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Bella's phone chirps. When she opens it up to see Hap's name and message, her heart thuds with sudden adrenaline.

She would love it if it didn't do that. God. Okay.

Without thinking too hard about it, she taps a ♥ on his text before tucking her phone away again.

What do you want, Bella? Be honest with yourself, at least. Be specific and then build a plan. She wants to see him and talk with him, like before, to enjoy his company for its own sake. She wants to know how he likes Mel, for the Bower's sake, for Mel's sake; not for her own, God knows, because if she's honest she knows it'll sting if he's happier seeing Mel than her. That's a possibility she needs to anticipate, even if it's frustrating to accept.

She wants him to know she missed him. But not too much. And by God she wants him to miss her, as much as possible.

Bella picks an outfit with meticulous care, and asks Peter for a ride.

Gray afternoon light filters in through the big front windows of the restaurant, diffusing through the cloud cover and making every passerby's shadow into a thin, blurred smudge. Inside, the host stand is unattended; servers and hostess chat by the kitchen. The bartender moves back and forth at her station, greeting patrons when they enter -- welcome in, sit anywhere, be with you in a sec -- the busiest part of an otherwise quiet establishment.

Bella comes in wrapped in a trench coat against the day's chill, heels clicking softly, and acknowledges the bartender's greeting with a smile. Her eyes are roaming the restaurant, though, looking for Hap. If she got her timing right, she'd expect him to have gotten here a few minutes before her.

Hap dresses for Mel the same as he dresses for Bella. Comfortably refined. Dark colors with a pop of blue in his scarf, hanging with his coat on the pegs in the adjacent wall. Hap orders for them both as soon as he sits down. A gin and tonic, and an Old Fashioned. Regardless of how she feels about him, she wouldn't stand him up. His relief upon seeing her doesn't stem from that juvenile a concern. It's reprieve from longing. He wouldn't go so far as to call it an end.

Smiling, Hap slips off of his seat and offers his hands to take her coat.

"Allow me."

A smile breaks across her face when she spots him, warm and artless. When she comes close enough to clock that he's ordered her drink, her smile goes crooked with amusement, and she gives him a pleased look.

"Hi, Hap."

She submits to letting him take her coat, turning her back so he can slip it off her shoulders. Underneath, she's wearing a simple black dress, knee-length skirt, elbow-length sleeves. It dips in front enough to show a little décolletage, flirtatious without being scandalous; on the other hand, the neckline scoops lower in the back, to show spine and shoulder blades and bare skin under the fall of her hair.

Most importantly, to Bella, there are visible, fading bruises on her wrists, on display when she takes a seat and reaches for the G&T.

"It's really good to see you again."

Bella has dressed to kill. Hap expected nothing less. It's a privilege to unveil her, hair spilling down her back as he steps away to hang her coat up beside his. Returning to her, his gaze catches on her bruises. That privilege of his turns sharply sour. He covers with two rapid blinks as he joins her.

It's the first time she's brought evidence of another date to one of theirs, if that's even what this is. It feels as heady as one, all of a sudden.

"It's good to see you too," he tells her. Despite his disdain for it, Hap is practiced at small talk, and it comes as almost as effortlessly as ever. "I didn't realize how long it's been until I got your message."

But he does disdain it, and they both know it. Bella regards him over her glass.

"I figured one of us had to make the first move." Sip, swallow; smile. "You remembered my drink order."

He drinks along with her. What would they toast to? Thriving in each other's absence? Good friends could actually mean it. That's not what they are.

"Of course." She remembers his. It's as personal as the unspoken rule not to show up wearing other men's time spent with her like an expensive new bracelet. "I owe you more than a drink for introducing me to Mel."

The bruises and the dress were intended as a hard serve; here's the volley, returned as neatly as anyone could ask for.

"Deal," she says, impish. "Dinner's on you."

As if it's ever been otherwise.

"You're getting along? With Mel."

No, she would never engage in a play as callous as insisting she pays for their drinks — or, clumsier, her drink. He's always appreciated that about her and the reminder assuages some of his selfish incredulity.

"You definitely hear me when I said I liked a master of their craft." He gives a mild cheers. "I think I underestimated how much I missed it."

He didn't. He enjoyed his time with Mel; he'll enjoy tonight with her. He'll enjoy future encounters with her substantially more after negotiating this stalemate with Bella.

