers, appropriating it for her own, and she looked him over. Her face, beneath the makeup, promised more youth than she was trying to portray in the harsh bar lights, and she gave him a smile as she took a sip of the beer. “Looking for something?” she asked, without a hint of the coquette in the question. Her voice was as innocent as her expression, something she couldn’t fake, and she held the beer back out to him, as if she’d never taken it without his permission in the first place.
He let her have the bottle with an uninhibited laugh as those around him offered up opinions of the approach from all directions. He ignored them in favor of her, and as he took back the bottle, he said, “I would have bought you one, if you were thirsty.” His smile was amusement and comfortable heat, and while he could play many games, he didn’t need to any more than she did. Her dress coupled with her presence in this place at this time of night, alone, made him assume she was looking for paying company. “But mebbe that would be ruining yo’ chances with de payin’ crowd.” It was an easy venture of conversation, offered without insult; in Hal’s world it wasn’t an insult, but a great many women might find that hard to comprehend.
Hal didn’t pay. Not because he didn’t need to--though he certainly had no difficulty finding partners since he was smart enough to know where to look, what to say, and how to say it--but because he found it dangerous. Sort of like buying foreign goods for too cheap. It was hard to know where it came from and why, and health hazards aside, he always felt like everybody got cheated.
He was smart enough not to share this opinion with anyone else. He had a reputation to uphold, after all.
His accent made her forget her purpose for a minute to listen. Wren had a passion for languages and accents that was only eclipsed by her love of books, and his voice brought her interest to the forefront in a sharp, crisp way. For a moment, she lost all the overblown sex in her demeanor, and her eyes went appreciate-wide. Then it was gone, and she was just a redhead with a price again.
The fact that he wasn’t willing to pay pretty much discounted him as who she was looking for, but she’d had no luck that evening, and he might know the men who frequented the bar, so she stayed. If the accent had anything to do with her decision, she pretended she wasn’t aware of it. “Maybe I like the non-paying crowd too,” she said, earnestness in her voice and features. Wren could play the hooker at a distance, and she could certainly look the part with her generous lips and soft curves, but on closer examination a strange sort of innocence shown through to contradict it all.
She took back the drink, and she tipped it back, taking a long, long swallow, before tipping the bottle back to him. “Maybe you can buy us both one,” she suggested.
This long succession of flickering changes, like a busted television rotating through channels at top speed, made Hal’s expression change briefly to one of wary confusion. He wasn’t drunk enough to let things like that pass him by, even in the smoke and the dim green lights. At first he thought maybe she was there for some criminal purpose, but if that was so she was doing a poor job, since he could only think the goal would be to get him with his pants off somewhere. He had no idea where the sudden impression of youth came from, either, and it made him even more wary than before. Youth in such a package was a dangerous offering, because it might leave a man open to a grown woman’s schemes. In such a place as this, youth only meant you got harder earlier.
The observations and attached revelations bothered him enough that he shook his head, indicating that she could keep the drink, and he waved over at the bartender until the man reached for another. “Was just thinkin’ about dinner, actually. You hungry, cher?” Cajun was a funny language, and while it wasn’t as pretty as its forebearer with the bells and whistles, it suited an American’s style of casual affection that didn’t necessarily imply femininity. A Frenchman would have said ‘cherie’ and he probably would have said it a lot closer and softer. Hal wasn’t soft, and he wasn’t getting any closer to her than right where they were standing. He meant to keep it that way.
“Was that an invitation? Or are you sending me on my way?” she asked in schoolgirl’s French. She didn’t know Cajun, had never heard the tones or intonations until now, but she knew the word ‘cher,’ and she assumed a connection. Her French was hardly anything skilled, coming from tutors and computer programs, but it was understandable. She watched him take the fresh beer, and she pressed the one he’d abandoned to her cheek, the icy bottle nice and cool in the smoky heat of the bar.
She’d caught the way his gaze moved over her, caught the intelligence there, and it surprised her. It wasn’t that she automatically thought everyone here was unintelligent, but she didn’t think any of them would care enough to focus on a slip of a girl with pricetag. It didn’t fit with the way he carried himself, the confidence and the devil-may-care swagger. “How many broken hearts have you left in your wake?” she asked, and it was an honest question, a curious one. She wasn’t asking to pump up his ego or to appeal to his pride; she asked because she wanted to know. He was a walking contradiction, and she knew how intriguing those could be.
He laughed again. His friends had returned to their game, and there was currently an argument about whether or not someone’s heels were still on the ground during that last shot. They were, to intents and purposes, alone in the bar. Hal felt it, and he felt the absence of a second pair of friendly eyes watching his back. This girl felt dangerous. “Je vas vous donner a hint.” Cajun French was like that, mixing bits and pieces of French into whatever grammar best suited the time: I’ll give you a hint. “A lot.”
