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He smiles broadly. “We have a lovely sazerac, but that’s really only an absinthe rinse. But you could probably order an off-menu shot on the rocks.”
“You know,” Tina says, “absinthe doesn’t really make you—”
“Hush.” I bend over my napkin. “Stop nitpicking.”
MODERN SCIENCE HAS PROVEN ABSINTHE TO BE COMPLETELY SAFE, I write. TOO BAD. IT’LL HAVE TO BE THE THOUGHT THAT COUNTS.
“Hell yeah.” Lee grins.
I sip my single malt. At this point, I’m mixing liquors. I’m going to have a hell of a hangover in the morning. I don’t care.
Five minutes later, our waiter is back. This time, he sets something gold and bubbly in front of me.
Ginger is an old Asian remedy for increasing mental acuity and reversing memory loss. Unlike your drink, this one is scientifically proven to work. I don’t know if it’s indicated for whatever you’re dealing with, but it can’t hurt.
My table reads this in silence. At first.
Tina speaks first. “A, it’s a Chinese remedy, not a generically Asian one, so—”
“Cool your jets,” Anj intervenes. “The Chinese were total colonizers. Everyone uses ginger. I bet he’s part Chinese anyway. Pretty common in a lot of southeast Asia.”
She frowns. “You think?”
“Yeah. The nose…”
I tune out their discussion and focus on the problem at hand. Namely, how to respond.
I finish the gingery cocktail in one long swallow. Then I open my purse and unsnap the container of Mace I keep on my keyring.
I drop this in the glass.
IT HELPED! My handwriting has become progressively less legible over the course of the evening. I JUST REMEMBERED SOMETHING I NEEDED TO DO. BE A DOLL, AND SPRAY YOURSELF IN THE FACE WITH THIS.
We have to bribe the waiter with a twenty to deliver this. Jay looks at it, reads the napkin without a flicker of response, sets the glass on a table to one side, and picks up his laptop again.
He works for the next five minutes without looking up, until the kitchen approaches him with a plastic bag filled with containers. He stands, pays, and then turns back to the chair he has occupied for the last twenty minutes. He packs his laptop, then picks up the glass.
He turns.
His eyes meet mine. Then—my heart skips a beat—he starts toward me, step by liquid step. He walks with a grace I can’t ignore, not as tipsy as I am.
“Oh, shit,” Anj says, taking my arm. “He’s coming over.”
He doesn’t look at my friends. He doesn’t look at the waiter. He just takes the glass with my little container of Mace and rattles it in front of me.
“Did you know that pepper spray has a Scoville rating of three or four million heat units?” He asks this question in an amused, conversational tone. “That’s ten times hotter than a habanero pepper, but about five times less potent than pure capsaicin.”
I search for a brilliant response.
“Uh,” I manage.
“The scary thing,” he continues, “is that concentrated asinine obtuseness burns twelve times hotter.”
My mouth moves. Nothing comes out.
He upends the glass on the table. My pepper spray rattles and falls out. “You don’t need that,” he says. “Between the two of us, I think we’ve had enough stupid. I’m done getting burned.”
I gulp.
“Have a good evening, Maria. And friends.”
He smiles at us, then turns away. As he leaves, I laugh. It’s the only thing I know how to do under the circumstances. I can’t really complain; I did send him drinks telling him I wanted him dead and/or pepper-sprayed. I can’t complain that he fought back. After all, I started this round.
“Well played, Jay.”
He stops. He almost turns.
A dim memory of a much, much earlier insult comes to mind.
“You know,” I say. “The asshole police won’t—” Goddamn. Nothing is coming out of my mouth properly. “The asshole police aren’t out giving tickets.” There was more to that insult. Dammit. How did it go?
Jay blinks. He frowns at me, probably trying to figure out what the words coming from my mouth even mean. Then he sighs. “Serious question. Do the asshole police give out tickets for being an asshole or for not being one?”
My nitpick. He stole my nitpick.
“They ticket you,” I say with as much drunken solemnity as I can muster. “They are your own personal police.”
He does show some emotion then. He smiles involuntarily. And I hate, absolutely hate, the little sparks of whatever it is that flutter through me when he does.
