It took surprisingly less time than I would have thought for Ambrose to track me down. The following night, I spotted him as he stepped into the nightclub, looking around uncertainly, until his eyes fell on me at the bar.
Shoot. I’d hoped he wouldn’t figure it out that quickly – or at all – but I’d apparently underestimated his tenacity and resources.
Ambrose immediately made a beeline to the bar, looking more delighted to see me than a grown man had any right to be.
“Maddie!” He announced cheerfully, with a bit of a happy sigh. “It took me a while to track you down, I had to figure out who you visited in the complex and ask them. But I found you again!”
“Oh.” Shawna stepped back behind the bar with a fresh load of glasses. “The one who can’t take a hint. Need me to call the bouncers?”
Ambrose looked a little affronted, and I reluctantly sighed and shook my head. “I’ll handle him.”
I jerked my head at Ambrose so he’d head to the side of the bar, where there weren’t quite so many people. Once he got there, I fixed him with an openly unhappy glare.
“What are you doing here?”
“Finding you,” he explained happily. “And I’ll order a drink so I’m not just chatting, I can be a proper customer, you know. But I really need to talk to you! I can’t just find you again and then let you walk out of my life without any explanations. We have to catch up! And you haven’t given me your number yet.”
His eagerness was a little daunting. I knew he was smart enough to realize I was trying to refuse to let him into my life, but he apparently was also deciding to just ignore that and demand in anyway. I’d always been bad at telling him no. I could have attributed that to the nature of our former relationship, but truth was, I wasn’t necessarily better at it now, even without that relationship in place.
“Your drink order, then?”
He obediently placed his order, then rested his chin in his hands, elbows on the bar, while he watched me make it.
“You look hot,” he announced abruptly. “The whole emo thing kind of works for you.”
The “whole emo thing” was just because that was the simplest look I could come up with which accounted for a hairstyle covering half my face. In the past, I’d tried just not hiding my eye or even wearing an eyepatch, but the hairstyle seemed to have the best effect on customers because then I looked mysterious, not weird.
“You don’t have anyone with you?” I asked politely, though I hoped he’d get my real question. I was wondering if he still had bodyguards around, because I hadn’t seen some the other day and he definitely didn’t have some today, either.
“Uh, dating, no. I tried a few times. This one girl I dated complained that I always compared her to you and she didn’t measure up, so she got mad and left.” He shrugged. “Mostly I’ve focused on other stuff.”
I set his drink in front of him and shook my head a bit. “The other kind of company,” I told him. When he still didn’t get it, I clarified a bit. “Like I used to be?”
“Oh. Oooh. No, not anymore. I did for a bit after you left, but once I turned 21, I kind of put some distance between my parents and people stopped relating us, so it wasn’t as necessary. Once I…changed things up a bit,” aka sort of started a new life with a new identity thanks to supernatural lifespans, “it was even less necessary, and I’ve kept it that way. You were great, but sometimes having someone hang around you all the time like that is just annoying.” He took a sip. “Oh, this is really good! You’re great at this.” Then he tilted his head to one side, studying me. “I’m kind of surprised you’re a bartender, though. Bouncer, I could see, but bartender is a little different. But since you’re skilled at it, I suppose it makes sense.”
I ignored his question. I had to pause the conversation for a bit while I attended to other patrons, well aware that the entire time I was making drinks for other people, Ambrose was just sitting there, quietly, drinking and watching me.
When I had another pause in customers, I drifted back over to his side of the bar.
“Can we talk, Maddie? For real?” He asked earnestly. “Please don’t just brush me off. I won’t give up on this, you know.”
I did know, unfortunately. I let out a little sigh and gave in. “Fine, but not here. Not enough privacy.”
He thought about that. “My place?”
I had no idea where his place was, but chances were it wasn’t close and I didn’t much like the idea of being dependent on him for a ride there and back. Especially the back part. If he was feeling uncooperative with letting me go, he very well might refuse to drive me back, and if the distance was far, it might be a bit of a pain – literally – to deal with. Plus, well, I didn’t know if his place had steps or anything and right now, given the state of my hip, I was trying to avoid those.