He was, for the most part, pleased at her attempt to speak to him, though his language was not the language of the classroom but that of a neighbors on a front porch, and there was little to admire or study about it in his mind. In fact no few had told him he was better off speakin’ proper. “It was an invitation, though not de kind yore thinkin’,” he told her, watching for more flickering signs of ulterior motives. He found it odd that she would spend her time with someone who would not pay, and that meant she had made enough to be free for the night or she was being paid for something else entirely.
And, of course, he was also honestly hungry, and he liked company.
The way he spoke the French was entirely different than her tutors or books or computer programs, and she repeated the words after him, testing the accent on her tongue, trying to replicate it. She didn’t much realize she was doing it, and it was an entirely open thing, unplanned and unthinking. By the time she closed her mind around his confession - that he’d broken a lot of hearts - she was smiling. “I would be disappointed otherwise,” she told him, and she meant it. Broken hearts were experiences, after all, and everyone would have their own one day - even him, if he hadn’t already.
She looked around the bar, peered through the smoke and the swear, and she decided she wasn’t going to find what she was looking for here, now. She’d come back after they ate, and maybe he’d offer something interesting in the interim. She put aside the mostly-empty beer bottle, and she slid his arm through his, ignoring any need for space and ignoring the formality of the gesture. She pressed herself against his side, all warm, soft curves, and she looked up at him. “How can you be sure you know what invitation I was thinking about?” she asked. “You don’t pay for sex,” she said bluntly, immediately after. “You don’t have to.” She didn’t see the point in pretending he did, and she didn’t see the point in pretending she didn’t realize it. “Where are you taking me?”
She was awfully trusting. Or she expected him to be awfully trusting. Either way, alarm bells were practically making his head rattle as she wound herself into the curve of his arm in that soft giving way that women had when they wanted to muffle the alarm bells good and proper. Again, Hal wished very much that there was a sober, serious, boring Charlie stuck somewhere on a roof making sure he didn’t get jumped while he was distracted, but he gave that up as a lost cause. It was their day off, and Charlie was off spending it meditating or reading crystals or whatever the hell he did. Some things Hal and Charlie did not share. Days off were one.
He hesitated, glancing back at the crowd and the pool table and the fight that was about to break out, and it was clear he thought of such a place as safe. Leaving with this girl he wasn’t paying for, now that was stupid.
Still. Hal was curious. He was attracted too, no doubt about that, but he tended to think of that as a given when it came to pretty women. No, mostly he was curious. He wondered why she was dangerous and he wondered how close he could get without getting burned.
Just like that, he decided to find out. He left the beer bottle behind. “Place couple block’ down,” he told her, pushing the door open with one arm to let her through it first. The restaurant was a chain that sold decent food until 2 AM just because the nightlife was good enough that people needed a place to sober up. The pinstripes and the junk on the walls made Hal think of home sometimes. He turned his head over hers to look down at her and got a whiff of something like glue. A wig? Eyebrows up, he asked, “What’s yo’ name, honey?”
Oh, she was trusting alright. It was the main reason she’d made such a bad beginning as a sex worker. As for any expectation of his own trusting nature, she’d learned that men who talked to hookers tended to fall into two categories - the ones who wanted to pay for them (who trusted no one), and the ones who wanted to save them (who trusted everyone). This man didn’t fall into either category, and that was interesting, true, but she didn’t expect him to be the trusting type on account of it.
She’d never been to the restaurant he led her to, but she wasn’t familiar with the area in general. She’d only come out this way because the previous night’s victim, a plain, brunette girl that had reminded her of herself at sixteen, said she’d met her john here. She was lost in that thought when he asked her name, her hand tightening on his arm for the briefest instance with the memory of it. “Wren,” she said easily. It was the name she always gave when she worked; her birth name was saved for the light of day.
She turned her attention back to him, and she looked up into his too-intelligent eyes. “I’m not as complicated as you’re trying to worry me into being,” she told him. Another sort of woman would have considered being mysterious quite the triumph with a man like the one on her arm; she preferred as much honesty as she could give without giving herself away. “What are you called?” she asked, again in that rudimentary French.
He looked around for whatever made her press closer, but found nothing. Drawing his elbow with her arm a little closer into his side, he lengthened his stride but set a slower pace so that he wasn’t dragging her along the sidewalk. It also meant that she didn’t dictate the speed at which they moved, which meant they weren’t getting where they were going precisely when she wanted. Hal was still halfway convinced this ended in a mugging.
