* * *
Tori finished her cold coffee with a big gulp and signaled the waitress currently flirting with another customer for a refill. It was the worst coffee she’d ever had, but she didn’t care, too busy watching the sidewalk for any sign of Jessica returning from court. The café was just down the street from the courthouse. They were supposed to meet here after Jessica finished with all the clerical crap and go for a triple whiskey with a side of lunch. Tori had managed to snag a prime seat by the window early in the morning, which was good, because hours later the place was starting to get packed with the power lawyer lunch crowd and seats were no longer to be had.
“Can I get you something else?” asked Destynee, the annoyed waitress, already holding Tori’s check. She was not happy with Tori hogging the best table in her section for so long on nothing but coffee and a Danish, so Tori tried not to hold it against her.
She gave the gum-chewing teenager a patient smile, mentally reducing the huge tip she’d planned to leave for letting her stay so long. “Just the coffee, please. I’m waiting for someone.” Still no calls or messages from Jessica. What was taking so long? She’d e-signed the confidentiality agreement an hour ago. It didn’t take an hour to file a little paperwork.
“Honey, if he hasn’t shown by now, he ain’t coming. Have some self-respect.”
It wasn’t that she’d made an assumption, or that she had the nerve to say it to Tori’s face. It was that she’d said it so loud, the people closest to them paused in their conversation to stare.
Tori raised an eyebrow at the over-glammed girl with her hair teased up in a messy ponytail and chipped nail polish at the ends of her pallid fingers. She was tapping her foot! “How old are you?” Tori asked, tempering her voice with a great deal of self-restraint.
“Twenty-one. Why?”
“Because, honey, at that age you should have learned better manners.”
A waitress at another table gasped and dropped the ketchup bottle.
“What’d you say to me?”
“I said, you may give me my check now.” She was talking like her bitter aunt Tilda, but Tori didn’t care. Who the hell did this girl think she was?
Instead of putting it in her hand, Destynee, whose middle name was probably Chylde, slapped the mini folder on the table and waited.
“Really? That’s how you want to play this?”
“We’ve got a full house,” the girl said with a saccharine smile, cocking her hip with enough attitude to make several gazes drop to her ass. “I don’t have time to keep running back and forth to you all day. There’s a line of paying customers waiting for the table.”
By that point, said line of waiting customers were paying an awful lot of attention to their little conversation. Half a dozen lawyers strained their ears to hear what was being said. Three women with impeccable makeup took out their compacts to check out the drama. The other waitress had already run off, probably to summon the manager, but from the way the maître d’ rolled her eyes and shook her head, this wasn’t the first time Destynee had caused a scene at Marlee’s, and it wouldn’t be the last.
“Come on, lady, I’ve got work to do.”
Tori suddenly felt like smiling. “Enjoy it while it lasts.” She took out her wallet and counted out exact change for her three cups of cold, bitter dreck and a day-old Danish, half of which had stayed on the plate. Shouldering her bag, she pushed away from the table. “All yours.”
Destynee stepped into her path, clammy hand turned palm-up. “And my tip?”
You could cut the tension with a knife.
“Tip?” Tori repeated. “Oh, right. For your superb service and exquisite fare.” She could tell the girl didn’t have even the slightest grasp of sarcasm. Sad. So sad. “Okay, here’s one. Take care of your customers, and your customers will take care of you.”
The café fell dead silent.
Tori went around the waitress, her ears burning with the obscenities Destynee spat at her. She endured it through a crowd of suits who parted before her like the sea before Moses, down, down, down the length of the room, until she heard a four-letter word that stopped her in her tracks and made several people push to their feet in outrage.
Before they could leap to her defense, Tori snapped her fingers and turned around. “But, you know, I did spend an awful lot of time in your fine establishment, so I really do owe you a tip.”
“Damn right you do,” Destynee agreed.
Tori rummaged in her bag as the girl shoved her way forward. When she crowded aggressively close, Tori found what she’d been looking for and slapped the business card for her local Starbucks into the girl’s expectant hand. “Learn how to brew coffee.”
The café erupted into cheers the likes of which Tori hadn’t heard since the last playoffs. They were so loud, she couldn’t even hear Destynee screaming at her as she walked away. Thunderous applause and hearty slaps on the back swept her out onto the sidewalk, and she couldn’t help grinning at the sound of two dozen lawyers stomping their feet and chanting the Spartan battle cry from 300.
