The waiter interrupted the silence by bringing over the wine. And after the sniffing and sipping had taken place, he poured and then vanished.
Eli raised his glass. “To wonderful company.”
“To wonderful company.” Bethany, sounding relieved, clinked her glass against his, and then sipped and settled it down again.
A little silence fell.
Her long slim fingers absently played with the stem of her glass. She stroked it up and then down. Up and then down.
Maybe doing warm-ups for later.
He was aware, however, that he’d fallen awkwardly—perhaps even darkly—silent again.
It was a physical struggle not to peer out the window in the direction of that Porsche. If he was a cartoon character, his head would transform into a giant magnet and suck the car back down the road.
He smiled at Bethany instead.
“Okay, Eli,” Bethany said brightly. “So, I happen to know it’s your birthday this week. And we can’t let your birthday go by and not acknowledge it atall.”
He groaned good-naturedly.
She laughed. “I promise I won’t ask the waiters to sing.” She pushed a little flat square package over to him, tastefully wrapped in brown parchment paper and tied with a wide, sheer orange chiffon ribbon. Minimalist and pretty.
“It’s just a silly little thing. And I mainly did it because I like wrapping things.”
“It’s pretty,” he said.
“The gift is actually on the inside,” Bethany teased dryly. But as she said it, she fingered the top button on her dress. Whether she knew it or not, it turned her sentence into an innuendo.
She was a nice person, Bethany was. And a big flirt. But he had a feeling that she’d be cool with a fling, or whatever they decided to do.
And it occurred to him that once you really just let go and were halfway on your way to having sex—maybe the clothes were mostly off or on their way there, the bra was unhooked, that sort of things—you could forget nearly anyone or anything.
Problem was, he had a feeling that everything he’d ever felt and never said aloud was too close to the surface, kicked up like some kind of monstrous, spinning dirt devil, bigger by the minute. It had been growing for days now. It was playing havoc with his internal equilibrium.
Something had to give. A few minutes of shattering oblivion might just be the ticket.
“Let’s see what’s on the inside.” He tugged the ribbon open, and slid a finger beneath the tape.
He found a little cardboard box with a lid.
He glanced over at her and she lifted her eyebrows encouragingly.
He sneaked a glance at their outside edges. Not a stray hair there. He’d notice that from now on in every person he met, he was pretty sure, dammit. And yet every little detail about a person told a story, and as a cop, he was sort of glad he knew about eyebrows now.
He pried up the box lid and parted some tastefully beige tissue paper.
He gave a little laugh. “It’s... I’ll be damned!” He lifted out an old forty-five RPM record of Led Zeppelin’s “The Immigrant Song.”
“Your local music store had it. Do you like it?”
He smiled. “Yeah! Very cool.” He turned it over to the flip side. “So thoughtful of you. Thank...”
He was suddenly as airless as if he’d been gut-punched.
And as he stared down at the name of that song on the flipside, it was like sunlight blasted through his every cell. Joy and fury and grief and yearning were suddenly one hybrid emotion as he was being dragged backward roughly through time.
He couldn’t look up at Bethany. Not yet.