“Yore gonna hafta parle doucement pour moi, cher. Ah’m no good at de fancy langue yore speakin’.” He smiled down at her and deliberately eased up on the accent and the Cajun French. He had a good grip on it, and if he chose he could have eliminated the accent almost entirely. “Ah’m Hal.” It was good enough, as introductions went. “Haven’t seen you around here before. Dere’s a regular crowd and yore gonna have some problems if yo’ business is movin’ in permanent.” It was a friendly warning; hookers were territorial.
She didn’t care about the pace, and she let him set it trustingly. If she had any worries that he was going to drag her into an alley, she didn’t show it. Mainly because she didn’t think that at all. She knew (already) that the man at her side was not weak willed, that she would not be able to control him if she tried. But he felt trustworthy, and so she trusted him.
She laughed softly at the notion of her bad French being fancy, and she smiled up at him when he said as much, her expression bright and happy in that moment. “Oh, you’re very good,” she said observantly, because he was. A man who could manage to compliment you in an entirely false way while still being charmingly adorable? Was very good. A trail of broken hearts, indeed.
“A friend I met last night recommended I come here. Her name is Tara,” she explained, giving him enough truth to be able to ascertain if he had any information about the man she was looking for. “Plain, soft-spoken girl. Brown hair and glasses. She hasn’t been working long,” she said, because it was what made the girl stand out so sharply. “She found some business here last night.”
Hal looked down at her. He had a broad, open face, a flat mouth, comfortable brown eyes. His expression just then was keen and sharp, however. “Dat’s de petite fille dat got hurt de other night.” In the movement of the conversation he’d forgotten about the accent, and he pulled back together again only to have it drift back into thick, distracted consonants. “I come to this bar a lot. My friends, dey was talkin’ about it.” He didn’t stop walking; if anything, he moved a little quicker, with less of a mind for her heels. “Yo’ friend Tara, she tell you dat part?”
She nodded, because there was no point lying to him. “She did,” she admitted. “But she said it was a good place before that,” she said, because Tara had said as much. Still, the fact that people knew about the attack, had been talking about it, meant she wasn’t going to find the attacker here, not now. He’d come back eventually (they always did), but not until he had been lulled into a sense of security. “It’s a risk you take,” she told him, and that was true enough; it was a risk you took. A risk you picked yourself up from and forced yourself to work through.
She smiled up at him, all warmth and invitation. “Do you worry with everyone, or just with me?” she asked him.
“Most people don’ need me worryin’ about dem,” he grumbled, resentful at the universe for making his life difficult when he should be allowed to just tumble redheads (or whatever color her hair actually was) into bed without moral difficulties. “Only little girls talkin’ about takin’ risks for however much yore chargin’ dese days.” He didn’t look down to meet her eyes or the smile. In fact, he looked the other way. “Dere are safer places to be workin’,” he told her grouchily.
She smiled at the grouchy tone of his voice, as if its presence had reassured her of something she’d already suspected, and she slid her arm from his. She moved in front of him, and she walked trustingly with her back to the world. She reached out her arms, tugging on his hands, and she gave him a smile that was entirely sweet and interested and sensual combined. “I’m not charging you anything dese days,” she said in a close approximation of his accent. “Sometimes working girls decide they like the look of someone, and they let that someone buy them dinner, Hal.”
“You gonna feel different when de night’s done,” he said, warningly, but obviously relaxing a little at the persuasive touch, which worked just as well on him as any other man in a bit of a temper about something. Hal’s temper, being loud and blustery, was also about as harmless as a temper could get. He folded his rough fingers around hers and pulled her around so that she wasn’t walking backward anymore. Working hands, unmistakeably, and though he was clean, there was a definite scent of metallic motor oil under whatever that cologne was. “S’pose I’ll let you take advantage of me, dis time,” he said, making a show of giving in as they came up the walk to the restaurant, which was loud enough that the sound spilled out the open windows.
“Are you going to stick me with the bill?” she asked, grinning even as he turned her back around. She leaned into him as the sounds of the restaurant reached her ears, because she honestly liked the warm, firmness of his body against hers. There were some things that Wren didn’t share with her sisters in the trade, and a hatred for casual closeness was one of them. The line between something she wanted and something she was paid for was a very clear one in her mind. She’d decided this man beside her, who was probably a rake and a mechanic (by the smell of him), was someone whose company she wanted; she had no qualms about enjoying things she’d decided she wanted. She slipped an arm around his lower back, and she looked up at him. “S’pose you do.”
