"I don't have a doorway thing."
"You absolutely have a doorway thing. You stand in them and observe people like you're assessing a situation." She looked up over the top of her glasses. "I'm not a situation. I'm doing invoices."
"What do you do?"
"I run a yoga business during the day and do freelance bookkeeping at night." She turned back to the screen. "Very unglamorous. But it pays well when I need some extra money and I can do it anywhere, which is convenient given that I had to bring in a substitute to teach my classes and my apartment is apparently not somewhere I can be right now."
He pulled out the chair across from her and sat down. She glanced up, something in her eyes registering the proximity, and then looked back at her screen.
He poured himself coffee. Didn't say anything. He knew he should probably cut back on the coffee, but life is short and there were worse vices. The club always had a fresh pot of coffee brewing. It didn’t matter what time of day or night it was. Men were always at the gate which meant there was always good coffee available. If you took the last cup, you brewed the next pot. It was an unwritten rule.
After about two minutes, she said, "This doesn't bother you? Just sitting here?"
"No."
"Most people feel the need to fill the silence."
"Most people are uncomfortable with themselves."
She considered that. "Fair point." She typed something. "Are you always up late?"
"Usually."
"Why?"
"Habit."
She looked at him over the glasses again. She reminded him of a naughty librarian. He needed to keep his imagination to himself. "Delta Force habit or something else?"
"Both."
She nodded slowly, like she was filing that. "Do you want to talk about it?"
"No."
"Okay." She went back to her spreadsheet without missing a beat. Her ability to not push for more of an answer but accept it at face value landed somewhere it shouldn't have. She wasn’t the type of woman to nag or to demand more than he could give. He respected that.
They sat in quiet with the clock on the wall ticking loudly and somewhere down the hall Irish was watching television at a volume that suggested he might have some hearing loss from all the combat operations he’d survived.
"Can I ask you something?" Emily said.
"Yes."
"Savannah and her—" She stopped. Started differently. "The dynamic here. Between some of the couples." She closed her laptop halfway. "Is that something you… is that a club thing, or is it?—"
"It’s something very personal to each person," he said. "But also club-wide. We’re all Daddies. It isn’t a requirement for membership, just like finding like."
"And you all know about it."
"I know about everything in my club."
She took her glasses off and set them on the table. "Savannah said something to me this morning," she said. "And Nicole. And the way everyone is around me is—" She stopped again. Pressed her lips together. "I feel like everyone here knows something about me that I haven't said out loud."
Rampage looked at her across the table. The kitchen light was low and warm. She had a small scar above her left eyebrow, he'd noticed. Her coffee had gone cold an hour ago and she hadn't touched it.
"Maybe they recognize something," he said carefully.
"Because of the book club."