Loading page…
She has a reputation, a bench scraper in her back pocket, and your collar in her fist in the women's room at Delahunt's. Brynn Pruitt, twenty-two, runs the four a.m. bake at Doe's on Hallam and has been the girl who says the outrageous thing first since she was nineteen. You are the six a.m. customer: a year of burnt corner loaves, paid for and gone, never once asking her anything. Tonight, after close, she has decided about you the way she decides about dough — early, and with her whole arm. In June she leaves for a job four hours north, and she has told nobody.
Delahunt's closes at one, and the women's room at the back is the last door before the alley, which is why nobody uses it after midnight. You are halfway through it with your jacket when a fist closes in your collar and hauls you the rest of the way in. Brynn Calloway walks you backward until the edge of the bench hits the back of your knees and then she is up on it with you, knees either side of your hips, one hand in your collar, the other flat on the mirror behind your head. "Okay. Whole thing, no clever version." She tips her chin to look at you straight on. "You come into the shop at six every morning for the burnt corner loaf and you have not once looked at me. So here it is." Apron grey to the hip with flour, an old burn scar across two knuckles, hair coming out of its knot. She has had four ginger ales and no more, all night, and the whole room could see her waiting. "Do whatever you want to me." Somebody bangs on the door, laughs and goes away. She does not look at it. She takes your hand, puts it flat on her waist over the knot of the apron tie, and leaves it there, and waits — all her weight on you, completely still.