So reluctantly, I offered an alternative I knew he would like but that I might regret. “My place is closer. However, if you’re coming over, I need some ground rules. First, you’re not going to show up whenever you feel like it, and second, you will leave when I ask you to.”
Ambrose had looked excited at first, and now a little disappointed, but he obediently nodded again. “I promise,” he stated eagerly. “Your place! That’ll be cool.”
I sighed a little, already regretting this. “And I don’t get off for several hours. Wouldn’t it be better to just meet somewhere else during the daytime?”
“No, you promised me a visit to your place, I want that.” He frowned at me for a second before going back to happiness. “I’ll wait! It’s not a problem.”
True to his word, Ambrose waited patiently the entire night. He never left the bar, just watched me work and occasionally ordered refills or chatted about random things.
Shawna raised an eyebrow when she noticed him still there at closing time. “So much for leaving you alone, huh?”
“This might be one of those things where I just have to get it over with so he’ll be satisfied,” I grumbled a bit under my breath. “Don’t worry about it.”
We finished closing up and locked up the building, Ambrose on my heels as I headed the few blocks to my apartment. He didn’t say anything, just looked around curiously and trailed after me as we rode the elevator up and then entered my simple studio apartment.
“Sit wherever you like,” I informed him tiredly, tossing my keys in a bowl by the door.
Ambrose took a moment to slowly look around my place, then turned his attention back to me as I retrieved a bottle of water from the fridge. I grabbed a second one for him and then headed to the couch, him closely on my tail.
“So,” I asked as I sat down, “what is it you just have to talk about enough that you needed to question everyone in the building to find out who I was visiting and then show up at my workplace and hang around all night?”
He looked mildly affronted. “You, you big idiot! You were the closest thing I had to family growing up and then you nearly died, because of me, and I never got a chance to see you again.” His expression got more serious as he reached forward, tucking my hair behind my ear so he could see my blind eye. “How are you, really?”
“How much do you know?” I wasn’t about to inform him about things he didn’t already know.
“Leo wouldn’t tell me everything until I was older, but he said you lost your vision in one eye and they had to reconstruct one of your joints or something.” Ambrose’s serious expression was almost unnerving.
It was pretty obvious, looking at my eye, that it wasn’t normal. It was almost pure white, the pupil and iris clouded over. It wasn’t a huge guess to figure out that I couldn’t see out of that eye.
“And you’re working as a bartender now,” he went on. “I’m hoping that’s because you like it, but…is it? What all happened to you after that?”
I leaned my head back a bit, staring at the ceiling for a second as I internally cursed his shrewdness and tried to come up with the best answers I could. “Thanks for coming back,” I said instead. “You saved my life with that. But at the same time,” I gave him a stern look, “I told you to run. Away. You could have gotten killed if Leo hadn’t been there with you.”
He waved off my concerns. “I was never going to just leave you, my goal was to run get help. Like I said, you were the closest thing I had to real family – my parents weren’t family, and Leo didn’t start to try to be family until later. There was no way I was just leaving you there, but I did know I needed some sort of help. I wasn’t sure if I could find anyone in time, and then when I saw Leo, I thought at first he wouldn’t be any help, but I decided I’d rather take some help than risk waiting any longer, because I knew you were in danger. Thankfully he turned out to be able to handle the situation better than I could, but then,” his face drew in a bit, “you were just – hurt. So much. So much blood everywhere. I didn’t know what to do and then we got you to the hospital and my parents practically dragged me away. I hated them for that, when they wouldn’t let me see you again and then insisted on firing you despite my pleading. I begged them outright, but they had made up their minds.” He did look pissed off, which wasn’t a look I was familiar with on him.
