They all say desperation has a smell, they were right. Tonight smelled like cheap whiskey, cigarret smoke and a particular brand of regret that came from dancing heels two sizes too tight.
Alora Jones countend wrinkled bills from her apron for what seemed like the fifth time.
Forty-seven dollars, only forty-seven dollars, and yet she needed two hundred and twelve dollars for her mother's medication co-pay which was due by 9:00 AM the next day. Alora wanted the bills in her hand to change so badly, that she was now joining her palms together for a prayer. Hoping that a short prayer would changer her current situation.
But ever since she was nineteen. Alora had stopped expecting miracles and now she was twenty-two, counting wrinkled notes in the bar bathroom mirrors and calling it life.
Her reflection in the mirror appeared tired, her brown hair which she hadn't had time to throughly brush before reporting for duty, was twisted up and stabbed into bun with a pen. In a uniform that didn't fit exactly right across the shoulders. Derek her manager ordered for medium size, no matter what size the body wearing it.
Her mascara was all messed up from crying for two minutes.
Alora quickly tucked the money she had into her bra this was the place she felt safe keeping it. She pulled her skirt back into place. Put on some lipstick that was the last thing she needed to do before she opened the bathroom door.
The music, in the bar was really loud she could feel the beat coming up through her shoes the air hot and sticky. Bittersweet cocktails slopped over and laughter pitched her perfect degree of diffusion for sounds above distress humans. Saturday night at Velvet Lounge offered a crash course in all the ways people could escape themselves.
Men who drank to to forget what they owed. Women with overdone make-up laughing too hard at things that weren't funny.
Alora weaved herself throught it all with a practiced invisibility of someone who had worked rooms like this since she was a child. Keeping a smile plasted on her face, deep in her heart she counted the minutes to her break through.
"Lora," This was her work name.
Derek her manager stepped out of the gloom, phone in hand and eyes looked on the screen.
Alora turned in his direction.
"Get your lazy ass to table seven. And tip well if you smile."
"I always smile." She mumbled.
"Smile like you mean it." He warned.
She always meant. Smiling was her gift that nobody fully appreciated and yet they enjoyed seeing her smile. Alora Jones had been smiling at undeserving faces most of her adult life and she never stopped.
Table seven was a fortieth birthady in the mood for four rounds of shots, and two pitchers.
Two hours later they had left a thirty-dollar tip on a two hundred and forty dollar bill and strewn streamers all over the floor that she'd be cleaning up later. She did not stop smiling.
She picked up the streamers. Threw them away, in the trash can. When that was done she started thinking about the money she had made. And adding the forty-seven dollars with the thirty dollars. That was seventy-seven dollars now, and still the money wasn't enought yet.
But that was before Derek came and snatched her tip from her including the forty seven dollars from before.
And now she was back to sqaure one, she had no money on her now. Meaning she had to start from scracth to look for the money her mother needed for her medication. She had to stay till the call and meaning she'd get home around five a.m. and back out again by six-thirty for her opening shift at the diner.
Ninety minutes of sleep. She could operate because she was used to this, she had done it before.
She was still running numbers when she first noticed the man in the corner booth.
She almost didn't.
A man in a dark suit who had got a comfortable in the the rear booth, an untouched glass of something amber before him, watching the room with cool registry attention as though he were someone appraising property for sale.
Brown hair, dark suit no tie, and eyes that she saw for a split second through the shigting sound in the room before she looked away.
Strange.
She didn't know a finer name for it. The color was brown around the edges. In the middle the eyes were hot, electric and almost blue like lightning trapped in a glass. She had never seen eyes like the eyes, in her life.
She kept moving.
Circled the floor once more. And settled a grievance at table four picked up a card that had fallen onto the floor. A women in a red dress that cost more than Alora's monthly rentm was seating on table four. Her friends and her were laughing loudly at something she had said.
"E-excuse me." Alora stuttered touching the edge of the table. "I think you dropped this."
The woman in the dress looked down at the card that Alora was holding out to her. And looked back at Alora with full disgust and snatched the card from Alora's fingers without saying anything.
When Alora passed by the corner booth for the third time, the man in black was still staring at her.
Alora took a deep breath, before walking up to the man, in black.
"Hi there." She stopped, order pad in hand, voice in that key she saved solely for late-night customers, polite enough not to start a scene. "Can I get you a refill, or?"
"Sit down." His words landed without volume.
"Excuse me?"
"I said," He glanced at her then. Directly. And in close, the emphatic storm-centric eyes were much starker than they had looked from across the room.
"Sit down. I need to speak with you."
"I'm still working," she said.
"I know." Something changed in his face not contempt, exactly, but its collateral relative of distaste that only one who has tasted better things can express and starts quietly comparing mentally. "I've been watching you work. Sit down, Miss Jones."
