Perfect Pairing (16 page)

“Doesn't look like anyone's waiting up for you,” Sully said to Ian as they pulled up in front of the little yellow house. She once again noted how modest the place was. With the way Quinn had raked in money at the pop-up, she was obviously good at her job. And she never seemed to rest. You'd think she'd at least have something swank to show for it.

“Quinn's probably working.”

“It's almost nine.”

“Yeah, she's been on one of her obsessive streaks this week,” Ian said, reaching for the leftovers he'd bagged up to take home.

Hal's stomach tightened. She'd avoided Quinn partially out of her own embarrassment and partially because she probably wasn't embarrassed enough not to make another mistake.

Sully looked pointedly at Hal. “She's been at the office until nine o'clock all week?”

“All weekend, too.” Ian sounded nervous.

Did he know something had happened between them? Or was he just worried about his sister? His concerns sparked a few of her own.

“Does she do this often?” Hal finally cut in.

“Just when she's freaking out over something,” he admitted. “But she's probably not at the office this late. She doesn't like to let other people know she's upset. I bet she's hiding out at Domski's.”

Hal and Sully exchanged another look, and Hal shrugged. She'd lived in Buffalo her whole life and had never heard of a Domski's.

Hal bit her lip. She didn't like this. She didn't like feeling responsible for Quinn. She didn't like feeling guilty. She didn't like the little twinge in her gut that she knew wouldn't go away until she sorted things out. None of this should've been her problem. It wasn't fair, but if anyone understood how stupidly unfair life got, she had to rank pretty high on that list.

“Thanks for the ride,” Ian said, seemingly oblivious to the turmoil chewing at Hal. “See you Thursday for lunch?”

“Yeah.” Sully swung open the door for him to hop out, then stared at Hal, the question passing silently between them. She didn't have to say what she was thinking. Fifteen years of friendship was enough for Hal to read her mind.

With a heavy sigh, she nodded for Sully to follow him.

Sully raised her eyebrow in a “you sure?” sort of way.

She nodded again, this time less certainly. She wasn't at all sure what she was doing or why.

“Be careful,” Sully mouthed, then jogged after Ian.

“Yeah . . . careful,” Hal said to the now-empty truck. Going after Quinn might make her a lot of things, but careful certainly wasn't one of them.

Chapter Eleven

When she'd searched for a Domski's in Buffalo, she thought the results on her phone had to be wrong. The Cheektowaga neighborhood that came up on the map wasn't the worst in town, but it wasn't the best, either—especially at this time of night. If Quinn needed a drink, there were nicer bars much closer to her house. This place wasn't what she would've picked for her at all. The building wasn't even built for business. It was little more than a run-down house with a clearly new extra-wide door and a wooden ramp. A couple of neon signs hung in the lower windows, and a hand-painted sandwich board on the front porch advertised drink specials. Hal couldn't think of a single logical reason for Quinn to ever set foot in a dive like this, and yet her car was parked in the broken asphalt parking lot.

Hal checked to make sure the back door of the truck had locked securely, then hopped out. The night wasn't as warm as one would expect for the end of June, not that anyone should ever really expect heat in Buffalo, but the windows were all open. She could hear the dull chatter of a T.V. announcer, but little more. There didn't even seem to be a jukebox playing, and when she pushed open the door, she saw why. Aside from four old men perched on stools at the end of the bar closest to the T.V. there didn't seem to be anyone else there. Especially not Quinn.

A man came out of a room to the side of the bar and eyed her skeptically. “You lost? Your car broke down?”

What a welcome. “No, I was just looking for someone.”

“Found someone, you have,” he said with a smile that Hal couldn't help but return.

“Right. How about a beer then, Yoda.”

“What kind?”

“I'm not fancy. Whatever you have on tap.”

He nodded and took a few uneven steps to the tap, then poured her something amber with a decent head. At least the beer wasn't flat, which meant they did enough business to keep the kegs rotated. Yoda slid the glass across the bar to her, then began to pour something else. She watched as he tipped a healthy dose of gin into a glass, then added a squirt of tonic water and a scoop of ice.

He carefully sidestepped back over to her and leaned in, his sparkling blue eyes becoming conspiratorial. “She's in the back corner.”

“What?” Hal turned around and squinted through the dim light. Sure enough, she could see just the top of a blond head above the dark green booth back. “How'd you know?”

“She's been in here every night this week.”

Her muscles tensed. “That's unusual?”

