The conference ended at six and by nine Luke was tired of jazz played for tourists.
He found the bar by accident, down a side street in the Marigny, behind a door painted the colour of dried blood. Inside: candles in old wine bottles, darkwave on a crackling speaker, and a woman at the end of the bar reading a paperback with a skull on the cover.
She wore black lace up to her throat, silver rings on every finger, and eyeliner sharp enough to cut glass. She looked at him once – a long, unhurried look – and went back to her book.
He ordered a drink he did not want and sat two stools away.
The guide
“You’re lost,” she said, without looking up.
“Is it that obvious?”
“You’re wearing a lanyard.” She closed the book. “I’m Celeste. And you’re about to go back to Bourbon Street, which would be a tragedy.”
“What’s the alternative?”
She considered him the way a cat considers a door. “The alternative is I show you the real city. But you have to keep up, you have to stop taking photos, and you have to do what I say.”
He took off the lanyard and put it in his pocket. She smiled for the first time – slow and dark-red.
The city after midnight
She walked him through streets the guidebooks skipped. A courtyard full of jasmine where an old man played the cello for nobody. A tiny shop that sold antique keys and dried roses. The iron gates of a cemetery under the streetlights, where she told him the story of a woman buried in 1853 who had outlived three husbands and loved none of them.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” he asked.
“I believe in people who refuse to be forgotten,” she said. “Same thing, really.”
Somewhere around one in the morning she took his hand to pull him across the street and did not let go.
The question
On the steps of her building, under a balcony dripping with ferns, she turned to face him.
“I’m going to be honest,” Celeste said, “because I hate games. I want you to come upstairs. If you don’t want to, say so, and I’ll walk you back to your hotel and we had a lovely night.”
“I want to,” he said.
“Then here are the rules.” She tapped his chest with one silver-ringed finger. “Slow. You ask before anything. And you leave before breakfast, because I am a monster before coffee.”
Her apartment was candles and velvet and a hundred books. She put on a record – something old and slow, all reverb and longing – and pulled him into the middle of the room. He asked. She said yes. He asked again. She laughed and said yes, Luke, keep up.
The rest belongs to the two of them and the candles.
Before breakfast
He left at six, as promised, into a pale pink morning that smelled of rain. On the back of his conference badge, in silver ink, she had written a number and three words.
Next time. Bigger city.
He flew home with the badge in his wallet, and he never wore a lanyard again.
