Just One Taste

by Louisa Edwards

  Somehow, this Lower East Side bar, on a random weekend night, attained Comicon levels of insanity.

  Only here, it was a beat cop, still in uniform, although she had to assume he was off duty, leaning against the bar next to an exhausted-looking woman in pink scrubs. The pair was flanked by chefs Rosemary recognized from her brief visits to the Market kitchen, their hair sweaty and wild, their eyes manic. There were artistic-looking types all in black, with strange piercings and makeup, sitting in groups, and at a table in the farthest corner of the dark, smoky bar, there were two men who appeared to be arguing.

  Rosemary found her gaze drawn to them like iron filings to a magnet, but it took her a moment to realize it was because one of the hard-faced, gesticulating men was Wes.

  Chapter 25

  Rosemary stared across the room at her angry … what? Lover? She never knew what to call him. Anyway, her Wes. He made a chopping gesture with his right hand, as if he were cutting off a line of discourse, and stood up fast enough to knock his chair over.

  The other man stood up, too, his back to Rosemary. He was of average height with a slender build, broad, slightly stooped shoulders, and a full head of silvery gray hair. He appeared to say something expansive, one arm sweeping out in a broad arc, and whatever he said made Wes shake his head in evident disgust.

  When he raised his head, his gaze caught on Rosemary’s, and she got a surprise—instead of pleasure or happiness, the microexpression she saw flash over his face before he schooled his features was fear.

  Huh. Rosemary frowned, reviewing what she’d seen. Eyebrows pulled up and together, a muscle low in his jaw ticcing—yes. According to her new book on reading emotions in facial expressions, upon seeing her, Wes exhibited a classic involuntary fear response.

  Hypothesis: Wes is afraid at the sight of me.

  Conclusion? Either he is actually scared of me, personally, or it’s the fact that I’ve appeared here, at this particular moment, that prompted the fear.

  When he immediately started toward her rather than shying away, Rosemary narrowed her eyes. That appeared to negate the possibility that something intrinsic to her had frightened Wes. Therefore, it most likely had to do with the man Wes had been fighting with.

  The man Wes was currently hustling toward the door, whispering low and fierce into the small, older man’s ear as they went.

  They reached the door, Rosemary never taking her eyes from them, and something passed between their hands in a move almost too fast to track. It was so quick, she couldn’t even tell which man had given and which had received.

  Wes encouraged the unknown man out of the bar with an insistent hand on his shoulder, nearly manhandling him through the door, but before he went, the older man slid out of Wes’s grasp as if his fine wool jacket were oiled.

  He turned, his handsome, weathered face alight with mischief, and winked.

  Rosemary blinked, and when she opened her eyes, the old man was gone. And Wes was coming her way, his purposeful strides cutting through the shifting masses of people like a shark through flickering schools of fish.

  “Hi,” he said when he reached her. “Been here long?”

  “Long enough to witness your intense conversation with the strange man you just hustled out of here.”

  She caught the tightening at the corners of his mouth before he managed to summon a credible smile. “Who, that old guy? He’s nobody. Just someone I used to know. Hey, you want a drink? Chris makes awesome cocktails. I swear, if you tell him what liquor you like he can practically read your mind. He’ll make you the perfect drink for whatever your mood is, guaranteed. I think he can read your aura or something.”

  He bounced on his heels, pointed at the bar, and Rosemary licked her lips. She was kind of thirsty. But maybe she shouldn’t allow herself to be so easily distracted.

  “I’m working my way through gin cocktails,” she told the bartender, who appeared to be the same long-haired hippy guy from Market. “Surprise me.”

  “This little lady knows how to order a drink from a master mixologist,” the bartender crowed, already filling a martini glass with ice and reaching for a silver cocktail shaker.

  “Make it two, thanks,” Wes said, then turned to Rosemary. “I think you just made Christian’s night.”