“It's usually a couple times a month. Normally I'd be flattered a beautiful woman couldn't stay away, but she's not here to see me anymore than you are.”

“So you figured we must be here for each other?”

“The Taliban got my leg, not my brain.”

She looked over the bar as he pointed to an artificial limb protruding from the tattered leg of his cargo shorts.

“Though between you and me, the leg was more useful than the brain some days.” He grinned again, and she laughed outright.

Extending her hand she said, “I'm Hal Orion.”

“Dominick Piotroski the third.” His shake was firm and friendly. “Welcome to Domski's.”

“This your place?”

“My grandfather built it and passed it down, mostly. Now Quinn owns a stake, but she'd never admit it.”

“Quinn?”

“Yeah.” He laughed. “Go figure, right? Of all the gin joints in all of Buffalo, she's got the bank note on mine.”

Hal didn't even know what to say. Poor guy. Lost his leg in a wretched war only to come back and lose ownership of his bar to a
control freak in a business suit. And still, he didn't seem the least bit angry.

“Does she work in here to keep an eye on you?”

“She likes to bust my balls about better lighting and nicer furniture.”

“Sounds about right.”

“No, not really. She's never once pulled rank,” he said seriously. “Doesn't even like me talking about it. I always tease her that I'm her dirty little Polish secret. What would all the other bankers say if they knew she laid down her personal coin so a guy like me could get a wheelchair into a place that should probably be torn down?”

Hal's chest tightened as the picture came together.
Her personal coin
. The bank didn't run these little business ventures. Quinn did, and she wasn't investing to pad her own account. Hal glanced around the bar again, seeing the improvements differently now. The ramp out front, the wide door, the extra space between the tables and the booths, they were all handicap accessible. And Quinn's little house, her midsized sedan . . . she didn't live the high life because she'd been using her money to help guys like Dom make a living.

“Shit,” she muttered. “I didn't know.”

“She likes it that way,” he said. “It's like her secret identity. I'm the bionic man, she's some sexy Mother Teresa.”

“Sexy Mother Teresa?”

He shrugged. “I'm kind of a lapsed Catholic.”

She laughed, then looked over her shoulder again. Any other time she would've been content to sit here chatting with Dom all night. A sense of humor like his didn't come along very often, but then again, apparently neither did women like Quinn.

“Mind if I join you?”

Quinn looked up from her laptop screen and blinked. She thought maybe she'd been staring at the damn thing so long she'd begun to see visions, but even after she rubbed her tired eyes, Hal remained firmly planted in her line of sight.

“I mean, if you don't want me to, I won't, but . . . here's a G and T.” Hal held out a glass, and Quinn looked past her to Dom, who pretended like he wasn't paying attention.

She took the glass. She could use a refill, and it had better be a strong one. She didn't know what to make of having her sanctuary invaded. Her heart rate accelerated at the sight of Hal so close and still speaking to her, but she'd also worked hard to regain some control of her life over the last few days, and having her here, in this place, obviously constituted a setback on that front. All the emotions that threatened to consume her all week came rushing back. Guilt, embarrassment, arousal, they swirled inside her making her feel like someone had used her insides for a punching bag. Worst of all was the relief—no, make that joy—pushing at her chest and lungs.

She was happy to see Hal, even after what they'd put each other through, even after all the time she'd spent trying to convince herself that she needed to avoid her completely. She still wanted her to take the seat across from her, and damn it, that made her mad. “What are you doing here?”

“I came her to ask you the same thing.”

“I'm working.”

“In a dive bar at nine-thirty on a Tuesday night?”

“Yes.” She folded her arms across her chest. “And you made it very clear you didn't want anything to do with my work, so I don't see how it's any of your business now.”

Hal sighed. “You're right.”

“What?”

“You're right. It's none of my business.”

“Oh. Well.” The easy acceptance took some of the heat out of her argument. “Good.”

“And yet, here we are. So what if this isn't really about business at all?”

She didn't like Hal's implication. “It's always been just business.”

Hal slid into the booth opposite her and dropped her voice to an intimate register. “Always, Quinn?”

Her face flamed, and Quinn looked into her drink. She couldn't answer. Either she admitted there'd been moments where she'd
allowed her feelings to become dangerously revealing, or she said she'd slept with Hal only in order to ink a restaurant deal. The first option was a truth she couldn't imagine telling anyone, and the second was a lie she wouldn't tell even herself. Hal had backed her into a corner, and she resented it. She briefly entertained the idea of throwing the drink in her face, but instead she took another long, cool sip.