He sighed at her (at himself) and the two of them ended up in one of the booths with another beer a-piece and some fried green beans. There were some eyes at Wren’s clothing, and even more eyes at Hal, judgments about what both were doing together, but Hal met them when they came and dismissed them just as easily. He had other things on his mind than the manager’s petty worries about the reputation of his establishment, and they got their table and, when they didn’t start screwing the second the waiter left, relative peace.
She took a sip of the beer, and she cocked her head to the side as she examined him across the table. She’d noticed the looks from the patrons and the manager, but she’d discounted those easily enough, and her attention was all for the man across the table from her. Her gaze was very obviously assessing, and she played over what she knew in her mind: A rake, a mechanic, a heart breaker, someone who felt badly that Tara had been attacked, someone who had more morals than he wanted. She smiled, and she reached across the table for one of his hands, not thinking for a moment that he’d stop her, not this man.
She ran her fingers over the work-worn tips of his fingers, a casual, sensory thing. “Mechanic?” she asked, but she didn’t wait for his answer before she continued. “I loved the smell of gas stations when I was little, the smell of gas from the pumps and oil sitting in drums,” she said. “But that was a long time ago. It suits you, though,” she admitted, because it did. It was an appreciative compliment, easily given and expecting nothing in return.
He was generous with his hands as his time, and turned his palms over for inspection with an indulgent smile. They were thick under the knuckles and along the outside of his hands, and there was a solid set of callouses where his finger pulled against a trigger and his knuckles impacted bodies. Brows arching, he said, “Gas and oil, dey not usually described as very good things to be smellin’.” He gave her a curious look, wondering that such things could be admired and perhaps a little taken aback that he still smelled like oil, which might have been embarrassing if he hadn’t determined she wouldn’t be embarrassed. He looked again at her, and tried to see where the wig settled over her scalp, but he couldn’t.
She bent her head, and she traced the lines on his palm, and she named them as she went. “This is your life line,” told him, tracing the line that curved down from between his thumb and forefinger. It was long and deep, and and she traced it down to the inside of his wrist. “Everyone likes different things,” she added a moment later, in reference to the scent of gasoline and oil. She didn’t know about trigger fingers or callouses gained from punching things, but she turned his hand over all the same and ran her fingertips over his banged up knuckles. There was something otherworldly about the touch, the way she savored the sensation of skin and strong bone under her fingertips, and when she smiled up at him, it was a with a lazy slow smile. “I like how you feel.”
Hal seriously reconsidered the restaurant and no-paying decision for what felt like the fiftieth time that night. “So they do.” The quiet comment was speculative, slow. He almost told her that she must be expensive, but aborted the comment at the last moment. That expensive was an escort service, not a bar at this end of town. She puzzled him, and he shook his head and took his hands back to signal the waiter, a tired-looking college kid with too much dye in his hair. Hal got a black and blue steak to go with his beer and waited while the kid looked down Wren’s shirt for her order.
If Wren noticed the waiter’s inappropriate gaze, she didn’t give the slightest indication. She ordered something called Western Shrimp, which she was certain would turn out to be plain old fried shrimp, and she handed the waiter the menu back. Once he’d gone, she turned her attention back to the man across from her. “What do you like?” she asked, the question all wide open spaces that he could fill however he liked. If she realized that her behavior wasn’t aligned with her attire, she hardly acknowledged it. Wren might dress the part, but she couldn’t be anyone but herself. “And was I right? Mechanic?”
He nodded, willing to stretch his trust quite a ways for this particular pair of eyes. “Right ‘nough. I like doin’ it, me and engines, we get along.” He waved a hand back and forth in front of him as if to indicate every vehicle within a five mile radius. “Lot of folk need dat kinda know-how, gets me by.” He left his other occupation out of it, as it would be a complicated explanation and mostly came down to dangerous boasting. Charlie would disapprove. The thought nearly made him change his mind. Nearly. “Not real glamorous.” He eyed her, thinking that she was the sort that might like a white knight saving, and knowing he was not the type to be doing it.
Wren didn’t own a car and never had. They hadn’t needed one when she was a child, and she’d made the trip from Florida to Seattle on dirty, crowded buses, all while reading every book left behind in the bus stations along the way. “I don’t know how to drive,” she admitted. “I always thought it must be frightening, controlling something that big.” It wasn’t intended to be a sexual comment, but it sounded that way regardless. She leaned forward, and she dragged her fingers along the cold outside of his beer, watching the condensation clear. “Is that what you always wanted to be, a mechanic?” She didn’t ask if he was a Creation because she didn’t expect him to be. She encountered very few of them in her business (both the vigilante one, and the one that actually paid the bills). She took him at face value; he was what he gave her.
