We had begun an old dance, and a familiar one. I’d learned it the way a future deb learns to two-step at cotillion. I didn’t ask any more questions; I didn’t care. He could be a banker or a busboy, from Austin or Albuquerque. His clothes were nondescript, excepting that slight faux-western flair, but he had fresh-cut hair, and some serious cash had gone into his teeth. I liked that he’d put more care into the body than the packaging. His forearms were corded with lean muscle, and I suspected I would find a gym body, complete with skinny-guy six-pack, when I peeled the blazer off and yanked open his shirt.
My little garnets, swinging from the chains, chimed in my ears as I bent and shifted, my body swaying toward him, then away around the table. We played the game, and sometimes I was chasing, sometimes letting him chase me. It was so familiar that the man himself began to seem like someone I remembered. In his movements, he became the avatar of every Kappa pledge that I’d seen once, then never seen again.
I’d done this dance with football boys, built thick like human walls. With basketball boys, long and delicious. A shy chess player approached me at a mixer, on a dare. I liked the way he rocked with nerves; there was an instinctive understanding in the sway of hip and thigh. I’d gone back to his dorm room, and there I’d made him king of all the dorks. I remembered a culinary arts major who cooked for me, and this same dance was in his deft hands, working the knife. I’d let him suck the butter off my fingers. And now this cowboy. Yes, I knew him. I knew a thousand of him, seemed like. He was a deep bell, tolling low down in my memory as we moved.
No one had sunk the nine ball, but I straightened up and slotted my cue into the wall rack. I had already decided. He would do.
He grinned, and his gaze got sharper and more eager.
He came around the table toward me, and I heard another bell, a real one: the ding and buzz of a text landing. I stepped back, reaching for the phone in my back pocket.
“One sec, I have to check this,” I said. “My little brother’s having a day.”
He eased back into a waiting slouch. We both knew we were done with the preliminaries; I was tempted to drop the phone in my bag and check on Julian later. Real life was not what I wanted buzzing and pinging in my pants just now.
But the last time we’d talked, he’d been acting as Birdwine’s hand puppet. Birdwine’s voice had rumbled in the background, and Julian parroted and paraphrased the details of their slow search as it crept toward Georgia. They had to check every route for any hint of Kai and Hana. It was painstaking and meticulous work, and my little brother sounded frustrated. He hadn’t wanted to stop, because the next lead might pay off, or the next one. Birdwine and I, more realistic, knew this kind of inquiry could take weeks.
“I’m going to call in sick again tomorrow and come back here,” Julian had told me at the end.
“Do you need me to get you and bring you back to your car?”
“No. Birdwine’s giving me a lift.”
It was the first time he’d called Birdwine by his name, and I didn’t half like the admiring tone. They’d apparently spent all day bro-bonding as they worked. Just what I needed—for disapproving Julian to join a pro-Birdwine faction the very day that I’d gone full and angry anti. Worse, Julian’s car was parked in my office lot. I hadn’t wanted to be anywhere nearby when they showed up.
I’d saved my file and said, “Good, because I’m going to McGwiggen’s.”
“Oh, what’s McGwiggen’s?” my guileless brother had asked.
“A pool hall,” I’d told him, but Birdwine knew that it was more than that. McGwiggen’s had a rep for getting its patrons laid efficiently; Birdwine wasn’t the only one who knew how to work a phone puppet.
I hadn’t talked to Julian since, and it had been a stressful day for him, no doubt. So I pressed the pause button on the cowboy, and I swiped my phone to life.
The text was not from Julian, though. It was from Birdwine. Directly.
Shoot me Julian’s cell number? Forgot to get it.
Just words. Nothing of consequence. But it was as if my naked foot had touched his chest, as if I’d felt his big heart beat against my instep.
I stopped. The whole world stopped. The air fell still around me, and I was still, too, unmoving inside silence. The buzzing of my body faded. The jukebox sounded like a distant, faded chiming.
I’d come here to wipe away my history with Birdwine, but in the moment of this simple contact, I fully understood that my foot was poised on something live. All I had to do was press down, stamp, and I would kill it.
I tried to remember the last time I’d gone to bed with a stranger. By the time I passed the bar, I’d had my dating life in hand. My last one-off had been—law school, when Nick started calling me sweetheart during sex. Love could be broken, in spite of what poetry and chick flicks said. I’d broken it much like this with William, then with Nick; it was what I did.
I couldn’t take this back, once it was done. I thought of Birdwine’s bruised face, silent and unforthcoming in his kitchen. He had a kid out there. A kid he never saw, that he had never mentioned. It was a bad bedtime story for a chick with abandonment issues, as he’d said, and maybe I could not forgive it. Perhaps forgiveness wasn’t in my nature.
I wouldn’t know. I hadn’t tried.