Tori shook her head. Jeans, sweatpants, power suit, or Styrofoam armor, it didn’t matter. A guy was a guy, was a guy.
She was still smiling when someone said her name.
Tori looked up and stopped in her tracks.
There he was. In the flesh. Exactly the way he’d looked as a hologram, except instead of jeans and a T-shirt, he wore a black suit with a tie hanging loose around his neck and the top three buttons of his shirt undone. He looked like he couldn’t believe this either, but then the shock on his face turned into something bitter as he jerked his chin at the café behind her.
“Celebrating?”
“What? No, I—”
“It’s cool. You earned it. Congratulations.” He turned on the balls of his feet and headed the other way.
“W-wait!” she called, and before she knew what the hell she was doing, Tori started following. “Where are you going?”
“Home,” he said over his shoulder. “You’ll be happy to know I’ve been ordered to stay away from you. So you don’t have to worry that I’ll bother you again. Ever.”
“Wait, stop.”
He didn’t.
“Ryan, please!”
He turned back around. “What? What do you want? You need me to call you a taxi? Order a food delivery? Water the garden? What?”
Taken aback, Tori forgot what she’d been about to say. “I wanted to thank you,” she said. “I… I never got to thank you for everything you did. If I knew you were real, I never would have… The whole reason I wanted a smart house was because I didn’t…” Not good enough. Tori had stood before a jury enough times to know when she was about to lose them, and she was losing Ryan fast. What did you say to someone you’d ordered around twenty-four seven for weeks before suing them for doing everything you’d asked, and more?
This was too strange. Ryan had gotten closer to her than anyone ever had before. He knew everything about her. Her habits, her flaws—she’d stripped down to nothing in front of him. But more than that, she’d told him things she’d never told anyone when she thought he was nothing more than a few lines of code and flashing lights.
And Tori didn’t know anything about him. She didn’t even know if Ryan was his real name, and it didn’t matter one bit. He’d saved her life. He’d wormed his way into her heart when her guard was down, and she couldn’t get him out, even knowing he was an illusion. She loved Ryan the hologram. She didn’t know Ryan the man.
But, God, she wanted to. How pathetic was that?
“They told me you were the one who called the cops,” she said, hugging herself against the familiar shivers of remembered trauma.
He noticed, and some of the hardness shifted loose from his expression.
“You saved my life. So, you know. Thank you.”
Ryan shoved his hands in his pockets. “Yeah, no problem.” He rocked back on his heels as if he couldn’t wait to get out of there.
>
If she let him walk away, Tori knew she’d never see him again. “Are you busy? I-I mean, you don’t have anywhere to be right this minute, do you?”
He shrugged. “Guess not.”
“Would you…” Tori cleared her throat. This was worse than high school prom. “Can I maybe buy you a drink? To thank you, I mean,” she added hastily. “It’s the least I can do.”
A group of lawyers came out of the café. “There she is,” one called, and all of them swarmed around Tori, shaking her hand and punching her shoulder like she’d just scored the winning goal. “Dragon lady! Epic set-down. I mean, ep-pic. You got style.” He noticed Ryan frowning and winked at him. “Better not let this one get away, my friend. There’s a café full of sharks back there just itching to snatch her up.”
Tori flushed beet-red as they ambled off. “That wasn’t embarrassing at all.”
Ryan looked after the retreating group, and then back to her. “Something tells me there’s a story behind that.”
“Not one I care to tell,” she muttered.
“Oh, now I insist.”
Tori blinked at him. He was daring her. Knight takes rook. Queen threatened. Check. She ought to be offended. She ought to feel threatened by another guy trying to push in on her. Instead, Tori felt butterflies in her stomach and just a hint of her backbone growing back at the blatant challenge. “Counter offer,” she said, crossing her arms to mirror his stance. “I’ll tell you about that, if you tell me how you ended up playing virtual bellhop with my smart house.”
“Hey, I prefer the term concierge, thank you very much.”
She shrugged. “Fair enough. Do we have a deal?”
He appeared to consider her proposal, and finally stuck his hand out.
Queen takes knight.
Tori reciprocated, and shook hands with the stranger who’d turned out to be the most important person in her life.
“Deal,” he said, gesturing toward the cluster of bars and restaurants down the street. “Pick your poison.”
“No. You pick this time.”
He grinned and took her to the corner Italian place they wouldn’t leave again until long after closing time.
It wasn’t perfect, and it wasn’t the instant connection little girls dream about, but it was real, and that was a start.
~ The End ~