Page 47 of Bourbon & Blood

“Tell me…” she said after some quiet. “What do you, like,do?”

“I run my club,” I answered her absently, transfixed by those smoky, misty, silver eyes of hers fixed on mine.

“Right, but for like, work?”

Ah…

“I work in a junkyard,” I answered. “Pullin’ parts and fixin’ old boat motors.”

“Really?” she asked and her clear eyes conveyed surprise.

“What’d you think I did?” I asked.

She shrugged and looked away. “I don’t know, which is why I asked.”

I felt my lips twitch and nodded slowly.

“Now that you do know, what do you think?” I asked carefully.

“I think that it’s surprisingly… normal.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I guess that’s alright,” I said and felt somehow a little bit lighter. Her smile sent me up on cloud nine.

CHAPTERNINETEEN

Alina…

We talked… well,Italked, asking a million questions, and yes – I was beating around the bush. I wanted to ask about what heliked, as in the bedroom, but I was afraid of the answer.

I didn’t know what to make of him, honestly. He was impossible to read, and so very intense it was scary… but he was honest. Like,brutallyhonest. Raw in a way I had never encountered before.

We ate our meal in silence, and it was really good food. The salad was real greens and not iceberg lettuce like most restaurants served. The dressing was fresh and made in-house. The meat was grilled to perfection and the flavors all married wonderfully. I’d learned things about this man that I suddenly found myself bound to who I didn’t know anything at all about. Normal things that made him seem a little less frightening in some ways.

“Don’t you want to know anything about me?” I asked at one point.

“I already know things,” he said.

“Like what?” I asked, curiously.

“You love books,” he said. “Used to sit outside and smoke, watching you read.”

“When I lived at the other apartment?” I asked.

“Mm-hm,” he hummed around a mouthful of fried gator.

“There was a window seat there,” I said. “It was my favorite place to sit while I read. One of my favorite features of that apartment period, really.” I braced my elbow on the table and my chin on my hand as I regarded him. He didn’t say anything, and I put my arm and my head down, going back to my food.

“Mine too,” he said, and I looked up sharply from where my attention had been refocused on spearing more salad onto my fork. He wasn’t looking at me, but rather his plate as if he hadn’t just said something that was at once incredibly sweet, but also incredibly unnerving.

“Saw a man fuck you on that same window seat,” he said a minute later.

“Oh my God!” I said, my fork clacking sharply against the edge of my salad bowl as it fell from my nerveless fingers. He looked up from his plate at me. In place of the cruel smirk I had almost expected, there was a heat, a serious look in his eyes, on his face, that almost felt a little too intense while I sat there feeling like every ounce of color had drained out of my face with embarrassment.

“That’s something I wanna know,” he said.

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