her lipstick—with a few minutes to spare before her first appointment.
* * *
ALEXSEI PRETENDED HE didn’t realize how often he found himself looking up at the door. She liked to work the late afternoon into evening several nights a week to couple her schedule to take advantage of the happy-hour-booze-and-a-haircut specials at the bar, which opened and began serving at four in the afternoon.
Smart.
She knew her clientele. Knew they enjoyed a drink after they left their jobs in the offices crammed downtown. It had been her idea to do the happy hour shave and drink specials they were now famous for.
He liked to see Maybe in the afternoons. Liked the way the sunlight would hit her while she worked. Essentially, he liked seeing her whenever she was around.
It was thinking of her that had gotten him through what had been a truly monstrously awkward late breakfast with his mother and aunt. There’d been posturing, as always, between the two sisters. Lots of passive-aggressive commentary. He and Cris had eaten and tried to talk around all the tension.
He frowned, thinking of it all over again, but this time when he looked up from his work, there she was standing in the doorway, always pausing just a moment as she came in like she greeted the walls and floors as much as everyone else.
Another thing that got to him. She seemed to love the physical space as much as he did.
She looked extra...that is, very whatever it was she exuded when she wore those pants. Maybe was a jumble of old and new in all the best ways. Hard and soft. She looked feminine and fierce and it set his heart pounding.
“Afternoon, class.”
Why he loved it so much when she was ridiculous and irreverent he wasn’t sure. But it was true anyway.
She glided around the shop, taking her coat off, touching base with their office manager and the other barbers until she stood at his station, a hand on her hip.
“I have no treats for you today. Sorry,” she told him with a pretty smile.
She was his treat. One he’d decided to let himself enjoy.
“We had a family breakfast so Irishka was with me instead of loading you down with food.” She’d mentioned Maybe in front of his mother several times. Alexsei was pretty certain it was her way of encouraging him toward Maybe and probably also rubbing it in that she was able to give him advice on something his mother hadn’t known about until right then.
He expected to hear all about that at some point from his mother, who’d hoard it until she needed it as ammunition to lob at him.
Alexsei had, for long moments, wanted to tell her, wanted to share with her this delicious new thing he’d planned to pursue. It had been right there on the tip of his tongue but then he’d realized he didn’t know if he could trust his mother the way he did his aunt. Which made him sad, but he had only so much time for sadness.
“I love it that you call her Irishka. It’s very sweet. I haven’t had bread from a grocery store in years. I’m not sure I could go back now. How is your mother’s visit so far?” Maybe headed to her chair and began to set up.
“Fine.” She’d been annoyed to have to go to breakfast so early. If you could call 10:00 a.m. early and his aunt most assuredly did not. And his mother had insisted on a hotel downtown so they’d gone to meet her there where some sort of bizarre one-upmanship had begun between the sisters.
“How long is she here for?” Maybe asked.
“Three days. She needs to get back because my youngest sister has something, an event of some sort in Moscow. She’ll be there on a school holiday.”
“That’s right. You have two little sisters.”
He nodded.
“Too bad they’re not with her on this visit. This is one of those Seattle Novembers all the tourism guides will be using to sell vacations here for years.”
Alexsei didn’t know his sisters very well, though he and his brother certainly wished they did. They were far younger—fifteen and sixteen years—and products of his mother securing her place at the side of her third husband, who happened to be a gangster as well as a vulgar asshole.
“Have you given your mom a tour of Whiskey Sharp? I can’t recall ever meeting her in the time I’ve worked here. I bet she was so proud when you did.”
In the sixteen years since he and Cristian had arrived at SeaTac to move in with his aunt and uncle, their mother had visited six times. The last time she’d been in town, four years before, he’d driven her over, so proud to show off this business he’d begun to build.
She hadn’t bothered to do more than glance through the front window, comment on the neighborhood and get back into the car after telling him she hoped he had good insurance or could she give him a loan for a better location.
All he said was “She’s seen it.”
The understanding on Maybe’s face might have made him uncomfortable a year ago and it certainly did right then. Only in a way that was new. More intimate, therefore a lot more terrifying.
That was, he thought, what being with her would be like. She saw straight to the heart of things and of people. An attractive quality, but a fearsome one too.
Maybe’s client came in and she waved him her way, their conversation done for the time being, but she gave Alexsei a look over her shoulder that told him she saw through his bullshit.
And though she’d asked him more questions than usual, she’d understood he didn’t want to say more and didn’t push.
She didn’t have to really because he couldn’t stop thinking about her. She worked efficiently as always, flirting and laughing with her clients. As the afternoon stretched into evening, Whiskey Sharp filled up with people drinking and getting shaves and haircuts. The sound level rose but it never got so raucous he was worried.
In fact, he used it to hide behind as the time for him to leave for dinner at his aunt and uncle’s house approached.
Slower than usual, he cleaned his workspace and his tools as the light wisped into full dark.
“So.”
Startled, Alexsei focused on Maybe, who stood so close he could smell her. Today it was what he liked to think of as her autumn scent. He’d never say that aloud, naturally, but she changed up her products over the course of the year. In the summer she smelled of heady, luscious flowers and sometimes of coconut and mango. Autumn she was always spicy and rich.
“Hello?” she asked, getting his attention back from where he’d been imagining leaning in and taking a sniff.
“I apologize,” he told her. Why was she so close? He had no ability to be in a space where she was like that because it shredded the control he normally used to keep himself firmly in the friend category.
His breath was full of her. Of her scent. Her heat. The soft sound of her breath was suddenly the only thing he heard.
If he dodged, just a step in either direction,
