Page 7 of Take Two

“That’s the best idea I’ve heard all week,” he says, lifting his Jack and Coke in a mock toast.

“See? Now we’re making progress.” I raise my own glass and tilt it toward his until the edges meet with a soft click.

His eyes narrow, playful rather than suspicious. “We?”

“Absolutely.” I toss my drink back and tap the bar twice to get the bartender’s attention.

“We’ve known each other for thirty seconds,” he replies, following my lead and finishing his own drink in a single swallow, jaw tightening slightly at the burn of it.

“Thirty productive seconds.”

The bartender approaches and I gesture between the two empty glasses with a single point of my finger. No elaboration required.

“You’re keeping track?” he asks, not questioning why I’m covering the next round. He just watches me with that same considering expression.

“I like data and I’m not the only one.” I keep my tone conversational.

The smile he gives me this time is different from the ones before it. Brighter. Warmer and less guarded, with an openness to it that feels like something earned rather than something given freely. It is, I will think later, a dangerous kind of smile to be on the receiving end of.

“That’s a weird thing to admit to a stranger.” He shifts his stool an inch closer to mine. It is a small movement, barely significant on its own. It tells me everything I need to know about where his head is at. He is interested. So am I.

“You’re drinking a Jack and Coke in a five-star hotel bar while wearing a tie like it personally offended you,” I say. “I don’t think either of us gets to judge tonight.”

He laughs again, and this time the sound lingers in the air between us rather than disappearing the moment it arrives. People laugh all the time, in bars and lobbies and in the background of other people’s evenings, and most of it means nothing. This feels different. Every time he laughs, another layer of something tightly held seems to release from his shoulders, like his body is finally remembering what it feels like to stop working so hard. I find, with a clarity that surprises me, that I don’t want the moment to end.

I couldn’t tell you exactly who suggests leaving first.

Maybe it’s me, or maybe it’s him. By this point, it doesn’t really matter, and I’m not entirely sure either of us can reconstruct the specific moment even if we tried.

One minute we are sitting at the bar, trading stories that somehow manage to reveal absolutely nothing and everything at the same time. Stories that avoid names and specifics and anything that could be pinned down, and yet somehow feel more honest than conversations I have had with people I’ve known for years. The next, we have worked our way through enough drinks to take the sharp edges off the night, and neither of us seems particularly interested in saying goodnight first.

The conversation never slows. That is the thing that sticks with me, even later, when I am trying to organize the evening into something I can make sense of. Not the stories themselves. Not the drinks, or the easy way the laughter comes, or even the fact that I still don’t know his name and he doesn’t know mine.

It’s how effortless everything feels. The absence of any particular effort at all.

I know he’s younger than me, though I couldn’t tell you by how much. I know he is sharp because every time I throw something at him, he catches it and sends it back with enough wit to keep me working for the response. I know his smile appears more often as the night progresses, and every time it does, I find myself thinking about what I can say next to be the reason for it.

At some point, the piano music changes and the crowd around us begins to thin, tables clear out one by one until the bar feels quieter and more private than it did an hour ago. More rounds appear between us, followed by another stretch of conversation that feels so effortless I lose track of time completely and stop caring that I’ve lost it.

I stop thinking about Seattle and the trade.

I stop thinking about the flight waiting for me tomorrow morning, my lost apartment, and the great distance that is about to exist between me and every person I love most.

For the first time in three days, my future isn’t sitting on my shoulders pulling my focus. For a few hours, in the warm amber light of this hotel bar with a stranger who hasn’t asked me to explain a single thing, it disappears entirely.

Judging by the way the tension gradually vacates his face over the course of the evening, whatever followed him through those glass doors seems to disappear for him too.

I don’t ask about it, and he doesn’t ask about mine. Some things don’t need to be named to be understood.

By the time we leave the bar, the distance between us has disappeared in the way that distances do when two people have spent enough time choosing not to maintain them. His shoulder brushes mine as we move through the lobby, natural and unhurried, neither of us adjusting or pulling back. My hand rests against the small of his back as we step into the elevator, a small gesture that feels less like a choice and more like a correction of some kind, like everything is slightly more right with that point of contact than without it.

Neither of us pulls away, as the elevator doors slide shut.

The second they do, his hand finds the front of my jacket and curls into the lapel. His breath is warm against my lips, smelling faintly of the whiskey we’ve been nursing for hours, and beneath that, something sharper, something like the salt of his skin when I lean in closer and catch the scent of him, clean, warm, undeniably him.

I don’t hesitate. My mouth finds his, definitely not a tentative brush of a first kiss, no, this is the kind of hunger that’s been simmering beneath the surface all night, coiled tight in my chest, in the way my fingers have been itching to touch him, in the way my pulse has been thrumming just a little too fast every time his knee brushed mine at the bar. His lips are softer than I expected, yielding just enough to let me take the lead, and then, then he groans into the kiss, a low, rough sound that vibrates against my mouth and sends a jolt of electricity straight down my spine.

His free hand slides up to cup the back of my neck, fingers tangling into my nape, teasing the tips of my braids, and my knees weaken at the possessive pressure of it. I press closer, my body aligning with his like we’re two pieces of a puzzle that have finally fit together. The elevator walls are too close, the air too thick, but I don’t care. I don’t care about anything except the way his tongue teases against mine, the way his teeth graze my lower lip, the way his breath hitches when I tilt my head just right and deepen the kiss until we’re both breathing each other’s air.