Chapter 3: The Only Safe Seat
For a moment neither of them moved. Ryan's hand was still around Maya's wrist, and the music through the open door at the corridor's end sounded obscenely cheerful, a piano — not hers — picking its way through a tune meant for dancing.
Then she understood, with the clarity fear sometimes gives instead of taking away, that he was waiting for her to choose the smaller shame: to make a scene and be talked about, or to go quietly and be gone. She had chosen quietly once, in solicitors' offices and in a doorway with one bag in her hand, because she had thought quiet was survivable. She was done choosing it.
She wrenched, not back but sideways, the way Joe, who had boxed in his youth, had once shown a new waitress how to break a drunk's grip without spilling a tray. Her wrist came free, stinging. She did not rub it. She walked.
Her legs carried her out of the corridor, past Joe's startled face at the bar, past table five and table eight, on a diagonal she would not have dared on any ordinary night of her life. The room seemed to slow around her tray-less hands. She was not carrying anything now. She had no professional reason to be walking where she was walking. She was crossing, in front of everyone, to the VIP booth.
Vincent saw her coming before anyone else at his table did. She knew it by the stillness that came over him — not surprise, exactly; attention, complete and immediate. The O'Donnell elder was speaking, gesturing gently with a spoon. Tony had half turned, his prosecutor's eye already measuring her approach for intent.
Maya's courage, which had been enough for the corridor, nearly failed at the edge of the booth's pool of lamplight. This was madness, and she knew how it would look, and she apologised for it the only way she could without words: with her eyes, directly into Vincent's, as plainly as she had ever asked anyone for anything. I'm sorry. I know. Please.
She sat on Vincent Corso's lap as if she belonged there.
She did it as women in films did it, and as she had never done anything in her life — sideways, graceful by desperation, one hand finding the back of the booth rather than his shoulder, because even now some steadfast part of her would not presume to hold on to him. Her heart was going so hard she was certain he could feel it. She arranged her face into the expression of a girl entirely at ease, a boss's girl arriving late and unembarrassed, and waited to be put off like a bad joke, politely or otherwise, in front of two families.
Vincent understood instantly. She felt the understanding happen — not in any movement at first, but in the absence of the wrong ones. He did not startle. He did not push her away, or laugh, or look to his guest for cues. After a breath his arm settled loosely around her waist, loose enough that she could feel the deliberate space in it, the room he was leaving her to move away the second she chose. His hand rested, open, at her side, touching cloth and nothing presumptuous. He was warm and very still, and he smelled faintly of cedar and the coffee he had not finished.
He leaned close, as a man might to murmur something sweet and proprietary for the benefit of the table, and said, low, for her alone: "Stay close. No one touches you while you're with me."
"Thank you," she whispered, without moving her smiling mouth more than she had to. "I'm sorry. I'm so — "
"Smile at me," he said, in the same low tone, almost amused, "as if I've said something better than that. You're doing well. Keep looking at me, not at the door."
She did. It was easier than she expected and harder. Close, he was not the remote owner at the end of the room but a man of her own approximate weather: lines at the corners of his eyes, a faint scar through one eyebrow she had never been near enough to notice, an expression of calm that she understood now was worked at, like a pianist's ease. She smiled at him as instructed, and the smile, embarrassingly, became a little real with relief.
"Vincent," Tony said mildly, "you've been keeping secrets from your own table."
"Forgive me," Vincent said, turning back to his guest with unhurried ease, Maya still in place as if she had been factored into the evening's arrangements all along. "Maya keeps her own hours. I don't argue with them. You were saying, about the licence — she won't repeat a word. She never hears shop when she's off the clock, do you, cara?"
"Never," Maya said, and was proud that her voice came out light. "I only hear the music."
The elder studied her for a moment with eyes that had assessed rooms for fifty years, then inclined his head, accepting the theatre or the fact of it — it came, for his purposes, to the same thing. "A man should be interrupted by worse things," he said graciously, and the table's tension sighed out into courtesy again. Someone laughed. Tony signalled for a fresh glass to be brought for her, which Maya held and did not drink, and the dinner resumed around her like a river resuming around a stone.
It was Tony, turning ten minutes later to refill the elder's water, who let her know without seeming to. "Your friend from the door is watching," he said, in the tone of a man remarking on the weather. "He hasn't moved from the bar."
Maya did not look. Vincent's arm, still loose, still leaving her the choice of distance, was all the instruction she needed. "I know," she said.
"He looks," Tony observed, "like a man revising an arithmetic he'd thought he'd finished."
Across the room, Ryan stood at the bar with an untouched drink in his hand and his wet coat over his arm, no longer smiling as if he belonged anywhere he chose. He watched his former fiancée sit at ease — apparently, convincingly at ease — in the lap of Vincent Corso, in Corso's own house, under Corso's protection plainly and publicly claimed, and Maya saw the moment the revision reached its sum. He set the drink down, precisely, as if the bar had offended him.
He did not come toward them. That was the thing she would remember later, more than the corridor, more than her own audacity. With every reason of habit to cross the room and assert himself, Ryan Cole looked at Vincent Corso once, directly, and did not come.