Hummingbird Salamander(24)

I am not a pretty woman, the way people think of beauty. I had a kind of jock-like, horsey charm when younger, I guess. But a man approached me soon enough. They always do. It takes a particular type not to be intimidated, but it’s more common than you might think. All it really takes is ego.

He pointed at the seat next to me. Which I liked. Sometimes they put a space between me and them.

I didn’t say no, so he didn’t go away. Sat down, and his shoulder touched mine for a moment. He had some muscle behind him. About my height, a little shorter maybe, dark hair, strange blue eyes I couldn’t quite get used to. Almost like he wore special contacts.

He motioned toward the bartender, made a joke about the “boats of Brooklyn” because of the flooding. But some instinct told me he wasn’t from New York. Too much melody to the voice. Smell of a rich, clove-infused beer had confused me, until I realized it was aftershave.

The man ordered us both a Rusty Nail without asking. But it was a drink I liked. My father had adored it, to oblivion, in the rural way stations that served as bars, but his sins didn’t pollute the taste for me.

I expected the man’s hand to be clammy, but it was firm, warm, dry.

“Here for the conference,” he said.

Telling me, not asking. Generic enough. Didn’t care about specifics.

I nodded. “You?”

“Yes.” Not “Yeah.” Not another nod. A very precise and almost formal yes that made me realize his approach had also been precise. No wasted movement. Not a lot of motion with his hands. He was like the opposite of a hummingbird. But neither was he a salamander.

“Worth it?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “I find panel discussions boring.”

“Like watching drywall harden,” I said.

He laughed. “Yes, like that.”

I put his age at somewhere between late thirties and mid-forties. Something about the wear and tear that registers right away even if you can’t tell how you see it.

He had a wide but not unpleasant face. I remember thinking, with envy, that if he were an actor, he could be anyone he liked.

“My name is Jack,” he said.

“I’m Jill,” I said.

That surprised Jack into a half-smile, and he turned to take me in. I didn’t look away.

A nice nose and mouth and jaw, the hair long enough to be thick but not an unruly mane. Eyes that wanted to be more direct than that mouth, and a hawk-like inquiry there that should’ve gone with narrow features. A sharpness. I had a glimpse, in that gaze, of sudden acceleration, of a plunge from on high. A velocity bearing down on an uncanny valley. The cry of some creature caught unawares. I don’t know how else to describe it. I knew that he, like me, was playing a role. That Jack wasn’t here for the drywall conference.

Fine by me. I liked that. Hawks, even in disguise, are so unlike bears.

Our drinks arrived.

“To extreme weather, experienced from the inside,” Jack said, and we clinked glasses.

How much nicer, Jack continued, to watch the raindrops run down the windowpane. I can’t remember how he said it, but so skillful, or the way he said it, conjuring a picture of the two of us already in aftermath, in bed, looking out a gray window. The undertow of his voice. A way you could get drawn into it, or caught in it. A rich, layered voice, and the more I imagined him beneath the suit, it was athletic, in shape. At odds with how fast Jack drank the first Rusty Nail. But he didn’t order another right away, or put any pressure on me to finish mine.

“Do you like magic?” he asked.

That made me laugh, it was so unexpected.

“Depends on the magician,” I said.

The kind of upturn to his mouth that said, Fair, but I have some new tricks.

“Do you have hobbies?” he asked.

“I wanted to be a homicide detective,” I confessed.

“Really?” Eyebrow raised, faux surprise. Like this was part of me coming on to him.

I nodded. “Oh, yes. Studied psychology, sociology, criminology. But then I discovered statistics.”

He considered that a moment, with clear disbelief.

But it was true: I’d found criminology duller than I’d thought and the required statistics classes more interesting than I’d imagined possible. This aggregate data. The ways in which eccentricities of human behavior persisted through software and how you could, with your own bias, skew surveys and studies to suit your interpretation. Maybe I liked the illusion of constraint. The restraint.

“But … even if I believe you … ‘homicide detective’ isn’t a hobby,” he said, with that smile I liked too much. “Not really. You can’t come home from work and say, ‘Now for my hobby.’”

Laughed outright at that one.

“True,” I said. “Real hobbies?” I pretended to think, then said, recklessly, “Taxidermy.”

“Is that right, Jill?” he said, and the way he drew himself up put a tiny bit of distance between us physically, made me think I’d made a mistake.

“What about your hobbies?” I asked.

Jack shrugged. “I get bored easily. Move on to the next thing.”

Message received.

“What do you sell?” I asked.

“How do you know I sell anything?”

Well, Jack was selling himself, at the moment.