He thought she was making him sweat on purpose, and it was a logical assumption. “Drivin’ is fun,” he told her, with another honey grin. “It’s what Ah’m good at, just so happens it makes decent enough money to pay de bills.” In a way. Hal tended to blow every cent he got almost as soon as he had it, buying car parts, mostly, as he certainly wasn’t into fashion or white picket fences. Charlie took his half and stashed it somewhere, or so Hal assumed. He never objected to living in Hamartia, anyway. “You never wanted to get where you wanna go faster?” he asked her, honestly curious if this line of conversation was supposed to be all metaphor.
“I get there eventually,” she said, pausing while the waiter put their food on the table to continue. “Getting there is part of the experience,” she told him, picking up a beer-battered shrimp and popping it into her mouth. “Like enjoying things, feeling them, making memories,” she said. Metaphor or no, it was the truth. “It’s easy to spend too much time hurrying to get places, only to hurry again once you’re there. Stop and smell the roses,” she said, holding a shrimp out for him. “I think I’d like it if you drove, though.”
Hal laughed, sawing through his steak and pausing to snag the shrimp with two fingers and shove it into his mouth as he spoke. “Depends on how good you are at holdin’ on,” he replied, eyes twinkling. He was never much for smelling roses, and it showed. Hal liked getting where he was going, alright, but he liked getting there fast.
She laughed warmly, and she reached out and put her hand on his, on the one slicing through the steak like it was going to run off if he didn’t hurry. “Slow down,” she said, her fingers soft and almost-nothing on the leathery skin of his knuckles. “It’s not going anywhere.” Then, “cut me a slice?” she asked, her gaze lifting from the steak to his lips. “Please.”
It took him a good ten seconds to get his thoughts back on track from the derailing. “D’accord.” He started working on a portion for her, and as he frowned down at the steak he said, “How’d you end up in yo’ business? Seems like you can go other places if you put yo’ mind to it...” Hal’s lack of prejudices being what they were, he thought of Wren’s profession as just that--a profession--though an extremely dangerous one if you were as casual about it as she was.
She took the piece of steak with her fingers, and she nibbled on it, closing her eyes and savoring it, the pleasure clear and evident on her face, and then looking back at him. “My mother was a prostitute,” she said easily, because she wasn’t ashamed of her mother. The pride was tangible in the response, as was the love for the woman spoken of in past tense. “When she died, I followed suit.” She finished the steak, and she licked her fingers slowly. She considered telling him she didn’t normally work in bars, that she worked out of her home and only went bar crawling and street walking to find people, to keep in the loop, to know who to go after; she didn’t say any of those things, but there was something in her gaze that spoke of unsaid things. She blinked the memories away, and she sat back in the booth, tucking her legs up beside her on the seat. “The steak is delicious.”
“My grandfather laid down pipe under houses,” Hal said, rather bluntly and without the Cajun word for the relation. “Dat’s no good reason to do anythin’.” He shrugged, disputing Wren’s mother’s legacy as something Wren could very well have done without, like a really ugly family heirloom. One of those plates with big-eyed puppy dogs on it. His mother had one or two and Hal hated them as much as she had. He reflected then that maybe such things were hereditary after all. He hadn’t thought of his mother in a long time.
He recognized the look as holding something back, but he didn’t know if it was earnest. He didn’t press, just nodded and took another bite of the steak. He’d had better. Hell, he’d cooked better.
She lived in Hamartia; to her, the steak was delicious. “Are you lecturing me?” she asked, the soft smile still on her lips. She would have liked to know him when she was herself, without the wig and the vest, and she considered being open with him. But she reminded herself that the jail time for assault with a weapon was much longer than the jail time for prostitution, and she refrained. She folded her elbows on the table, and she gave him a look that was as smart as it was trusting. “Sometimes good things come from bad things,” she told him, and it was true. She did what she did to make things better somehow, to have something good from the bad.
At the entrance to the restaurant, a loud group of men burst through the door laughing and calling for a table. One of them fit the bill for Tara’s attacker, and Wren let her gaze on him linger a moment longer than on the others, and then she looked back at Hal. “Who are they?”
Hal had nothing to say to either of her first comments, he just gave a healthy snort of derision and stabbed another piece of steak. He was chewing when she asked her last question and he turned his chin to take a look. “New crowd,” he said, putting an elbow on the edge of the table and watching the swarm overtake a waitress and a table with equal enthusiasm. “Dunno dem by name.” He looked back at her, and his own question, why was on his lips, but he didn’t let it pass.
She looked at the new crowd a moment longer, and then she looked back at him. “They remind me of Tara’s friends, the way she described them,” she said, brushing it off as nothing of any importance. She knew where to come now, and that’s what mattered. “What would you rather I do, if not what I do?” she asked, attention back on the snort of derision he’d given her.