  “Yeah,” the bartender, Christian, put in. “Most people who come in here, all they want is beer or whiskey. No more Bushmill’s for you, huh, kid?”

  It sounded like a perfectly innocuous comment, from the content to the mild expression on the bartender’s face as he said it, but because Rosemary was standing pressed so close to him by the crowd in the bar, she felt the tremor that stiffened Wes’s body against hers for a single, very noticeable, second.

  What in the name of Spock is going on?

  Christian slid their drinks across the bar and spun away to fill another order, leaving Rosemary and Wes to puzzle out the contents of their glasses on their own.

  Wes leaned in to speak directly into her ear. “Come on, let’s go sit down.”

  She followed him, squeezing through the crush of hard-partying bar patrons, to a table that seemed to be situated some distance from the sound system. At least it was a quiet corner where Rosemary could finally draw a deep breath without fearing she’d either asphyxiate from the miasma of cigarette smoke hanging in the air, or hyperventilate from the closeness of way too many people.

  Wes studied her face as they sat down. “You don’t like crowds, do you?”

  “Not so much,” she admitted, taking a sip of her drink. It was still cold, slivers of icy condensation freezing on top of the very faintly green liquid.

  The flavor was smooth, mellow, with a refreshing hint of something herbal and clean—cucumber and mint, maybe? And a tartness on the back of her tongue that reminded her of summer. Lime juice.

  “Unreal, right?” Wes said, raising his eyebrows over the rim of his own glass. “You’d think a dive like this would serve mixed drinks like screwdrivers and vodka tonics, but Christian’s an artist. They were lucky to get him to fill in at Market.”

  Rosemary took another sip, then another, and another, while she tried to think of something to say. “Is this small talk? Are we doing small talk? Because I don’t excel at that.”

  The corners of Wes’s mouth twitched. Amusement, Rosemary thought. Which was an improvement on the tense pinch he’d sported there ever since she came in.

  “We can talk about whatever you want,” he said. “Was there anything else you wanted to tell me about what you discovered today?”

  “It wasn’t really new discoveries so much as confirmation that we’re on the right track,” she said, enthusiasm mixing with the gin in a heady whirl that made the room dance before her eyes, just a little. A quick jig. Jiggle. She laughed.

  “Enjoying that drink, aren’t you?” His eyes twinkled at her across the table. Rosemary sighed and propped her head on her hand. He was so unbelievably attractive. Like Spike, Han, Helo, and Kirk all wrapped up in one.

  “It’s good,” she sighed. Inebriation was a strange thing, she reflected, watching the way his face creased so nicely when he smiled. “I feel very … slow. And open. The sensation is not unlike what happens when we have intercourse.”

  He bobbled his drink, spilling a few drops on the table. “Shit.” He laughed. “Warn a guy before you come out with something like that.”

  “And not only intercourse.” Rosemary really thought she might be onto something, a correlative effect. “I felt it that day in the park, too, when actual coitus did not take place.”

  He leaned closer, his whole face alight with fascination. She wondered if it was her or the topic that had him so worked up. Men could be so distressingly focused on physical gratification.

  “You felt the same in the park,” he said, his low voice scratching pleasurably across her nerves, “because we were making love. The same as that night in your lab, and what we do in your hotel room. And there’s more to lovemaking, to sex, than simply ins
erting Tab A in Slot B.”

  She shivered, every hair on her body lifting as if in a chilly breeze. Except she didn’t feel cold at all, she felt overly warm, in that way she’d come to associate with being near Wes.

  “Some enlightened folks,” Wes continued, inching one hand across the small, round table to trail his fingertips across her bare wrist, “might even consider this, what we’re doing right now, lovemaking.”

  “But this is public,” Rosemary protested, trying to feel scandalized and not quite managing it. “More public than the park, I mean, because there are actual people all around. People like your boss’s girlfriend, whom I met earlier. So it would be weird if they were watching us m-making love.”

