“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 fromThe Thin Manlast 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. Itwasa 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?”
Hehadheard 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.”
“So, though you couldn’t swear, electricity wasn’t satanic science for you either. That’s what you’re saying.”
“That’s what I’m saying. I just wasn’t aware of tournaments for games like that.”
“There’s a pro tour every year—the World Magic Cup. You travel to other cities and win big cash. Like, tens of thousands. And you get to go to cool cities, which I’d love to do.”
“Because you’re not a hipster with a man bun; you’re a nerd.”
He feigned insult. “I’ll have you know, this is a topknot, not a man bun. But, yeah, I’msucha nerd. Throw in magic tricks and the fact that I’m nineteen and still live with my mom. Now you’ve built yourself a raging nerd monster.” He thumped his chest with one fist and roared.