The fact that he knew her name, send her shivers.
She sat down without uttering a single word.
Ares Miller.
He introduced himself.
She knew the name. Everyone knew the name. For it resided chorally somewhere in the register of things that were more idea than flesh, Miller Industries, fourteen billion in diversified assets, that kind of intergenerational wealth not to do with cash after a point but something more weatherlike.
He was twenty-eight, yet he did not feel young. Youth implied softness, raw edges, the akward gracelessness of becoming. Ares Miller possessed the face of a man who got to wherever he was going way back and could not give less than two fucks how he even arrived.
"I'm only going to say this once," he continued.
He pushed a simple white envelope toward her across the table. The move of a man who had anticipated every potential outcome of this moment and then eliminated the unnecessary ones.
"I need a wife. Just Twelve months, not a day beyond that. The terms are in there. So is the compensation. You will have forty-eight hours to respond.
Alora looked at the envelope. She looked at his face. She looked back at the envelope.
"I think," she said slowly, "You are mistaking me for someone else."
"Alora Mae Jones. Twenty-two years old." There was no specific malice in the way he said it: That made it, in some sense, more so. "Currently three months behind on rent at Hillside Apartments, Unit 4B. Your mother, Carol Anne Jones, was hospitalized at St. Helena Medical Center in September with stage-three leukemia. Her existing standard treatment protocol is priced approximately."
"Stop." She hadn't intended to hit the word so hard. A whole lot harder than she'd known it would. Something sparked in his eyes surprise, but it passed so quickly she could have imagined it. I guess no one interrupted him much Or maybe nobody interrupted him at all.
"Stop calling my mother like she's some fucking research dossier."
The silence that followed had a texture. He stared at her across the small table for two, and she stared back at him, and the bar keep was still sounded around them as if he had no particular stake in this moment.
"Open it," he said at last.
She shouldn't have. Every instinct she had, and she had very good instincts honed over years of reading rooms and people and that particular lexicon of situations about to become bad told her to stand up, walk back into the noise, spend the rest of the night trying to forget those unusual eyes.
Her hands were outstretched for the envelope, nevertheless.
Inside: a contract. Four pages, clean type, lawyer talk that cost by the syllable. She turned first to the last page, because that was where the number lived.
Five million dollars.
The room kept moving. A person sitting near the bar laughed out loud. The bass began transforming into something denser and more lethargic. A glass shattered somewhere in the back and someone cheered. All of that was happening, indifferent and unrelenting, as she sat in a corner booth with five million dollars here on the table and the most deadly man she'd ever met was staring at her like what? She had no category for such a thing.
She recalled the co-pay for the medication. But the three months' back rent? About the stack of hospital bills she had lined up in order of urgency rather than amount because paying them by amount would have broken her;
She thought of her mother, who in the year and a half since they had received the diagnosis had never once asked Alora for anything other than please come if you can, don't change your life for me, which was the saddest thing she'd ever heard and also the one thing she most wholly ignored.
She looked up from the contract.
"Why me?" she asked.
"And that's not one of those conditions."
"I'm making it one."
He regarded her. She was getting the impression she was constantly doing things he hadn't modeled for her, and that this raised his hackles to a degree even below little lower than that at which it would have mustered actual annoyance. He held up his glass — the one he hadn't touched in how long it had been he'd just been sitting here, turned it over once in his palm and set it down again.
"My father," he said. "Chose you."
He said it like someone who is faced with something perceived to be at once inconvenient and baffling. Like it had been a variable plug into an otherwise crystalline equation that would not reduce.
Alora stared at him.
She thought about Tuesday mornings. About chess on slow shifts. About a man with skin stretched paper-thin over ancient bones who had looked over table space at her across their coffee and said: I've never seen anyone take you down to nothing and get away with it.
"Your father," she said, her voice very careful, very level. "Is James."
Ares said nothing. His jaw creaked, a bit, where it had just held something very still and by force.
"James Anthony Miller," she said.
Something happened to Ares's face. She wouldn't have called it breaking nothing about him had suggested such a possibility but a crack, fine and sped through his marble. There and gone. A slight crack in the facade of someone who was not used to being blindsided.
"Apperantly," he said.
It was one word with the weight of a thousand things he wasn't going to say.
Alora closed the contract, and folded the envelope carefully. Putting it on the table between them.
"No" she said, her teeth tightly clenched.
Taking a moment to collect her thoughts, she said.
"I want to make one thing clear "
Ares waited silently for her to continue.
"I'm not doing it because you walked into this bar like you invented oxygen and thought I would be the most convenient way to fix your problem." She looked into his eyes.
He gazed at her for a long time.
"Is that a yes?" he said.