Lips Like Merlot

“Alright, here is your steak and your pasta. If there’s anything else I can get you, just let me know, okay? Enjoy, guys.” Their waitress leaves them alone again, and Talia wishes she could melt into the floor as she picks up a fork to pick at her calamari pasta—the only thing she’d been able to recognize and pronounce on the menu.

“Wait!” Lucy says, reaching out to snatch her wrist before she can dig in. “Let me take a picture of the food.”

“Really?” Talia asks, trying to keep her voice neutral, even as little volts of electricity shoot up her arm.

“Yeah, this is, like, the nicest meal I’ve had since I moved to L.A., I wanna document it.”

She snorts, but Lucy looks so earnest and wide-eyed, and it’s not like it’s the weirdest thing she’s done for the other woman in the month they’ve known each other, so Talia moves her fork away from the plate so Lucy can take pictures of their meals.

(Plus, she looks…well, sexy, in the deep green dress that cinches at her waist and ends right above her knees and Talia isn’t dead.)

Taking in the restaurant around them while she waits for permission to eat her food, Talia can’t help but wonder how Lucy managed to get them in.

When she’d picked her up for their…date—it’s still so weird to call it that—she definitely declined to mention that they were going to literally one of the nicest restaurants in the city, where reservations were six months out and prices weren’t listed on the menu.

Even if Talia weren’t dressed so casually in her one pair of jeans that didn’t have grease and oil on them from work and a semi-decent button-down, the two of them would stick out like a sore thumb.

All around them, wealthy businessmen and politicians and their wives (or girlfriends and/or mistresses, as the case may be) wine and dine on top-shelf brandy and the finest-cut sirloin. She and Lucy are easily the youngest ones here who aren’t staff.

“Alright, you’re clear,” Lucy says with a light laugh, pulling her phone away from her plate, and Talia picks her fork up, shoveling a forkful of pasta in her mouth to give herself something to do.

“The wine’s pretty good, right?” Lucy picks up her glass, swirling the deep red liquid in it, unaware of Talia’s inner turmoil. “I think it’s Merlot. I don’t really know, I just picked one that looked expensive, my sister was always the one good with wine.”

“Mm,” Talia hums, taking a big swallow of her own wine, not really tasting it. She’s never really liked wine all that much, preferring something much cheaper and less fruity.

“C’mon, let’s do a boomerang. Like a whole ‘cheers’ thing.” Lucy opens her phone to the right app, waiting until Talia picks up her own glass.

She tries to appear enthusiastic, even if it’s just their glasses in the shot, but it must not come across on her face, because Lucy sets down her own glass with a loud clink. “Okay, if this is gonna work, you have to at least pretend like you’re having fun, Rodriguez.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Kelly.” Talia sets her glass down as well. “Am I not fun enough for you?”

“You’re not acting like you’re on a first date.” Her tone is borderline accusatory, and Talia doesn’t care for it. This is so not what she signed up for.

She just—and that’s a big just—barely resists the urge to roll her eyes. “Well, maybe because it’s not actually a first date.”

“You and I are the only two who know that, aren’t we?”

“Is this how you always operate?” Talia asks, half-serious. She has only known Lucy a month, and this is her first stake-out with a private investigator. Forgive her if she’s curious.

“Honestly?”

Talia arches a cool eyebrow. “That’d be a great change.”

“No, it isn’t,” Lucy answers honestly. “But you’ve seen this restaurant, right? If I tried to eat here alone, I’d immediately draw attention. And not the kind I like.”

“So, what? You waited around ‘til I called so you could get in?”

She gives her an aren’t you so sweet kind of look that Talia hates. “Cute. You think you’re the only date I have on standby.”

“Then why me?”

Instead of answering, Lucy jerks her chin. “Oh, those flowers are so pretty.” She picks up her phone and starts taking pictures of the garland along the low railing beside their table.

“Okay, what’s with the whole Instagram influencer thing?” Talia demands.

“We’re young, easily believed to be constantly consumed by social media, so no one will look twice at us taking a lot of pictures. Plus, I need to, because my mark just walked in.”

“He did?” Talia twists around in her seat to see an older Timothy Olyphant-type without the Western ruggedness that drives her abuela crazy be seated with a platinum blonde woman. The sight’s so cliché, it hurts. “Ugh, gross.”

“Yeah, I’m not looking forward to telling his wife he’s cheating on her,” Lucy says with a wince. She takes a handful more pictures on her phone while Talia eats, before dropping it on the seat next to her. “That should be enough.”

“So, this is what you do, then? Sit in expensive restaurants and take pictures of cheating spouses?”

She shrugs. “Mostly.”

Talia tears a roll in a half. “Is that what you were doing in San Francisco?” she asks.

It’s where they met, a month ago. When Talia had to get out of the city after a bad break up with her ex-girlfriend, Janie, she’d tried breaking into a car to make her escape. That car had turned out to be Lucy’s. The woman had been in a hurry, and on the run from someone herself, and, in a very confusing turn of events, kissed Talia as a distraction, before offering her a ride and a job if she was ever in Los Angeles.

Which is how she ended up here, now.

