“Neither, I suppose.” But my insides burn, knowing that she’s not as off-limits as I originally thought. It’s nearing the end of January. Commencement will be here soon enough. She graduates and all bets are off.
“So…” she says, twisting a finger into the ends of her hair. “I know you like old, dead poets. How do you feel about hearing something fresher?”
I lean toward her. “Such as?”
“I’m reading in a poetry slam tonight. It’s just something over at Tino’s in Jonestown on the fourth Friday of every month. There’s no prize money or anything, but I perform something new pretty much every month.”
“A poetry slam…” I want to say yes in the worst way, but it feels dangerously like a date.
She must read the hesitation in my eyes. “If it’s too weird, no worries. I just thought, since you like poetry…”
She leaves the thought dangling. Like a noose. And I jump right into it. “Yeah. Why not?”
The answer to that rhetorical question is that it’s not May yet and she hasn’t graduated. I’m risking everything I’ve worked the last three years toward. My entire future. But the voice of reason is being drowned out by the raging waves of something rolling up from the deepest layers of my being like an undertow. Something base and essential. And unrelenting.
“Do you want to meet me there?” she asks, standing from her seat and giving me a better view of the entire exquisite length of her.
“Yeah…that’s probably best.” Plausible deniability. No, Dr. Duncan, I didn’t have any clue she’d be there. Just went to hear the poetry.
“Great,” she says as she gathers her book and shoves it in her bag. “It starts at nine. There are usually five or six poets and it’s a random draw, so I don’t know what time I’ll be reading.”
I nod without standing, no longer able to tame my erection. “I’ll be there at nine.”
“You know where Tino’s is?”
Electricity crackles under my skin. I’m really doing this. “Yeah. I’ll find it.”
∞
I feel better about the whole thing when I walk into Tino’s. The bar is very dimly lit except for the spotlight on the MC up on the stage. He’s a blond kid, probably twenty, with a top hat and a flair for the dramatic. As I move deeper into the room and my eyes adjust, I don’t see anyone I know. Including Blaire.
I find a seat at an empty table for two tucked into the back corner near the bar, and a toothpick thin waitress comes over for my drink order.
“What’s your house scotch?” I ask, needing something stiffer than a beer to calm my jitters.
“Johnny Walker Red,” she says, jutting a bony hip and fisting her hand on it. “Want some?”
“Sounds good. Make it a double.”
“You got it,” she says, already twitching toward the bar.
Onstage, the MC finishes announcing the first poet, and an Asian woman takes the stage. I lean back in my seat and rub my eyes as she starts her poem, something about a tsunami.
“Hey.”
Blaire’s sand-on-silk voice is right beside me. A second behind it, the warm press of her hands on my shoulders knead them down from my ears. She’s only touched me once before, when her hand brushed mine taking the book from me that first day in the library. Just like then, her touch is like a grenade, sending shrapnel ripping through my insides and leaving me gutted and gasping.
“Hey,” I answer when I’ve gained my composure, twisting in my seat to see her.
She’s pulled her dark waves up and pinned them into a loose bun on the back of her head. She’s changed into a long-sleeved blue top, but I can’t tell if she put on a bra for the occasion because she’s got a scarf around her neck that hangs over her breasts.
“You’re so tight,” she says, her fingers massaging deeper.
“This should help with that,” the waitress says, back with my drink. She thumps it on the table in front of me and looks at Blaire over my shoulder. “What about you, honey? Something to drink?”
“Just a Diet Coke,” she says, releasing me and slipping into the seat on my right. Once the waitress is gone, she pulls her chair closer and leans in. “I’m last tonight. Better for scoring.”
“Scoring?”
She gives a loose shrug. “It’s pretty random. Every night there are five judges. They score just like in the Olympics, from one to ten based on how much they liked the poem.”
“But you said there’s no prize money.”
Blaire looks at the stage as the first poet finishes and the audience claps. “The bigger slams all offer prizes to attract better known poets, but this is just for the community, so all we’re competing for is bragging rights.” She smiles up at the waitress as she sets her Coke in front of her, then turns back to me. “And every once in a while, someone gets discovered at one of these things.”
A boo goes up from the crowd when the MC starts to read the scores. I turn and see a guy at the bar holding up a 5.5 on his whiteboard. The other scores are in the sevens and eights.