  Why did she stumble on that phrase? It was in common parlance, a familiar vernacular emblem for the biological process of two humans mating. She knew that. So why was she afraid to say it?

  The way Wes was looking at her, she knew he’d noticed it, too. Feeling her cheeks superheat, Rosemary cast around for something to say to take the focus of the conversation off her and her ridiculous hang-ups.

  “Why were you fighting with that man, earlier?”

  Well. That did it. Rosemary watched as the tension that had mostly disappeared snapped back into Wes’s frame, from his shoulders and neck to the corded muscles of his forearms lying on the table. His fingers clenched, briefly, into fists, and his lips tightened. Only for an instant, then he was back to looking relaxed and lazy in his chair. But Rosemary knew what she saw.

  Something about the older stranger made Wes nervous and angry.

  But when he spoke, his tone was easy and free of any emotion she could detect. “We weren’t fighting—it was a minor disagreement about money. As in, he owes me some, and I thought maybe since he offered me a glass of Christian’s best Irish whiskey, he could pay me back. That’s all. I didn’t want to talk about it before because it’s kind of embarrassing; I feel like a fool for lending money to someone who’d stiff me like that.”

  Rosemary thought it over, as best she could through the haze of alcohol. It made sense. The weird impression of shame she’d gotten from Wes, as well as his odd reaction when the bartender mentioned the whiskey he’d been drinking earlier.

  His eyes on her face were clear and steady, the pupils wide to drink in the meager ambient light, the irises slender bands of dark green flecked with gold.

  Everything about him proclaimed he was telling the truth. So why did she feel so uneasy?

  And since when are you an expert on social cues and facial expressions? she asked herself. You’ve been wrong—dead wrong—on things like this before. Just let it go.

  “Did he pay you back?” she asked finally, not sure what else to say.

  Wes looked down and away, his mouth tightening again. “Not this time. But I’m sure I’ll be seeing him again soon.”

  She nodded and finished her drink. Silence stretched between them for long moments, pulling like taffy, longer and longer but never quite breaking.

  Finally, Wes looked up from the condensation rings he’d been drawing on the surface of the table. His eyes were shadowed, expression hidden by the downward sweep of his lashes against his cheeks. “What’s your best memory from your childhood?”

  It was important not to fidget. No finger drumming, no toe tapping, and especially no licking his lips or tugging at his ear. Those were all easy tells, obvious even to civilians.

  Wes knew how to do this, he was just out of practice.

  But somehow, faced with Rosemary’s scary-smart, analytical eyes, the intent, listening posture of her, he found himself wanting to squirm and spill his guts like a two-bit street hustler caught running his first shell game.

  Or maybe it was the fact that she clearly knew something was up. She was about the furthest thing from clueless that Wes could imagine. It was rotten, awful luck that had her walking in on him arguing with Pops.

  He thought he’d allayed most of her nameless suspicions about it; he’d laced the vague lie with enough specific truth to be convincing. At any rate, she’d stopped pushing.

  But Wes couldn’t bring himself to let it go completely. He knew the signs of a guilty conscience, had lived with them for a long time. He needed to keep Pops away from her, to keep her safe from his father’s completely unreliable, totally unconvincing promise not to run a scam on her—a promise made in exchange for a hefty price, of course.

  Even with all of that, there was a part of Wes that wanted to tell her everything.

  The truth. About Pops, about the Heartway House, about Wes and where he came from.

  It was that part of him, the idiotic blabbermouth part, that prompted the question about her childhood. Straight from his hind brain to his tongue, no filter in between. Jesus.

  She was blinking at him now, pretty and intense, her soft blond hair falling in a wave over her left shoulder. “My best childhood memory? You sound like a talk show host.”

  “Really? I never watched a lot of TV. Is that the kind of thing they ask questions about? I thought it was all ‘What made you sleep with your wife’s mother’s best friend’s brother?’ type stuff.”

  That got her to laugh. “No, whatever else you can say about my mother, she never dragged me in front of Jerry Springer.”

