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He took a drink. “We’re getting off track here. I feel like you were making a point, and I interrupted you.”
“Right.” She pointed at him. “You do that.”
“Sorry,” he said.
“Or, I get distracted,” she said. “Probably my undiagnosed ADHD.”
He grinned at her. “Usually, I find your distractions pretty entertaining.”
She grinned back.
And then, for a few moments, it felt like it usually did between the two of them, easy and right. Like they just fit together. This was the whole reason he was obsessed with her, for the sake of the tangles of time itself.
“Well,” she said, taking a drink of her gin and tonic, “I was saying that it’s very likely it won’t work out between us. Do you remember your last intense breakup?”
“Sure,” he said.
“I don’t mean the thing with Larissa, because you were barely bothered.”
“The breakup before that,” he said. “Obviously, I remember.”
“I do, too,” she said. “Because it was only a few months after I got the job at the Tribune. You moped around the office all the time, and you took up smoking again, and you were so very, very bitter—”
“I remember you were really nice to me, though, so if you really thought I was so unappealing—”
“This isn’t an insult, briars, Decker! This is just, remember how you felt. And now, imagine during all of that, every day, your ex-girlfriend was sitting across the office from you in a desk.”
He did. Her name was Mandy. She was a goblin, and she’d broken up with him because he hadn’t been very supportive of her new makeup channel on Tiktok. She would make these videos where she did “contouring” or something. He’d once, offhand, said that he thought she looked great without makeup, and that had spiraled into a huge rift between them. By the end, it had been impossible for them to have a conversation without sniping at each other, both of them in a state of constant hurt and irritation. He took a long drink of his own drink, draining his glass. He set it down, sighing. “I see your point. But you and me, it wouldn’t be like that.”
“It would be worse,” she said. “Because we’d have more to lose.”
“But maybe we wouldn’t lose anything,” he said. “I think, if it’s us, maybe—”
“It will change us,” she said. “Look how it already changed us. You thought I was being super critical of your sexual prowess. You’re the most confident person I know, but sex made you into an anxiety pretzel. It made you resent an aspect of my personality you usually like.”
He scratched the side of his jaw, surveying her. “I need another drink.”
“Well, we should think about that,” she said. “About whether or not we should drink too much while we’re handcuffed together.”
“This will be my third drink.”
“Yeah, and—”
“I’m a lot bigger than you. Trust me, three drinks is nothing for me. I’ve metabolized the other drinks right out of myself at this point.”
She shrugged. “Okay, fine. Let’s get more drinks.”
“You’re getting another drink?”
“I live in walking distance of this fucking bar,” she said.
“All right,” he said.
“All right,” she said.
7:00 p.m.
ESSENCE YANKED ON the chain of the cuffs as she sorted through her clutch for a credit card.