“What were you doing in San Francisco?” Lucy asks, and Talia’s really sick of the no-answer answers.

She sighs, dropping one half of the roll on her plate. “I followed a girl out there, and it didn’t work out. As you remember. You wanna answer now?”

Lucy picks up her wine glass, taking a sip, eyeing her. “Sometimes I…obtain things, for people, in a strictly morally gray way.”

“So…illegally?” Talia clarifies.

“If you want to put a label on it,” Lucy says with a flippant shrug.

A black folder, holding their check, Talia assumes, is dropped on their table wordlessly then, not by their waitress from before, but by a thirty-something-year-old in a manger’s shirt who briskly walks off before they can say anything.

“Well, that’s rude,” Lucy says. “We didn’t even see a dessert menu. I want tiramisu. Don’t you want tiramisu?”

Talia shrugs. “Actually, I’m more of a red velvet girl.”

“See, and now we’re both being denied our desserts of choice. You know why? They don’t think we’re gonna pay.”

She says it like she’s so sure, and Talia cocks her head at her. “You don’t know that.”

“I do know,” Lucy says authoritatively. “I’ve been in lots of places like this on the job, and the managers all think the same. They see a young couple in a nice place, and assume that they won’t pay, so they drop the check off before they ask for it.”

“So what’re you going to do about it?”

Lucy slides a card in the billfold, shouldering her purse. “I’m gonna go smoke,” she says, standing. “Wanna come keep me company?”

“Why do I feel like I don’t have a choice?” Talia asks, narrowing her eyes a little. It’s a hard one-eighty from complaining about being stereotyped as someone unlikely to pay her check, but she really shouldn’t expect anything less from the woman at this point.

She winks, quick as you please. “Just pick up your jacket, Rodriguez.”

Shrugging into her leather jacket, she follows Lucy to the front of the restaurant.

(Talia’s starting to feel like she’ll follow her anywhere.)

“We’re just going out for a smoke,” Lucy says to the hostess. “The waitress has our card. We’ll be back in a minute.”

The hostess waves them off, and they exit the building, trading the suppressive restaurant atmosphere for the cool evening air, and she takes her first real, deep breath all night.

“Okay.” Hiking her purse higher up on her shoulder, Lucy looks down at her boots. “Those comfortable shoes?”

“Yeah,” Talia says slowly. “Why?”

“Because…” She grab’s Talia’s hand, grinning maniacally. “Run!”

Talia’s arm is nearly wrenched out of her socket and Lucy pulls her down the street, their feet pounding against the pavement as they run from the restaurant.

“Wait—what about your card?” Talia demands, between breaths.

“It’s my brother’s New York library card!” Lucy yells back. “Pretty sure he won’t miss it!”

“All this because they didn’t offer you tiramisu?”

She can just hear Lucy’s laugh over her pounding feet and equally pounding heart and the traffic next to them, and Talia knows for sure, after San Francisco, after the restaurant, now as they run down the block, she’d follow her anywhere.

They don’t stop running until they’re several streets down and around the corner, and Lucy drops her hand in favor of leaning both hands against her knees, breathing hard.

“How are you not dying?” she accuses, glaring up at Talia, who shrugs.

“Ran cross-country in high school.”

“Stupid parents who fostered a belief in the arts and didn’t make me do sports,” Lucy groans, straightening. “Well. I can never go back there again.”

Talia snorts. “And neither can I, so thanks for that.”

“Please, you hated that place. I could see it all over your face. You’re kind of an open book,” she adds off her surprised look.

“Maybe, but the calamari was good. I would’ve liked to have taken the rest home, but whatever.”

Lucy waves a hand. “Don’t worry. Next time, I’ll take you someplace you can finish your dinner.”

“So there’ll be a next time?” Talia tries not to sound pleased by that—the woman did just drag her running from a restaurant and denied her seafood.

But she’d also be lying if she said she never wanted to see Lucy again.

She shrugs. “Maybe. You’re not horrible in the heat of the moment. And I think you might be good enough to move up from arm candy on a stake out.”

Snorting at her choice of words, Talia asks, “You mean for your more ‘morally gray’ jobs?”

Lucy smirks. “If you’re up for it.”

Maybe it’s the smirk. Maybe it’s the adrenaline and Merlot running through her veins, chasing each other to see which can make her dizzier the fastest. Maybe it’s because she’s on the first date since she left Janie and she finally feels free.

But her hands reach out on their own accord, one fisting in the hip of Lucy’s skirt, the other threading in the soft baby hairs at the nape of her neck, and kisses the damn smirk right off her face.

It’s their first kiss since her inadvertent kidnapping a month ago. It’s a lot less bumbling and awkward than that one—try making out over the center console of a shitty Toyota Corolla. It ain’t easy—and Talia’s pride swells just the tiniest bit when Lucy takes a minute to open her eyes again when she pulls away.

“That,” her voice is just a little breathless. “Is why I picked you. You’re the best kisser I’ve ever caught breaking into my car.”

Laughing, Talia shoves her shoulder and starts walking away. “You still owe me calamari, Kelly,” she calls back to her.

“Baby, you keep kissing me like that, I’ll get you the whole damn ocean.”