  “What else would you say about her? Your mother, I mean.” Wes was back in control of his mouth now, deflecting attention back onto Rosemary and away from the scuffle with Pops. He’d rather find out more about her, anyway, than sit here stewing about the utterly immoral and incorrigible man who’d raised him.

  Although from the way she buttoned up whenever her mother was mentioned, maybe the Wilkins family wasn’t any less of a clusterfuck than the Murphys.

  “I’m not sure what you’re asking,” she hedged. “You already know she’s a bestselling author. My father is an award-winning biologist, spends most of his time on the lecture circuit.”

  “And that’s all you know about them? Come on,” Wes pressed, not even sure what he was digging for. Except that even after the hours they’d spent together, in bed and out of it, there was an inner core of her that he knew he still hadn’t touched.

  What could he say? He was greedy. It was bred into the Murphy men.

  She shrugged and drained her glass. “I’d order another one, but I’m still not sure what it was. Which is a shame, because it’s definitely a contender for my favorite drink.”

  “I’m glad you liked it,” Wes said, trying not to feel like she was blowing him off.

  After a moment of not-completely-comfortable silence, she blurted, “I’ll tell you one of mine if you tell me one of yours.”

  “Wait, what?”

  Rosemary flushed so prettily, it made him want to keep her embarrassed and off kilter permanently. “A childhood memory,” she clarified. “A good one.”

  He sat back in his chair, hoping the movement would mask his sudden, full-body clench.

  Stupid guilty conscience. This was what it had been angling for all along.

  “Yeah, sure,” he said, then grinned. “You first.”

  “Okay,” she said slowly, her eyes taking on a faraway look as if she had to scan the deepest recesses of her brain for a single good memory. Wes frowned.

  “I think I already told you, my parents spent a lot of time traveling when I was younger. Still do, actually, but back then I went with them a lot of the time. We’d be gone for months at a stretch, together if they could manage to sync up their tour schedules, and just me and Mom if they couldn’t. Even when we were all together in a hotel suite, though, it felt …” She appeared to struggle for a word that wouldn’t sound as bad as Wes knew it had been.

  “Lonely,” he supplied, knowing he was right.

  Rosemary shook her head, obviously wanting to deny it, but all she said was, “I suppose it was fairly isolating. My tutor or a nanny accompanied us on most trips, so that was some company for me. Where was I going with this?”

  “Toward one of your happiest childh
ood memories,” Wes said, heart aching. “Not sure how you get there from here, but I’m all ears.”

  The perplexed frown smoothed from her brow. “Oh, of course. A happy memory. It seems like I should probably say the time I structured my own experiment to test the level of acidity in the new brand of apple juice our housekeeper started buying when I was six, or when my father realized I was reading the back of his newspaper from my high chair at the breakfast table when I was three—but the first thing that comes to mind when you ask about my childhood is this one, random day when I was about nine.”

  She smiled, a pleased, secret little smile, and Wes felt his spine melt.

  “I’m not even sure what city we were in,” she went on. “But I know it was on a coast, because my mother’s publisher had arranged for us to go sailing. I think there was supposed to be a reporter with it, a segment recorded for some show while we were sailing, but I don’t remember that happening. I think the reporter called in sick, but the publisher let us take the boat out anyway. And my father’s lecture got canceled, so he came with us. All three of us were there on the boat, on blue, blue water that stretched forever out to the horizon, and the sun was shining. We saw dolphins, and seagulls, and my parents laughed a lot. It was just …” She looked down at the table, but Wes still caught it when her smile went wistful. “That was a very good day. And I felt lucky, because I knew my father wouldn’t have been with us if he hadn’t had a cancelation, which was very rare, and my mother would’ve been totally involved with the interview if the reporter had been there—but everything came together, for once. And we had a good day.”

  Her voice trailed off, and it took everything Wes had not to clear the table in a single hurdle and sweep her into his arms for a good cuddle. In fact …