I hate that I lied to my friends about him. I hate that he’s not simple. I hate that his eyes dip briefly to my tight shirt, and I hate that I don’t hate that he looks.
“Drink some water, Maria,” he says dryly. “You’re going to need it.”
I watch him walk away. He moves easily. Like he doesn’t need to turn back and look at me.
“I don’t need water,” I mutter. “I need more alcohol.”
* * *
“Coffee.” I clutch the five in my hand almost desperately the next morning. “Black. The darkest roast you have. Please.”
And fast. I don’t say that, though, because I’ve been a barista before, and my splitting hangover is not their problem.
They aren’t fast. I stand to the side, clutching my plastic number, wishing my eyelids didn’t feel like sandpaper.
My head feels like cotton. My mouth is dry, and the low rustling murmurs of the coffee shop around me seem magnified and echoing. With my eyes shut, the sounds seem louder. More invasive. More…
“We have to stop meeting like this,” says a low voice, practically in my ear.
I jump, startled.
Jay is standing right next to me. He has a smile on his face, probably because he knows—down to the drink—how shitty my hangover is at the moment. I squeeze my eyes shut.
“Is there a name for that phenomenon where you keep running into the wrong person?” he asks.
I don’t rub my eyes because dammit, I’m not about to smear my eyeliner. “Sounds like a form of confirmation bias,” I mutter. “There are probably dozens of people you see on a regular basis. You just don’t notice them because you don’t know them.”
“Oh.” His lips twitch into a smile. “You know, you really should drink some water. Coffee is a diuretic.”
“Not as much as people think. Your body gets used to it.” I think about this. “Mine does, at any rate. No comment on yours.”
But my eyes drop accidentally to his chest on those words. That thing where you keep running into someone… It’s not fate. It’s not a sign. It doesn’t mean anything except that I notice him. And I do. He’s watching me with a suspicious expression. Like he remembers last night, and…
And, oh my god. I do, too. I bought him drinks and sent him messages, and pointed as they were, I could have hung a sign around my neck that said: I NOTICE YOU. In big, flashing, barely legible capital letters.
A flush of embarrassed heat creeps up my cheeks.
“Besides,” I say with a determined brightness, “I had a ginger lemonade this morning, and everyone knows ginger improves mental acuity.”
His smile broadens.
“Right now,” I say, “I have the mental reflexes of a…”
I trail off. I can suddenly remember Anj and Tina arguing over whether he was part Chinese. I can’t tell, but now I’m looking at his nose, his cheekbones, the shape of his lips, as if there is some secret in them.
“Don’t leave me hanging. The mental reflexes of what?”
“The mental reflexes of someone who can’t think of a good analogy,” I say with forced cheer.
He laughs. It’s a low, husky laugh, and for one second, I can’t tell if he’s laughing with me or at me. Then I realize I’m not laughing.
He’s holding his drink in a cardboard cup, and I still have a plastic number. Why is he still here?
“Don’t you have photons to excite?”
“Photons to excite, populations to invert, and qubits to entangle.” He raises his cup in its cardboard sleeve as if in a toast.
But he doesn’t leave.
“Okay.” I look desperately at the coffee bar behind me. “Let me go before I need to signal a friend to fake-text me an emergency to escape this conversation.”
His face goes blank. Utterly blank. For just one second. Then he shakes his head. “I think I hear your phone right now.”
“Right. I’d have to come up with the emergency, as the one of us who has friends.”
He just shrugs. “Bye, Maria. Drink water.”
Then, thank god, he leaves.
My coffee still hasn’t shown up, but at least I don’t have to invent an emergency after all. The last time that happened…
Ha. I smile in bitter memory. That smile lasts about four seconds. Four seconds, while I think of the conversation I had with Actual Physicist. I hate that I’m hung up on him. I need to get over it. I need to go out and find someone and forget, and never mind that I’ve tried that.
Except… In the space of time it took me to think that, an errant tug of memory surfaces. I remember last night, and the drinks, and coming home with Tina, and…
“Oh, no,” I moan. “No, I didn’t. Please tell me I didn’t. Please please please…”
I fumble my way into the chat app. My pleas to erase reality are futile.
Oh, god. I did.
* * *
1:03 AM