The girl Tara didn’t have any friends, and Hal knew it. His expression was flat and grim, but he said no more about it. Wren was a smart girl, smarter than she looked, and he leaned back in the booth with one arm behind him. “Dat be yo’ business, cher.” He wasn’t playing anymore, and whatever game they’d been at before, it was different now.
She noticed the change, because it was impossible not to. “I just wanted to see him,” she confessed, because there seemed little point in denying it. Hal, for all his mechanic oil and grease, wasn’t slow on the uptake. She looked over in the direction the crowd had moved. “I can never understand it, the ones who enjoy hurting scared girls.” She looked back at him, expression open honesty. “I like being with a man,” she said, and it was entirely, openly truthful. “But I don’t understand the ones that hurt people who give themselves so willingly.” She shrugged her shoulders a little. “We all have to make a living, Hal.” It was a sad-touched statement. “We shouldn’t have to hurt to do it.”
“Not sayin’ yore wrong,” he said gruffly. “Don’t much see how findin’ de Devil is gon’ make him less like to burn you.” He took his beer and tipped it back for a long hard gulp. He didn’t look again across the room; he didn’t know who she was looking for any more than she did, but he didn’t want to like she did.
“I can’t tell why you’re angry,” she told him in French, honesty in the words. She kept her gaze on him, not on whatever hell was behind her. She began to reach across the table, but she came up short, letting her hand rest on the flat surface, the smooth skin belying the age the makeup she wore strove to hide.
If she thought the French was going to disarm him, she was sorely mistaken. She already had everything there was to disarm him. “Ah’m not angry,” he said, frankly. He checked with himself. Am I angry? No. Not angry. “Irritated dat yore gon’ be dat stupid,” he said. Maybe a little angry.
She was quiet for a long moment, and then she slipped out of the booth and went around to his side, sliding in beside him. She should have gone after Tara’s attacker, she knew. She never made connections when she was out this way; it wasn’t the point. But they’d gone beyond that now, and Wren , who made connections easily, was loathe to walk away. She turned, facing him slightly, her knees bent beside her, and she touched his cheek. The manager glared, and the waiter watched with blatant interest, but she didn’t do more than caress the skin at his jaw, just below his ear. “I’ve been doing this 4 years, and I’m fine,” she said softly, reassuringly. She had a soft spot for gruff men with good hearts, and he definitely fit the bill.
“You fine so far,” he pointed out. He wasn’t giving in. Nope. He reached up and took her hand, not unkindly, and gave it back to her. “Ah’m not a customer.”
“If you were a customer, you’d know it,” she said honestly, and he would. She nodded though, taking her hand back and scooting to put space between them. She wasn’t vain enough to think every man was going to want her hands on him, and though there was a fair bit of disappointment in her eyes she didn’t say anything about it. “There are lines, you see,” she explained, reaching into the pocket of her skirt “Street walkers don’t talk to their customers,” she said, again in French. “If you’re looking to be someone’s mistress, you talk, but I don’t think you’d pay to keep a caged bird.” She smiled, putting enough money to cover the drinks and the shrimp on the table. “Talking means I like the person I’m with. We’re human, Hal; Sometimes we just like people.” She said the part about being human easily, with the sense of someone who had been in the mortal world long enough to consider herself human. She slipped out of the booth, and she leaned down to kiss his cheek, the vest gaping, showing, and then she straightened.
He stood up too. He left more than enough for the steak and the beer and the tip. He let her pay for hers. “Gonna let you t’ink I believe dat,” he told her, smiling nonetheless. He put his fingers in her hair, the hair that wasn’t hers, and turned it over onto the warm palm, thoughtful. “You come home with me, dere’s nothin’ dere you can take home wit’ you.” He shrugged, dropped his hand and tipped his chin. “It’s yo’ call.”
She looked up at him, considering, and she nodded in the end. He hadn’t seen her do anything, and there was no reason for him to associate her with whatever eventually happened to Tara’s nameless attacker. It was risky, stupid, a million cautionary things, but she nodded. “I don’t want to take anything home with me,” she said, and it was the truth. She knew he wasn’t controllable, and she knew he wasn’t wealthy. Sometimes that mattered, it kept her grounded, interacting with people who didn’t have it in them to be worth anything in the end.
He looked at her a little while longer, traced the curve of her ear, and then laughed, taking her waist and settling her against his side. “D’accord,” he said, jovially. “Let’s go den.” And he led her out. Hal’s car was parked a block past the bar, left quiet and modest just out of the way of a street light. The Chevy Nova was a polished green and he gave it a friendly pat of greeting as they rounded the hood and he opened the passenger door for her. It was astonishingly clean within, and smelled strongly of him and cigarettes.