“I was fine,” I told him, hoping to calm down some of the anger he apparently still carried about that event, even after all these years. “I recovered okay, but I figured it was best to get out of town since it had become a news sensation, so people wouldn’t keep asking me about it. Start somewhere fresh.” I shrugged a bit. “I’ve sort of worked random jobs since then. Just…going through life. That’s it. Nothing super exciting. I work as a bartender because I’m good at it and it pays the bills. No big secret there.”
His brows furrowed a bit, like he guessed I was kind of leaving out a lot of information. I mean, I was summarizing almost 75 years here.
“Well…do you need anything?” He glanced around my apartment again. “This place is okay, I guess, but you deserve better.”
“No, I really don’t.” I gave him a more gentle look this time. “Ambrose, you have fond memories of me because you were a child, looking up to someone who was protecting you, and I was the only person in your life on a daily basis, for almost the entire day, for years on end. But that was a few years of my life, and those memories – you’ve colored them more kindly than I deserve, I think. There’s a lot more to my life that you don’t know, and no, I won’t tell you,” I cut him off, “because, frankly, it’s none of your business.” That clearly stung him a bit, but I went on. “Cherish those memories if you want, but…that’s not who I am. Not now, at least. So please, don’t act like just because I worked for you during some of your younger years that now you have the right to inject yourself into my life or that you know what I deserve or don’t deserve.”
“You’re a great person,” he responded stubbornly. “I do know that much. I know things have changed, for both of us – how could they not, in this much time? – but that doesn’t need to change us. I still love you, you know,” he added, his eyes earnest. “You’re – you’re family, even if I haven’t seen you in ages. I can’t just forget that.”
I sighed more openly this time. He wasn’t getting it. “I protected you because of a job,” I told him bluntly, not entirely enjoying how he drew back in shock but knowing it was necessary at the same time. “I was around you all the time because of that job. I certainly didn’t dislike you, but you’re remembering things – me – more fondly than you should. Our relationship ended the day my employment ended,” I told him, with a little bit more force behind my words. “I get that there’s some nostalgia with seeing someone from back then, but it doesn’t need to be more than that. Please don’t turn it into more than that.”
He’d drawn back, looking almost hurt, and for a long moment said nothing.
“You’re lying,” he said at last, in a smaller voice.
“I’m really not,” I began.
“If you didn’t care for me,” he interrupted, a little heated now, “you wouldn’t have taken me to the library. That had nothing to do with your job, it was only for my sake. And you wouldn’t have stayed when you knew my parents were too dumb to listen to your advice. You would have known your life would be in danger if they couldn’t take the proper precautions and would have just left and let someone else handle it instead. But instead you stayed, despite all that. Instead, when you saw two demons you knew you couldn’t beat, you decided to engage them anyway just to give me a chance to escape. That says that I was a lot more than just a job to you. You wouldn’t risk your life just for a job.”
“Depends on the person,” I countered. “For some people, giving your word that you would fulfill a job that does require putting your own life on the line means you’d risk your life to keep your word. It’s not always about the person being protected, it’s sometimes about the person and their own belief system.”
Ambrose looked frustrated with my response. “I don’t know why you’re trying to pretend you don’t care about me,” he said at last, “but I know you do. I know you better than you seem to want to admit.”
“Maybe you did. But it’s been decades, close a century since then. Even if I was fond of you back then, there’s nothing to say it would carry through to today.”
He frowned a bit, then suddenly fixed me with his intense eyes. “Then say it outright. Say you don’t like me now.”
I felt a little tongue-tied at that. I could try to mislead him and lie about the past, but it was hard to give just a blatant lie straight to his face.
He sat back, looking a little more satisfied. “See? You do still care, even if you won’t admit it. I don’t know if that’s a naga thing or just a you thing, but for my sake, could you stop pretending you don’t care? It kind of hurts, you know.”
I groaned and ran a hand through my hair. This was not the way things were supposed to go. He wasn’t supposed to be able to see through my lies that easily.
Comments (17)
See all