She kept her shifts.
Will black coffee him and already-haspread suit at 7 AM, her inverted in the usual t-shirt oversized she slept in and cardie little dip turned to shake off the inside door white: absolutely This is not gonna do my morning person performance:
"I'm still hanging on to my shifts at the diner."
He looked at her over the kitchen island, as if the face of someone batting it out with an unexpected variable in an equation that otherwise added up.
"The contract doesn't require employment."
"But the contract does not prohibit it, either. I checked."
Something crossed his face. It could have been the beginning of something rueful.
"The bar?" he ased.
"I already quit. You were right, about that."
"That's really unusual."
"What is?"
"That I actually am right for a change."
She poured herself coffee. His kitchen, which was bigger than her mother's entire apartment. The machine alone must have costed more than a semester at the design program she had deferred three times. She tried not to think of it bitterly, and mostly failed.
"I can concede you're right on logistics," she said. "That's different from liking you."
"Understood." He turned back to his phone. "A stylist is coming Friday. We have the Renwick Gala on Saturday, and the Millers have a table; they've booked it for two years, there'll be press too."
"I will style myself."
"Alora."
"I'll wear whatever you send. But I don't need anyone taking care of my face. She picked up her coffee. "I have my own face since I was sixteen years old. It's fine."
He looked at her.
She looked back.
"Fine," he said, the word feeling heavy. He looked away first as if he were learning what 'fine' actually meant.
~~~
She changed into her uniform and took the bus to the diner, because if she had told the driver where to take her it could have ended badly.
"Please take me to this diner." would have seemed ridiculous and it took twenty-three minutes on the bus, she knew what route the bus traveled, in twenty-three minutes she needed something that was normal before returning back home into a reality she understood.
The diner was the same.
That was the miracle and comfort of it: the bell above the door the smell and taste of griddle grease and coffee that back booth with a leg that everyone who went to Millies place knew to hold onto Millie herself behind the counter calling out order numbers in a loud voice that you could hear all the way to the parking lot.
"You look different " said Bea, her co-worker looking at her across the counter, her eyes narrowing as if she were trying to solve a puzzle.
"I am tired." Alora said not looking up from the ticket she was making.
"No it is not just that you are tired, you look different, to me." Bea said to Alora.
Alora paused, the pen in her hand hovering just above the paper.She could feel Bea's blazing gaze searching for the shift.
"Did something happen?"
Alora finally looked up. "I started a new moisturizer,"
The lie hanging between them, thin and transparent as glass. Bea opened her mouth to say something but was cut off by Alora before giving her the time to sharpen her point.
"Table four's getting cold, Bea."
On Tuesday, James's regular corner table sat empty.
She'd known it would be. Through messages relayed by his assistant, she already knew he was having a worse week. But here she was, at the corner table, with a coffee she had filled by whispering sipwise into his cup without thinking, staring through an empty seat and on top of an overdue crossword that she'd been saving for him, the Tuesday puzzle; month three of knowing him marked the beginning of her keeping them pristine and waiting and boil-fresh, because he used to want to work perusing irl queuing hot rolling 'cross home to sit up across her palm.
There, it sat until the end of her shift, growing cold.
She didn't throw it away.
The Renwick Gala.
Alora had forty-five minutes to get ready because she was in at the diner on a double and the crosstown bus ran behind and so arriving at the penthouse, 6:22 PM for a car by seven she took precisely six before showering and drying her hair and pulling on the only cocktail dress she owned: secondhand navy silk that cost twenty-five dollars two months ago after its first owner took it poorly when nominated for some college award that Alora then couldn't attend when her mother's fever spiked that same afternoon. When she'd discovered it in that box under her bed, still had the tags attached. She'd taken that as a sign.
She was studying herself in the full-length mirror when a familiar knock rapped at her door.
"Car's here in eight minutes," Ares said, voice muffled by beyond the wooden door.
"I know."
A pause. "Did you?"
"I said I know."
She opened the door, and immediatly the air between them went still.
There he was draped in black tie. Of course he was. The right but absolutely casual black tie of a man who had undergone this hundreds of times, and wore the formality as if it were a second skin — jacket made just so, no slip anywhere on it, the watch on his wrist probably worth more than whatever building she'd grown up in.
He looked at her.
This time, though, the assessment changed. It exceeded the length he planned for it. She watched as his blood ran cold, as he limped a little for a moment under the weight of an unfamiliar focus was told her about to allow; she someone who'd been trained in reasserting this controlled blankness across something he hadn't meant her to witness.
"It was the navy that did it," he said. Which was not what he had nearly said.
"Useful to know," she replied.
The gala was another civilization.
Five hundred people in a gilded room, every single one of them belonging to a tax bracket that made Alora's very existence provisional. She smiled until her face was hurting. She gave the verbatim, well-crafted version of how-they'd-met with the ease of someone who had slung tables long enough to know how to read a room and pivot a conversation and make sure each person in her orbit felt like she was listening harder to them than anyone else within screaming range.
She thought to herself with a kind of pleasure that she was really good at this.
Ares was standing next to her his hand on her back. It was not a gentle touch it was just something he did because he thought he should. He looked at what she had done and she saw a look, on his face she saw it two times. Each time he looked away before she could figure out what it meant. Ares looked at her work. Then he looked away Ares did not want her to see his face.
Then a voice cut through the orchestra like a blade of red paint.
"Ares."
Low. Feminine. The rehearsed warmth with a frosty chill underneath.
She watched him go still a whole-body stillness, the sort that was not absence but felt like its opposite, something bracing before he turned.
Tall. White-blond. A scarlet gown the sort you choose if your intention is to be, currently, the first thing anyone thinks of entering a dreary room. The kind of beautiful that knew its own power."
"Cassandra," Ares said. Even. Measured. Every syllable accounted for.
Cassandra Voigt's gaze flicked to Alora with the smoothness of a scope settling into range. The smile that followed did not light her eyes. It wasn't designed to.
"So." Cassandra's eyes tracked down to the hem of She glanced at Alora's secondhand silk, then drifted back up to Ares. "You got married."
"We got married" and Ares's hand moved from the small of Alora's back to her waist, a constriction, an action that brought Alora as close up against his side as she could get in a gesture so smooth it might've been choreographs except for the fact it hadn't been and then there was just his solid heat through silk then became actual holding her body by him, and thought: focus.
She tacked to Cassandra with the smile she'd practiced for years on unreasonable diner patrons — open, friendly, solid as a wall.
"I'm Alora," she said warmly. "And you are?"
A half-second of pure silence.
"Cassandra Voigt," she said. "Ares and I have some history together."
"Great," Alora said, a mellow sound in her voice. "Well, past tense is such a sophisticated tone, you know."
She felt it go through Ares's chest, caress her side that which was almost a thing, stilled just enough to know its name so as then you could be sure of your borders and boundaries; from whence he came the closest he got to a laugh.
Cassandra's smile didn't move. But something in her eyes sure did.
"Enjoy the gala," she said then immediatly left.
Alora didn't wait until six feet away. Then gently, into the space just beyond Ares's shoulder:
"You're welcome."
The almost-laugh happened again. Bigger this time.
He turned his gaze toward her, just a little, and for one breakable moment she saw something in those brown electrically charged eyes that left her without a box to put it into.
Then it was gone.
"Come on," he said. "We're still responsible for three other lives."