After Hours (InterMix)(12)
“You’re not really selling me on it.”
“Wasn’t trying to.”
“Did you grow up around here?” I asked.
“Not really, but it’s a lot like where I did.”
“Where?”
“Hamtramck.”
I sort of knew where that was. A poor city outside Detroit, crippled like so many in the state in the wake of plant closures. “I didn’t grow up too far away. On the other side of Dearborn.”
Kelly nodded, his stern face looking different in the sky’s pink cast and the glow from the dash—somber, if not soft. “Some people grow up on the ocean, by the mountains, places where it snows or places with palm trees. That’ll always be the kind of stuff they want surrounding them. Guess I’m hardwired for cracked concrete and rust stains.”
He turned us down a more civilized block, past a hardware shop and a karate studio, an AT&T store, other signs of life. There was a heart beating inside the city’s bones, if faintly. He parked along the curb outside a bar called Lola’s and we swung open our doors, slammed them in unison. The town was half-dead but the bar had a pulse. I could hear it thumping to the rhythm of classic rock and loud conversations. Kelly held the door for me.
The patrons seemed lively enough for a Monday night, though there were plenty of places to sit. Back in manufacturing’s heyday, it would’ve surely been packed with factory workers. Kelly brushed past me and I followed him to the bar.
“Heya, Kel,” said the bartender, tossing two napkins on the wood before us. He gave me a lukewarm nod and the most cursory male assessment.
“White wine,” Kelly said, shocking me speechless. Just as well, as the bartender didn’t ask for my order yet. So my companion had a girl’s thirst to match his name.
“Sit tight.” Kelly tossed some bills on the bar and left me, presumably for the men’s room.
I studied the taps and liquor bottles but decided I’d probably get wine as well.
“Hey.”
I turned, finding a guy about my age leaning casually on the corner of the bar. He wore baggy pants and a white tank, a gold chain. He wasn’t my type at all, but his friendly, hopeful smile made me think maybe I didn’t look as wretched as I felt.
“Hey,” I said, and offered a little wave.
The bartender returned, plunking Kelly’s wine and somebody’s beer by my elbow.
“Buy you somethin’?” the friendly guy asked.
I hadn’t come here to flirt, and a polite decline was halfway to my parted lips when the guy’s face suddenly fell. I sensed Kelly at my back, tangible as a shadow cooling us.
When I craned my neck to look, I understood why the guy had withered. Kelly’s eyes had gone black, jaw set, expression like a rusty steak knife. His fingers closed over my shoulder, spreading warm misgiving down my arm, up my neck, through my chest.
“Can I help you,” he said to the guy. It was no question, just cold, hard words wrapped in barbed wire.
“No, man. Sorry.” And the guy slinked away with his tail between his legs.
Kelly let me go and took his seat. I resisted an urge to rub my shoulder and see if the skin really was as feverish as it felt. This man had a wife, and if anybody got to feel all hot and confused by his touch, it was most definitely her.
“Who was that?” I asked. And what had he done to get on Kelly Robak’s bad side? Drug dealer? Maybe some old beef over a woman?
“Never seen him before,” Kelly said.
“Oh. Then—” I stopped, frowning as Kelly slid the wine glass in front of me, the beer bottle before himself. Did I really look so rattled that I couldn’t choose my own drink? Or for that matter, handle myself around a stranger?
He held up his beer, and I went ahead and tapped my glass against it, miffed.
“Congrats on surviving day one,” he said, and took a deep pull off his bottle.
“Thanks.”
He stared at me, his pale, hueless irises tinted by the beer signs, blue and yellow and every other neon color. He had a scar above one brow, a thick shiny line that must’ve needed stitches in its day. To my great surprise, he reached out to run a fingertip up and down the frown crease between my own brows. “What’s put that there?”
I tried to snuff out the spark I’d felt from his touch, hot and startling and inappropriate. “You could’ve asked me what I wanted to drink,” I said, hoping to camouflage my unease behind annoyance.