Passing Through
Page 5
She'd gotten good at ignoring Noah's truck on the way in from the parking lot. She'd even started to pay less attention to the way her patrons stared at him. Hey, if looking at him kept them on the stools longer, then so be it.
Heather was still giving her some side-eye, though. That might take longer to deal with. She was rinsing a cocktail shaker with club soda when Gigi sidled up to her. The day manager looked up at her expectantly.
"Hey, you hear about anybody getting backed into in the parking lot?" Gigi kept her voice low. No need to start an alcohol-fueled panic. "My spot had a lot of glass in it."
Heather put the shaker next to the sink, in easy reach of her bartenders. "I hadn't heard anything," she said, not looking up.
"Well, maybe they took care of it themselves."
"Fingers crossed."
Another concert night meant another crazy happy hour. Gigi looked around at the booths and tables, the odd handful of people standing near the bar with bottles and glasses in their hands. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the commotion, but the excitement in the room lifted her spirits. A waitress wove through the crowd to deliver plates of appetizers and then stopped to answer another table's questions with a bright, youthful grin. One of the day bartenders enlisted a pair of women to help him convince one of the summer staff to stay on permanently.
Gigi grinned. She loved this business. She couldn't imagine what had led her dad to retire. For as long as she could stand, she hoped to stand behind this bar.
Noah swung through the kitchen doors with a load of ice. He slid out of the way as the bartenders grabbed their scoops out of the ice well, and his hip bumped against Gigi's.
Their eyes met when she glanced up at him.
Her skin tingled beneath his dark blue gaze. That was probably a permanent condition. But she didn't feel her insides starting to unravel and open for him. She smiled at the improvement.
"Boss?"
Her heart made a single, giddy bounce before resuming its normal rhythm. Yeah, she was going to be okay.
"Come talk to me when you have a minute?" she asked.
"You got it."
She went to her office to wait for what felt like forever. She tried to track his steps. He would have to dump the rest of the ice, return the buckets, and maybe refill them again. The ice bins got low quickly during happy hour. And she did give him as much time as he needed to come back to her office. It wasn't his fault that she no longer had her list of party tasks to distract her.
She tried to focus on order forms and a list of supplies she'd been compiling from Heather and the staff. In spite of herself, she almost got back up to lean into the hallway when he appeared in the open door.
"You need me?"
"Yeah." His presence seemed to fill the cluttered room. Proximity raised a familiar static prickle between them. Would she ever be completely free of his effect on her? Not now, not likely. "Come in here and shut the door."
He complied, and instantly the room seemed too small for them both, especially with the photo of her father between them.
"Listen. The other night," she began.
He opened his mouth and then shut it again.
You did that. He's all scared of you now. Should have done this sooner.
"What we did," she said. "I maybe shouldn't have done that."
"We did." He smiled gently at her. "We're grown people, Gigi."
"That's not the problem," she said, trying to keep the edge out of her voice. "I'm your boss. I'm in a position of power over you."
His face went red. It would have been cute if her own skin wasn't prickling, too.
"You know what I mean," she said. "It's not appropriate. I don't want you thinking that I think it is. It definitely isn't my way of trying to get you to stay here."
He chuckled. "I didn't think it was. Look. I meant what I said. We're consenting adults. I wanted it as much as you did."
She almost said that was good but thought better of it.
"The other night was the other night," he went on. "It means whatever we decide it means. But I don't think it changes anything between us."
This time she did say, "Good."
"You need anything else, boss?" he asked.
She took a long, deep breath. She was going to be fine. Everything was going to be fine now.
"No, we're good. I just didn't want that between us, to be awkward and everything."
He shook his head. "It's not awkward for me." He headed for the door before looking over his shoulder. "Not even a little."
Gigi grinned and gave the door a decisive nod. If only everything could work out so easily.
"Goddammit!"
Gigi's voice echoed up to the patio's wooden rafters, snapping Noah out of his flashlight-assisted inspection of the long dead lighting system. Instinct drove him to the edge of the balcony, and he looked down into the deserted parking lot.
She stood with her hands on her hips next to her corner parking space, her face turned upwards to the heavens. She let up a ragged cry of frustration and let her head drop back down. Noah jogged down the stairs and arrived at her side in time to see rage bloom on her face. He followed her gaze to the car.
Both the passenger side tires were flat. Something glittered in the gravel and dust around them. He knelt beside the car and sifted through the dust until he found what he was looking for.
He lifted three metal spines from the dirt beside the tires and showed them to his boss.
She turned her fiery glare on him. "What the fuck are those?"
Noah bit his lip to keep from smiling. This woman, who had just last week talked two very drunk bikers out of a fistfight without swearing once, had now dropped an F-bomb on some sheet metal screws. He was pretty sure she wouldn't appreciate his amusement at the irony, at least not just now.
"They're screws. The nice, long kind, for the roof." Noah nodded toward the hair salon and its nearly completed addition. "Probably from next door. Contractors must have spilled them."
"Spilled them?" She extended her hand, and he reluctantly gave her one of them. She held it up to the streetlight and inspected it. "How do you spill these?"