She’d trailed her fingers over the hood as he patted it. She never actually rode in cars, and she climbed inside with the definite look of someone experiencing something new. “It’s nice in the front seat,” she told him, with candor and a playful grin she expected he was growing accustomed to by now. She dragged her fingers over the smooth-clean leather, and she kicked off her shoes before tucking her feet beside her on the seat. “Where are you hiding the cigarettes?” she asked him.
“Dey bad fo’ you, cher,” he said, laughing again. He leaned in the side of the car, ducked under the frame, and kissed her. It was a casual kiss, physical and heated, and the rough fingers took her jaw for his. He pulled briefly away a few moments later and reached past her to the armrest he’d installed low on the seat before the shifter. “Dere you go, since yo’ likin’ what’s so bad fo’ you.”
The kiss surprised her, mainly because he hadn’t shown any real interest in intimacy, and it was over before she had the chance to really learn his mouth. She traced his jaw with her fingers as he reached past her to the armrest, and she pressed a soft, exploring kiss to the stubble-smoothness there. When he showed her the location of the cigarettes, she took out the box and she tapped them on the dash, watching him while she did it. “Maybe I just like you right now,” she said, and she nodded over to the driver’s side of the car. “Show me how fast this goes.”
It was the right thing to ask. He laughed again and pulled away, shutting the door with a strong shove and settling into the driver’s side a moment later. This is where all the money went; not into living or fine clothes or quick deaths, but here, into leather and metal and speed. The car was rumbling ignition and strong purring, and it was the kind of car you could feel under you as it moved out onto the street and Hal hit the gas.
She lit a cigarette as he started the car, but she didn’t keep it for herself. She put it between his lips, and she stowed the pack and the lighter. She didn’t smoke, but she liked a man that did, and she traced his jaw as she withdrew her fingers. She moved closer on the long front seat, and she slid one of her legs over his thigh as the car purred and rumbled. You could feel it under the seat, in the way the car moved, and she could tell why he liked it; it was sexy in a purely visceral way, in a powerful way, and she suspected he liked controlling something that took off the way the car did when he hit the gas.
She propped her bare foot between his thighs on the shiny leather seat, but she didn’t touch him beyond that. Instead, she relaxed against the cool backrest, and she watched the city pass by in the dark. It was strange, feeling so safe in a place that generally offered anything but. She reached out and idly dragged her fingers across the gear shift, and then she opened the passenger’s window, letting the air blow through and across them. It was cool out, crisp and balmy, and she liked the feel of the night on her skin. “Keep driving,” she told him early on, and he did.
When he turned into her neighborhood, she looked over at him curiously. She was usually fairly good at pinpointing creations; wasn’t he just full of surprises? “Lived here long?” she asked.
He turned the ignition off with a hint of regret regardless of who was with him and what he planned on doing to her in a little while. “So sure I live here?” he asked her, partly teasing and partly curious as to the cause of the question. Turning his knee toward her, he put a hand on her ankle and pushed it up her thigh, appreciative but listening to the answer he felt sure would turn the conversation somewhere he thought it shouldn’t. Complications.
She noticed the regret, and she looked up at the familiar building, then back at his face. She made a soft sound when he touched her, and she leaned forward. She didn’t lean into him, however. Instead, she touched the key in the ignition. “Want to go somewhere else?” she asked. “I know somewhere cars are allowed.” She said it with a soft-fond smile, and she kissed just under his jaw as she waited for his response, the kiss a slow press of lips, patient.
“Here is closer,” he said, without even a pause to consider. He’d taken her to some version of home, yes, but it held nothing that he or Charlie truly valued; that was all spread out into their many garages scattered over the city. His hand kept going up her skirt in one long line and his opposite hand left her jaw for a hip as he pulled her roughly nearer. “Hope yore not changin’ yo’ mind,” he said hoarsely into her neck, lips high above her collarbone.
She responded to his touch by sliding her thigh the rest of the way over his, straddling him, her back against the steering wheel. There wasn’t much of anything under the skirt, and there definitely wasn’t anything beneath the vest, and she decided it was the perfect moment to remedy the briefness of the kiss earlier. She kissed the corner of his mouth first, slow and soft, and she fully understood that he’d probably only let her explore for so long. Still, she let her lips drag against his, soft against rough, and then she licked. She didn’t smell of sex, not that night, and her hair, red and not hers, tumbled over his shoulders smelling of berries and cream and old pages of books. “Not changing my mind,” she said against his lips, almost all breath and no sound.