"She's very good. I think she ought to be in much higher demand, honestly. But she's choosy."

She crosses her legs with a shh of stockings.

"I wanted to make sure you'd be seeing someone whose standards are as high as yours."

The implications of "choosy" ring through his mind. He doubts it was Bella's intention for Hap to fail Mel's standards. It doesn't seem like something she'd do. That's what disappoints him. A flicker across his eyes, lowered to his glass as he has a pull of whiskey. His lingering smile remains in place.

His standards. What a joke. In the darkness behind his eyelids, her bruises flash.

"And how have you been?" Besides in high demand herself.

Bella inhales deeply, considering the question, fidgeting with her glass. The gap between them feels like it's echoingly deep. Did she miscalculate this? It wouldn't be the first time.

No, no. Don't catastrophize. It hasn't been ten minutes since she sat down. Let things develop.

"Honestly?"

Hap watches her toy with her glass, elegant even as she seems to act indeliberately. She's done some borderline obscene things to drinkware with those fingers.

His eyes return to hers, not quite as soft as his smile. Both are genuine.

"Honestly."

She nods. Honesty, then.

"All right. Working. Catching up on some bookkeeping I'd been neglecting."

It's not a great euphemism for keeping tabs on corrupt police commissioners and hitmen. It has the potential to raise questions about her finances, her debt to the Bower. At least it's close enough to true to pass a lie detector.

"And thinking about calling you when I can't sleep." Her lips curl ruefully. "Someone asked me if we're fighting."

Mel asked, in fact, not long after Bella introduced her to Hap, and Bella wondered briefly at the time whether Ibarra had put her up to it. Ultimately she decided that wouldn't be like the madame. Mel is simply incisive enough to notice and blunt enough to ask.

Now, sitting with Hap, Bella wonders for the first time whether Mel asked him the same question. Whether she'd use it as a lever when she wants Hap in a particular state of mind, or a wall to pin him against. Whether they talk at all.

Honestly, Hap couldn't care less about how she's been. Not in the sense that it's polite to ask: What she's been doing. Working, of course. Same as him. And bookkeeping, apparently, a euphemism he refuses to grant intrigue.

But then she goes on. The half of his mind occupied with ruminating on his own apathy becomes present. Softness wins out.

Can they fight? It doesn't strike him as behavior typical of their relationship, as it is on paper. He and Mel wouldn't fight. At most, they might disagree. They don't talk. They discuss. In the capacity that she comes up, Bella is not a topic, but a tool. Nameless. Sometimes Mel refers to her simply as a woman sometimes she is more critically invoked as a vice. Along with his safeword, Hap has plausible deniability.

"We're... taking a break." Hap shakes his head, laughing. "Which as we all know is code for fighting."

Hap leans an elbow on the bartop, head crooked to one side. "You've been on my mind too." His hand slides across the bar, knuckles to the counter. His thumb brushes delicately along a bruise.

"Really."

The touch is gently, subtly erotic. She's always liked his hands. Bella feels a thrill that's half triumph and half anticipation, and reminds herself that her goal is not to sleep with Hap today. It's not that kind of seduction.

Still. She hopes he's imagining something similar to her: his hands around her wrists, or her wrists tied to his headboard.

"I'm glad to get that cleared up," she says, echoing his laugh. "Now, if you want to tell me what we're fighting about, I can argue with you about it with a little more precision."

It would be too pliable of him to cancel Mel and take Bella out instead, and she may well have other arrangements. He hopes not. He'd like for all the effort she put in to look devastating to have been for him and only him.

"I suppose the crux of it is," his thumb slowly swipes back, forth, "I liked being yours."

And she his, inasmuch as she could be. They're not exactly being conventional about this, are they? Referring him to another woman's services reduced him to a customer. Just one more man in the market for a shapely distraction.

Even expecting something along those lines, hearing him say it sends a jolt up Bella's spine. Not an entirely unpleasant jolt, at all, but a surprise nonetheless, and one she doesn't do a good job of keeping out of her eyes.

She needs a moment to put her thoughts in order. Stall. "Well, God damn it, how am I supposed to argue with that?"

