Serious Moonlight(28)

In fact, I was still thinking about it when I took an early ferry into the city the next day. I was also thinking about Daniel’s leg touching mine under the table. I couldn’t figure out why it felt more taboo than what we did in the back seat. Maybe I was just on a mystery high. Or a pie high.

Maybe both.

After daydreaming my way through a short bus ride from the downtown ferry terminal, I ended up in front of Elliott Bay Book Company in Capitol Hill. I’d been here before, and it was an excellent bookstore—two expansive stories with lots of light spilling over crisscrossed beams, wood floors, and row after row of cedar shelves. Any other day, I’d spend hours browsing. But I was headed to the café in the back of the store, where I was supposed to be meeting Daniel. I’d given him my phone number last night under the heady influence of Rainier cherries and brown-sugar crumble, and we’d been texting to coordinate our plans. When I looked around, I worried that I’d misunderstood.

Then I spotted him at the counter.

Like me, he was wearing the hotel’s required “uniform” of black pants and white shirt—it was two hours before we both had to clock in—but instead of the green Cascadia zip-up he wore when driving the hotel van, he had on a slim leather jacket with a diagonal zipper that clung to lines of lean muscle on his arms and chest. Inside my head, I had a brief, hallucinatory flash of that chest without a shirt on and quickly banished it.

As if he could sense me, he turned around and his eyes immediately found mine.

“Hello, Nora.”

I glanced behind me.

“You’re supposed to call me Nick,” he explained. “Or I could be Nora, if you want. I’m not picky.”

I stared at him.

“I watched online clips from The Thin Man last night,” he said brightly.

“Oh,” I said, unexpectedly pleased. “You did?”

“I felt it was my duty to get in the right frame of mind for sleuthing. I have no idea what the movie’s about, but Myrna Loy was insanely hot, and they’re both total boozers. I liked it when she found out her husband had already had five martinis and she wanted to catch up with him.”

“?‘Bartender, bring me five more martinis,’?” I said, loosely quoting Nora in the film.

“?‘And line them up right here!’?” he finished.

I laughed. “It was the 1930s. Drinking was a sport.”

“Well, this isn’t a martini, but it will have to do,” he said, extending an arm to hand me a steaming paper cup. “Black tea. Since you are apparently a coffee hater, which is a little blasphemous in this town. But if you truly prefer it, I will defend your right to drink this brown tap water.”

“Perfect,” I said, smiling. “Thanks.”

He nodded toward my head. “Different flower.”

“Tiger lily. We have all kinds of lilies growing in our yard. My grandmother was a big gardener,” I explained. “She said it was holy work.”

“Is that why you were homeschooled and couldn’t swear? She was religious?”

“No. I mean, yes, she was religious, but I think it had to do more with the fact that she drove her teenage daughter away, and they didn’t speak for years, and then she died. I think she was just trying to keep me on a short leash out of overprotective fear, if that makes sense.”

Daniel stared at me for so long with a dazed expression, I feared I’d said something wrong. But how could that be? Maybe it was just that he hadn’t heard me. It was a little loud in the café (music, cappuccino steaming, cups clinking), and I wondered if this was one of those environments that made it hard for him to pick out sounds. So I pointed toward the front door, and we walked outside together.

What little sun we had was low in the sky, and Capitol Hill was windy, which made walking and talking hard. But we didn’t have far to go. We turned on Pike and crossed Broadway, made famous by Sir Mix-a-Lot and his posse, when he wasn’t proclaiming his love for big butts. This enclave of the neighborhood was a collection of restaurants and yoga studios, lots of rainbow flags.

“I sort of pictured you living here,” I said. “When we first met.”

He tugged his ear and shifted to the other side of me. “This is my good ear,” he said, and then asked me to repeat myself. When I did, he said, “You thought I lived here? Why?”

“Seems like hipster central. Or maybe Ballard.”

“Me, a hipster?” He laughed and then twisted his head at a comical angle. “Are you serious? Birdie, Birdie, Birdie. I take Saturday nights off from work twice a month to play in Magic tournaments.”

“Magicians have tournaments?”

“Magic the Gathering. You know, the card game?”

I thought back to when I’d researched Daniel online, and some event from a comic book shop had popped up—not that I was going to tell him I’d been stalking him online. “Like Dungeons and Dragons?” I asked.

“Same crowd of nerds, so close enough, and I was a dungeon master when I was a kid. Basically, if there’s a wizard in it, I’ve played it. I like my games dark and full of demons.” He glanced at me. “I bet your religious grandmother would have hated me anywhere near her granddaughter, huh?”

He had heard me earlier in the bookstore. “She was Lutheran, not a member of a crazy cult,” I said, grinning. “Sure, she thought that Bobby Pruitt down the street was trouble because he listened to heavy metal, but we weren’t Amish, or anything. We had Internet and TV.”