He had the skirt worked up over her hips by the time she was on his lap and the hard need was obvious even in the distracting rough kiss. “Bon.” He let her kiss him how she would, bemused that she bothered, enjoying the softness and the rather unique smell of her, which was nothing like he expected. Strong arms came around her hips and pulled her down and closer against him as the slightly scratchy mouth raked over her own. “Come on, den, Ah got no use for neighbors lookin’ in my windows.” He shoved at the door then and caught her before she tumbled out of the driver’s side, laughing again.
He was entirely unexpected, this man, and it made her smile as she found her footing on the blacktop outside Hamartia. He laughed often, and he laughed easily, and she liked the strong warmth of his hands on her body. She took one of those hands, and she led the way into the lobby, which had no locks or doormen or anything that amounted to anything. She let go of his hand once they were inside, and she looked over her shoulder, her already generous lips kiss swollen, the wig impossibly mussed. “Which floor?” she asked, not hiding the want in her wide blue eyes.
“Dis one.” He was working into his jacket pocket for something, and with his other hand still in hers he pulled out a cellphone and sent out a fast and sharp text message. It was visible from her position practically atop his hip: “chat dans l maison.” He knew her little bit of French would help her understand what he’d sent, and he gave her one of his honeyed smiles, the one that meant he was getting away with something. He took her down three rooms and unlocked the door for her.
She had watched him type, and she had laughed softly, not at all offended. “Roommate?” she asked as they walked, because she didn’t think he’d be the sort to bring someone home to his woman (even if he didn’t realize that about himself). She graced him with a soft, playful meow as he opened the door, and she stood still before doing anything else, waiting to see if said roommate materialized. She didn’t panic about being in an enclosed space with him (and, possibly, another unknown person) because she didn’t think he’d do anything to harm her. She’d been wrong before, but it was her nature to be trusting, and so she trusted him. She stood in the center of the apartment that was larger than the one she was intimate with, the one directly above it, and she waited.
“Oui,” he said, jovial. “He not comin’ home.” The living room was what could be expected from the exterior of Hamartia, with cracks in the ceiling and water damage in the walls. It was, however, oddly clean. There were side tables, neat ashtrays that were empty, couches with repaired seams. There was a hub cap that had been made into a clock, but other than that the walls were empty and the counters were cleaned. It was definitely not Hal and even more definitely this unnamed roommate. He kicked the door shut with a heel while he was still in range, and it was a miracle, but it closed solid. He followed her in with a lower feline growl of his own and picked her up by her hips again, bearing her toward one of the back rooms.
It was a vast contradiction to her own space above, which should have been blank and businesslike, but which spoke to her tastes in every little corner and space. She was still taking in the sparseness and trying to find him within it when he lifted her, and she gasped with pleasure and wrapped her legs around his hips. She wasn’t tentative, and she wasn’t shy, and she slid her fingers into the ends of his hair and tugged, demanding. “I like that about you too,” she told him in French, because she did. He was gruff, not at all elegant and refined; he was real, and that made him trustworthy.
He got her through his door and nearly tripped. This room, this room was Hal. There were clothes and debris all over the floor. There were cups that had been made into ashtrays on most surfaces, the ceiling fan was slowly rotating while a key on a lanyard swung from one of the blades. It didn’t smell as strongly of stale cigarette smoke as it could have, but that was because a window was wide open and the room was filled with chill Seattle mist. There was actually a scratched red toolbox overflowing with wrenches that still had oil residue in their joints at the foot of the bed. He lifted her over all this and dropped her onto the bed, which smelled strongly of musk and that cologne he wore.
Now this room felt like it belonged to this man. She undid the buttons of the vest as she looked up at him, and then she stretched her arms above her head and closed her eyes, taking in the way the cool air felt in the room, the way the bed and sheets smelled, the sense of chaos in the enclosed space, all which corresponded perfectly with the man who’d just toppled her on the bed like she weighed precisely nothing at all. Then, a moment later, she dragged open heavy lidded eyes and she reached for him, her hands sliding under the shirt he wore and touching greedily.
Later, once they’d both found their pleasure, he didn’t sleep immediately. He wanted to, no doubt about it, but he was also waiting for something that never came. Somebody to break down the door, maybe. After about twenty minutes of listening to her even breathing, he reached quietly from the pillows and sorted through the contents of his floor for his jacket. Once he found it he fished the cellphone out of his pocket and texted Charlie again. This one said: “maybe dangerous cat this time. crash at garage 8. c u tomorrow.” Pressing send, he locked the keys again and pushed the phone away in favor of the warm woman at his side.