She turns her hand so she can clasp his wrist lightly, her glass-cool palm against his pulse. Maybe the wisest thing to do would be to cut bait here. Remind him of the reality of the dynamic. No matter how much they may like each other, he'll always be a man with a checkbook and she'll be a woman with no past. That was what they agreed on when he first came to the Bower looking for a kind of companionship that standard dating and vanilla escort agencies can't or won't provide -- maybe it wasn't stated in so many words, but the point was that Bella was something to pick up and put down without thought. The trappings of a relationship were meant to be decoration, not -- well. A trap. Not for her, anyway.

So, now that it comes to it, can she be wise? For once?

"I've never had much I can call mine," she finally says, slowly. "But I would never be careless with what is. Not on purpose.

"Did you think I was trying to get rid of you?"

His throat warms beneath his collar, watching his candor take her off-guard. He hasn't seen her struggle like this before. She's very lovely, trying to hold onto something she wants. Treading water over an uncertain abyss, back resolutely to a shore that's still within view. He admires their hands, hers reaching for him. His yet to grasp back.

"Were you?" he asks, raising his eyes to hers. He knows the attempt itself was not the goal. If she wanted to put space between them, for whose benefit was it? Or was she really that selfless a lover, that she thought nothing of it?

She blinks, a little stung that it's a question, and shakes her head. You'd think the fact they're sitting here together, that she not only accepted his touch but reached for more, would prove that to him.

"No, of course not. Come on. If I wanted to get rid of you, I wouldn't refer you to someone I like. --That's not what I mean," she says, immediately. "I wouldn't refer you to someone I like at the Bower."

Though there's truth in the slip. If things got to a point where she felt the need to get rid of Hap, she probably wouldn't refer him to anyone at all. Firing a client at the Bower, from what she's heard, is more likely to involve threats than recommendations to other establishments. But if she decided to end it amicably -- if this conversation ends with them walking away from each other -- she'd consider it the least she could do to set him up with another option. Does he think she's unprofessional enough to do otherwise?

"I thought you'd -- I thought it was something I could do for you." Her eyes flick over his face, dark and sharply focused, and unguarded enough to show that glimmer of frustration as well as her need. "Because there are things I can't do for you."

He chuckles silently at her plan for sending him packing. At her quick revision to it, more precisely. There was the possibility that she wanted to meet with him today to do just that, dispelled as soon as she hit him with that dress. She'd hardly be giving him closure by ending things on a vision that visceral.

Without breaking eye contact, Hap turns his hand just so. His fingertips ghost along the inside of her wrist, gracing both blemished and unmarred skin.

He could tell her that he didn't think she would ever get rid of him because she didn't like him enough. It's a double-edged idea: Too much of a good thing. Dangerous on even footing, and the ground is currently unsteady.

"It was boorish of me to assume." Not exactly an apology. "I forgot what it's like just to have someone who cares. No calculations."

In the game of her mind, that's a ball hit back to her so hard she'd never be able to lunge and return it. She reads two possibilities from that. Either he knows how many calculations she makes to keep him happy, and is digging at her, or she's done her job so well that he doesn't, and he was still able to forget that she cared.

Boorish is a word.

Bella inhales deeply, sighs through her nose, and drops her eyes to their hands. After a moment, she pulls back from him, gently, and reaches for her drink instead.

"It's a rare thing in this world. Someone who cares."

It's neither. Hap is the one making calculations, driven by complex motives that cannot, must not, be examined. He works tirelessly to prevent that or else it all comes crashing, burning down. It's that hint into himself, he goes ahead and assumes, the compels her to pull away. Hap straightens in his seat, reaching for his drink.

"I'm not especially adept at it myself." And part of him may have resented her for that, too. That she was able to provide for him in a way that he couldn't for her — so instead he revoked what he could offer until she was desperate to have it back.

She glances at him, about to say That's not true, and stops to consider him.

"What is care to you, Hap?"

Determining and eliminating every obstacle presented to someone's health and longevity. Minimizing their pain. Exploiting their gifts to ensure a better quality of life for future generations.

That's duty.

"A measure of comfort in being helpless," he decides, casting a wan smile over to her.

"Mm. Well, by that definition, maybe I need some practice, too."

She sighs again, propping her chin on her hand.

"Granted, I know how that sounds." Her eyes cut sideways to the bartender, who's busy a few seats down with other patrons. Satisfied they're not going to be overheard, she continues, "Coming from someone you've tied up."

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