Noah shrugged. "It happens."
She knelt beside him and stroked one of the tires. "I'll have to get them patched, I guess."
"I don't think you can patch these, boss." He took the screw from her, suddenly nervous about leaving the sharp implement with her. "No telling how many you picked up."
"Are you saying I have to replace two tires?"
He checked out the smooth surface of the tire beneath her fingertips. She needed to replace them anyway. But this was not the time to broach that subject.
"I'll give you a ride home, boss."
"No, no." She rose carefully, balancing on the flank of the car. "I'll call Triple A."
"At this hour? You'll be waiting forever." Gravel crunched beneath his shoes as he stood up. "I'll drive you. This will wait until morning."
She glared at the rear tires as if her will would re-inflate them. Noah tried hard not to smile at her expression. Enraged or not, she'd have to face the prospect of replacing those tires.
He sensed that her real issue was sharing the truck with him. Despite his little consenting adults speech, things were still awkward between them. That was just too bad for her, though. Awkward or not, she was riding home with him. No way he was leaving her here long after last call to wait for a stranger to tell her she'd have to replace her tires.
If she were his girlfriend, he'd put his hands on her shoulders. Maybe knead that fury out of her. Not to be sexual. Just to acknowledge that sometimes shitty, expensive things happened and that she wasn't alone in being pissed off about it.
But Gigi wasn't his girlfriend, was she? She was a gorgeous woman with a demanding sex drive and some inner conflicts about fucking him. She was also his boss.
So he kept his hands to himself. For now.
"All right, Monroe." She sighed. "All right, dammit."
Driving home after work bothered Noah for reasons he used to have trouble naming. The traffic-clotted madness that marked his drive to the bar didn't faze him. At rush hour, he was surrounded by people on their own missions, trying to get home or stop for groceries or meet friends for the evening. Late at night, he had the road to himself.
Not having all those people to pay attention to should have made things easier, but the empty streets pushed his senses to high alert. After a few weeks of making that late-night drive, he realized that part of him was looking for people. That side of him wasn't nearly as hypervigilant as it used to be, but the quiet still bothered him.
Tonight, his boss's directions provided just the right distraction. She led him deeper and deeper into the suburbs, away from the water and the highways lined with strip malls and hotels. Trees gave shelter to narrow drives, and petite houses lay in darkness. People envisioned this sort of place when they talked about settling down with a family.
"Nice neighborhood," he said.
"This is where I grew up. Used to ride a bike up this very street." She pointed out the open window. "Fell out of that oak tree once. Next right."
As he made the turn, he caught her wistful grin. She had more stories to tell about growing up here. This had been the place she'd learned to drive a car. This was where she'd done homework. Daydreamed about a boy who would one day take her to prom. Her parents had left her with more than a business. She had a history in this neighborhood. She had a whole life with roots growing down deep in this place.
She had a home. Something stable to protect from transient barbacks passing through town.
Something inside him twisted painfully, but he willed the ache away. Whose fault was it that he didn't have what she needed in her life? His whole history fit in the back of the truck with room to spare. He chose that for himself, connecting only with what lay inside his arm's reach. Able to move and start over whenever he liked.
Her home and history still called to him, and the need to answer pulsed in his veins. When the time came, it would take all his strength to go.
She pointed at a farmhouse on the right. "There it is."
He pulled into her driveway and coasted beneath the boughs of a tree to her carport. The ancient transmission clunked when he put the truck in park, and they turned to face each other as the engine gurgled.
They watched each other in silence for a few seconds. Years ago, a teenage Gigi would have looked across the front seat at some hormone-plagued boy, wondering if he would kiss her.
Noah chuckled. Who was he kidding? If this woman wanted to be kissed, no way she was going to sit there with her fingers crossed, waiting for it.
"Something funny, Monroe?"
"Just thinking, boss."
She rooted deep inside her purse before pulling out her keys with a jingling flourish. "I'll call Heather in the morning, I guess." She glanced down at his lap briefly before her gaze skittered to the gearshift.
Damn if he was going to make this easy for her.
"I can pick you up if you want. You know, if you want to make a run on the way in."
Her tempting lips pursed as she shook her head. "No, no. Heather has to be up early anyway, and she has the supply list."
He tried without success to keep from smiling. Was she even going to thank him? "If you say so, boss."
A breeze tickled the branches overhead, making them sigh. She'd probably sit here all night rather than ask him for anything. But she wanted to. She wouldn't still be sitting here, her knee up on the bench seat, if she didn't want something.
"You have a second to come in?" Her voice lacked a little of the steel she used at work, and for an instant, he wondered if he was wrong about the teenage Gigi, waiting on the passenger seat.
He turned off the engine and the truck shuddered to rest. "Yeah, I have a second."
Gigi shut the door behind them and leaned against it. Noah waited for her in the living room. The hodgepodge of furniture, most of which her parents had left behind on their way to retirement, looked small and insubstantial around him. He towered over the coffee table like a giant.
Her giant.
