I tell her mine is cybersecurity and she raises an eyebrow. "You don't seem like a computer guy."
I turn my hand over, showing her the grease under my fingernails from working on bikes at the clubhouse that morning. "I contain multitudes."
She laughs deep and hard.
Short, surprised out of her, like a bird startled off a branch.
Her hand comes up to cover her mouth and then drops, and for one second she looks like someone who forgot to be guarded.
The sound sits in my chest for the rest of the day.
At Backroads, we overlap on Thursday and Friday nights. I'm there because Ellie still needs help and because prospects go where they're needed.
Saylor's there because she works.
Behind the bar, the space is narrow. Two people moving in it means proximity, and being close means I learn things about her I didn't know from sitting one seat away in a lecture hall.
The way she smells. Something clean, not perfume, like soap and citrus.
The way her hands move. Confidently, no wasted motion. The opposite of how they look in class when she's gripping her pen too tight.
The way she holds space. Aware of where I am at all times without looking, the way you're aware of a wall or a counter.
And the way the air between us is starting to change.
It's not sudden. It's tidal. A slow pull, incremental. You don't notice until you look down and realize the water is at your ankles.
A brush of fingers when she hands me a glass. Eye contact held a moment longer than the sentence requires.
The way she moves around me behind the bar, close enough to touch, close enough for me to feel her warmth without contact, and neither of us mentioning the gap or closing it.
I don't act on it. Acting on attraction is the behavior of a man who trusts his instincts, and I am not that man.
My instincts told me Kinsey was safe. My instincts told me her questions were innocent.
My instincts are compromised witnesses and I don't put them on the stand.
But Saylor isn't Kinsey. The thought surfaces unbidden, again and again, and I push it down because the thought itself is an instinct and I don't trust those either.
Friday night after the soft reopening. Backroads is closed, the last customers gone, the parking lot empty except for her Honda and my Harley.
Ellie left an hour ago and Tildie before that.
Beats is in the kitchen finishing cleanup, his headphones on.
Saylor is behind the bar, wiping down the taps. I'm stacking chairs.
We've been alone before. In the statistics classroom after everyone leaves, in the parking lot between our vehicles.
But this is different. Closed room at midnight with low lighting and nobody watching, the distance between us reduced to a bar counter and a decision.
I carry the last chair to its stack and turn around.
She's at the sink, her back to me, rinsing a rag. The overhead light catches the line of her neck where her hair is pulled up.
I should say goodnight. Walk out, get on my bike, ride back to the compound where my laptop is waiting with access logs I need to review because the anomaly from eight days ago has happened twice more and each time the intruder stayed longer.
I should do a lot of things.