Talk Dirty To Me – Chapter 1 – Fresh Start

Ella’s idea of supportive was three cocktails and a speech about how Marcus was never good enough anyway, delivered at increasing volume over the course of two hours at a bar we’d never been to before because she said a new place was a fresh start and I didn’t have the energy to argue.

She wasn’t wrong about Marcus. He wasn’t good enough. He also wasn’t terrible, which made the whole thing harder to be dramatic about – no screaming fight, no discovered secret, just the slow accumulation of two people who had stopped trying and were waiting for one of them to say it. I said it. He looked relieved. That was the worst part. The relief on his face.

So yes. Three cocktails. New bar. Ella’s speech.

“You deserve someone who sees you,” Ella said, pointing at me with her glass. “Actually sees you. Not just the version of you that makes everything easy.”

“I make everything easy because I’m good at it,” I said.

“That’s not a compliment, Robin.”

“I know.”

She opened her mouth to say something else and then closed it and picked up her drink, which meant she had something real to say and had decided against it. Ella did that – she saw things and mostly kept them to herself, which was one of the reasons I’d been friends with her for twelve years.

The bar was the kind of LA place that tried too hard to look like it wasn’t trying – exposed brick, drinks with names, low lighting that was supposed to feel intimate and mostly just made it hard to read the menu. Loud enough that you had to lean in to hear. Busy enough that nobody was paying attention to anyone else, which was the only thing I liked about it.

We stayed two hours. Ella’s three cocktails became four and somewhere in the fourth one she went from sharp and supportive to soft and slightly sideways, leaning on my shoulder, saying you’re my favourite person into my hair with the earnest conviction of a very drunk woman.

“I know,” I said. “Drink some water.”

“Water is boring.”

“Water is necessary.”

“You’re so practical.”

“One of us has to be.”

By the time I got her into a cab she was sleepy and affectionate and holding my hand through the window. I told the driver her address. I paid. I watched the cab pull away and stood on the pavement and thought: good, that’s handled, and then thought: my bag is on the bar.

Not my phone – I had my phone. My bag. With my wallet, my keys, the specific collection of things that made leaving an apartment possible. Still sitting on the barstool where I’d set it two hours ago when Ella needed both my hands to stand up.

I went back in.

The bar had thinned out since we’d left. Late enough that the early crowd had gone home and the serious drinkers had consolidated toward the middle. I could see our spot from the door – the two barstools, and my bag exactly where I’d left it, because apparently nobody in this bar needed a tan leather bag that badly, which was reassuring.

I crossed the room.

Picked it up.

Turned around.

“You came back,” the man next to me said.

I looked at him.

He was already looking at me. Had been, I understood immediately, for a while – not in the obvious way men looked at women in bars, not the performing-attention version. Actually looking. Grey eyes, steady, the specific quality of a man who saw things and didn’t announce that he was seeing them.

Tall. Dark hair. Strong jaw, the kind that looked like it had been decided on deliberately. Arms that suggested he worked with them. He had a glass in front of him that was mostly empty and he hadn’t been in any hurry to refill it.

“My bag,” I said.

“I noticed.” He nodded at the barstool beside him. “I kept an eye on it.”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“No,” he said. “You didn’t.”

I looked at him for a moment. He looked back. Not aggressive, not trying to impress.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Sit down,” he said. “I’ll buy you a beer.”

It wasn’t a question. Not rude – just a statement, the way people who were sure of things said things. I had been in a bar for two hours managing my drunk best friend and before that I had ended a relationship and before that I had been managing a front desk and four other people’s problems and I was tired in the specific way of a woman who handled everything and occasionally wondered what it would feel like to not handle something.

I sat down.

“Robin,” I said.

“Nicko,” he said, and signalled the bartender.

The beer arrived. I drank some. He drank some. The bar moved around us – music, other conversations, someone laughing too loud near the door.

“You were here earlier,” he said.

“With my friend.”

“Is she okay?”

“She’s in a cab. She’s fine.”

He nodded. Not pushing it, not performing sympathy. Just acknowledged and moved on.

“You’re not from this part of the city,” he said.

“How do you know that?”

“You looked at the menu like it was new.”

I looked at him sideways. “Were you watching me read the menu?”

“I was watching you,” he said, without apology. “The menu was incidental.”

I should have had a response to that. I am a woman with responses. I have managed drunk clients, difficult employers, a seven-year relationship with a man who communicated mostly in shoulder shrugs – I have responses for everything.

I picked up my beer.

“What do you do?” I asked.

“Cars,” he said. “Custom accessories. You?”

“Front desk.”

He looked at me in a way that said he understood that front desk and what I’d said about myself with my body language for the last ten minutes were not the whole picture, but he didn’t say it. Just nodded.

“Do you live nearby?” I asked.

“Above us,” he said. “The hotel.”

I looked up instinctively, which was not a useful action inside a building, and then looked back at him. He was watching me do the math.

“Is that a line?” I asked.

“It’s an address,” he said.

“That’s a very fine line between those two things.”

“I know,” he said.

I drank the rest of my beer. Set the glass down. Looked at the bar, the bottles lined up behind it, the specific amber light of a place that had been designed to make people feel warmer than they were.

Marcus’s face. The relief on it. Two years of fine and adequate and the specific flatness of a life that was technically working.

I picked up my bag.

“Which floor?” I asked.

Something moved in his face. Not surprise – he hadn’t been surprised, I understood that, he’d been waiting. Just the specific settling of a man whose patience had just paid off.

“Third,” he said. He stood, left money on the bar without counting it, and looked at me. “Ready?”

I stood up.

“I don’t do this,” I said. Not an explanation. Just information.

“I know,” he said.

“Then why do you look like you expected it?”

He looked at me for a moment with those grey eyes that saw things without announcing it.

“Because I’ve been watching you manage everything all night,” he said. “I thought you might be ready to stop managing something.”

I looked at him.

He was right. I didn’t say so.

“Third floor,” I said. “Let’s go.”

We didn’t talk in the elevator.

Not the awkward silence of two strangers regretting a decision – the other kind, the kind with something underneath it. He stood slightly behind me and I was aware of him the way you were aware of heat, not looking at it directly but knowing it was there. His hand at the small of my back when the doors opened – light, not possessive, just directional.

The room was a hotel room. King bed, the usual furniture, a window that showed the street below where I’d put Ella in a cab twenty minutes ago. Another city, same night, different version of it.

Nicko closed the door.

He looked at me across the room with the same quality he’d had at the bar – unhurried, certain, like he’d already thought about this and arrived at his conclusions and was now simply in the part where things happened.

“Come here,” he said.

I went.

That was the first thing I did differently.

I didn’t think about it. I didn’t manage it. I just went, because I wanted to and because I was tired of being the woman who stood at a distance from the things she wanted and handled them from there.

His hands found my face.

And that was the end of the night I thought I was having and the beginning of something else entirely.