She shook off the thought and jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the kitchen. "Want anything?"
He smiled and sat down on her couch. "I'm good," he said.
She opened her refrigerator and stood in the chilly air, acutely aware of the heat of his gaze on her back. She'd invited him in to ask about their conversation from the other night, to be certain that there were no awkward aftereffects from the Fourth of July. She had no reason not to take him at his word, of course; Noah was a straight shooter through and through. But at work, he could be such a closed book, even when they were alone after last call. He'd never let on that there was more between them than work and one hot night on the patio. And the cab of the truck—that was where kids made out.
If they were going to have an adult conversation, they'd have it in the living room like adults.
She finally closed the fridge empty handed, cutting off the spill of light into the darkened room. When she turned back to the living room, she found Noah holding the hefty glass ashtray that weighed down the coffee table. He turned the unwieldy thing over and over, his thick fingers moving in the grooves cut for cigarettes.
Gigi grinned and joined him on the couch. "It's an ashtray," she explained.
He nodded, smiling. "Yeah, I know. My uncle had one like this. I haven't seen one in years."
"Home décor secrets of the Seventies," she said, watching as he set the ashtray back on the coffee table. "This is your uncle who was in Vietnam?"
He nodded. "My Uncle Tim."
"You really loved him, didn't you?" The question was out into the air between them before she could stop it, more personal than anything that had yet happened when they were alone.
In the soft light of streetlamps, his gaze found hers. "Yeah. He was my favorite uncle." He leaned back on the couch. "My dad's oldest brother. He was old enough to be drafted to go to Vietnam like a bunch of other guys. Dad worshiped my Uncle Tim when they were kids." He smiled at her. "He said when people asked him what he wanted to be, he used to say he wanted to be Uncle Tim."
Gigi laughed, and Noah shifted on the couch. His smile slowly faded into something harder.
"Anyway, he went to Vietnam and came back home. When he got off the plane, this gorgeous woman came up to him. My uncle thinks, hey, this is great, this woman wants to flirt with the man in uniform. He opens his mouth to say something to this girl. And she spits in his face and then turns around and walks off."
Gigi felt her mouth drop open, weightless. He glanced up at her, sorrow darkening his features.
"Dad said Uncle Tim wasn't the same after that. It was like someone had taken whatever he used to be and shattered it, and then he wasn't able to find all the pieces." He sighed. "When we went to visit him and my Aunt Joanie, they were always happy enough to see us. I could kind of see what my dad saw in him. But sometimes I'd look over at him when we were watching TV, and he'd be staring at the floor, almost like he was wondering what happened to him."
"Just like Frank," she whispered.
"Just like Frank." He laced his fingers and set them on his knee. "You know, we're doing all this stuff for veterans now. Free drinks and all that. College girls who want to climb you like a tree. Which is great. All that is great. But no one wants to remember that, a little while ago, people would wait for soldiers to get off the plane so they could spit in their faces."
The silence stretched and grew thick between them. In the dark, she could all but hear him breathing.
"You learn a lot in the Army, boss. You learn that everyone's there, willing to put it all on the line, for a different reason." He looked up to meet her gaze. "And I never met one person who went all the way to Afghanistan for free beer. But little things like that matter anyway."
"You didn't have to tell me all that," she said.
He shrugged. "Your ashtray just reminded me." A long sigh slid out of him. "I guess it's been trapped in there for a while."
She had to reach to pat his knee. Resisting this need to make contact with him proved harder than simply giving in.
His hand covered hers, setting her heart on a jig. More than the excitement she'd been trying to fight for so long, she ached with a new emotion. She felt safe. Like he'd opened this part of himself to her now and wanted to welcome her inside.
She stared at their joined hands, long enough for her skin to tingle. She knew he was watching her with the same intensity he reserved for potential trouble on the job, for anything that might not go as planned.
Yeah, this qualifies.
He shifted again on the couch, and she forced her eyes to meet his. His fingers twined with hers. A whirlwind pushed at her insides, fear and need and this forbidden excitement chasing each other around her heart.
He reached for her slowly, cupping her face in his large palm. His rough thumb stroked her cheek.
"What do you need right now, boss?"
Gigi found her breath. "You said this was whatever we said it was."
He nodded. "Right."
"So what are we saying it is?" she whispered.
He closed most of the distance between them, stopping just inches away from her. "What do you need it to be?"
She tried to yank her hand out of his but he tightened his grip. Frustrated beyond endurance, she turned her gaze up to the ceiling. "Jesus, Monroe." She looked back at him and wanted to pull that smirk off his face. "Can you really not answer a simple question like that?"
He slid his fingertips up to her chin, gently tugged her toward him. Their knees touched when they kissed. His mouth coaxed hers, teasing her, making the spark she was trying to suppress into a hungry flame.
He pulled away from her and pressed his forehead to hers. "I want you like I want air to breathe." The rough caress of his whisper made her catch her breath. "But Gigi, you make the rules." He kissed the corner of her mouth, his lips lingering there. "You tell me. You tell me what you want."