Control.

“You know what?” Hal said with a sigh. “Let's start over.”

Quinn raised an eyebrow over the rim of her glass.

“Let's say you and I just met, two native Buffalonians in a dark bar on a Tuesday night looking to get away from all the pressure for a while.”

“Sounds like some kinky role play.” It was a crass response to Hal's genuine peace offering, but she couldn't help herself. She'd come too close, made herself too vulnerable, and when that happened, she lashed out or shut down.

Hal wasn't easily shaken. “It doesn't have to be kinky. But yes, call it role play. Only I won't play the chef, and you don't play the banker. Let's play ourselves.”

“I
am
a banker.”

“I'm a foster kid.”

All the air drained from Quinn's lungs. The room seemed suddenly small, and everything else so far away.

“I grew up in and out of the system from the time I was four until I came of age,” Hal continued evenly, but she picked at the flimsy cardboard coaster under her beer. “That's where I met Sully, in one of our placements, one of the last ones. We were both fifteen, and we both had brown skin and Irish last names. The family we stayed with called us the Black Irish. We wondered if that's the reason they didn't want to keep us, our skin color, but it could have been they saw us for the budding queers we were.”

“Hal.” Quinn reached across the table and took her hand. The move surprised her, and it seemed to catch Hal off guard too, but she didn't pull away. “I don't see how anyone could have not wanted to keep you.”

“Some of them did. Early on. The first time I was in the system,
when I was four. I don't remember the family very well, but they seemed nice, a mom and dad and a dog. Funny, I remember the dog more than the dad.” She smiled. “But my mother came back.”

“Your mother?” Strange, she'd never thought of Hal having a mother, and somehow the revelation that she'd been in the foster system bolstered that silly thought. Didn't people who put their kids in foster care abandon them? She'd heard of kids being taken away from bad homes, but she'd never considered what it might be like to go back to one.

“Emily, my mother,” Hal said the name casually, but her mouth turned down in a quick frown. Quinn recognized the flash of pain and its fast burial. How hard had she worked to convince herself it didn't hurt anymore? “She grew up in the system, too. I guess it's sort of a family tradition. Dom's dad gave him a bar. My mother gave me the same life she knew. Only she didn't, really. She didn't let go.”

“She didn't relinquish custody?”

“No. She'd had a lot of bad experiences. She wanted better for me, but she had a problem with painkillers.”

“An addict?”

“Yeah. She tried. She fought. In and out of rehab, which means I went in and out of her care until I was fifteen. Then it was too late. No one adopts a fifteen-year-old.”

“I don't know what to say. I've heard the foster system in this country is a mess, but I've never known anyone who lived it.”

“Oh it's broken all right,” Hal said, then took a swig of her beer. “It needs a lot of work. There are plenty of people in it for the money, but there are a lot of good people, too. A lot of people who want to make it better, like any major system, I guess. A lot of ups and downs, but for me the only thing worse than being a part of the system was not being a part of it. You know?”

Quinn shook her head. She didn't know. God, Hal had been so right when she'd screamed at Quinn in the kitchen. She didn't know. She had no idea.

“At least when I had a foster home, I knew where to go at night. I knew where to get some food, even if there wasn't a lot of it. I knew
where I could get a coat even if it wasn't mine, even when I realized none of it would ever really be mine.”

“I'm so sorry.” What else could she say? Hal had been robbed not only of her own family, she'd been robbed of multiple second chances. What must that do to a person over the course of fourteen years? “I didn't know.”

“There wasn't any reason for you to know. I don't dwell on the past. I didn't see any reason to tell you, but maybe I should have. The popup brought up a lot of memories, things I don't like to think about because they aren't ever going to change. What's the point of diving back in?” Hal looked up, her dark eyes deep and mournful. “But sometimes you get pushed back in.”

Quinn listened the best she could through the rush of her own pulse in her ears and the muted echo of previous conversations.
You don't understand
, Hal had said. Families that weren't hers, food that would remain after she was gone, the restaurant Quinn had offered that would never really be Hal's. All the anguish finally made sense.

“I'm sorry I snapped on you the other night. You tripped a trigger, and while I still think you should've talked to me about it beforehand, it's not fair to hold you responsible for dredging up things you never knew existed.” Hal smiled sadly, wistfully. “The pop-up reminded me that all the amazing things in life will only ever be temporary.”