I lift mine back.Hi.
The moment is broken when Mason’s hand lands on my thigh under the table, high on my leg, wide-fingered and easy. My dress has ridden up and his palm is on bare skin. His thumb makes one slow stroke against the inside of my leg.
I freeze.
“You good?” Mason says, mild.
“Mm,” I say, recovering.
His smile barely moves. “Sure.”
He lifts his hand off long enough to take a sip of his wine, then sets it back higher, reaching places I haven’t given him permission to go. But I don’t want to make a scene, because I know exactly what a scene costs and exactly who pays for it, so I take a sip of the Barolo.
“Tell me about your internship again,” I say, desperate to move on.
He does. He tells me about it for what feels like a full quarter of an hour, though the clock on the wall behind him says nine minutes. I track every one of them because I’m counting how long until I can excuse myself to the bathroom without it looking like an exit.
He talks. I nod. I ask the follow-up questions any reasonable person would ask, and he answers them expansively, and Irealize he’s enjoying himself immensely and hasn’t noticed I’ve stopped contributing.
His hand never leaves my thigh.
When he finally pauses to refill his glass, I lay my napkin down. “I’ll be right back,” I say.
“Where are you going?” His voice is light, but his eyes aren’t.
“Bathroom.”
“Hurry back.”
I laugh because that is what the moment asks of me.
I walk to the back of the restaurant on legs that aren’t entirely stable, careful not to look at the table with the hockey boys. The bathroom is down a hallway just wide enough that two people can’t pass without acknowledging each other, and I enter and shut the door.
In the mirror, I look fine. That’s the alarming thing. My face looks exactly like the girl Mason brought to the Lantern, but then I look down at the warm, hand-shaped patch on my thigh and suddenly I want to scrub off in the shower.
I lean both palms on the sink and drop my head between them, trying to compose myself, because I want to be here. This is the date I said yes to — this boy, this place — because that’s what an up-and-coming Halden Girl from a good family does.
Right?
I take a few minutes, then leave the bathroom.
Rowan is in the hallway.
He’s leaning against the wall, phone in hand, like he stopped on his way to the men’s room and forgot to keep going. His hair curls slightly at his temples where it’s grown out too long, and he looks tired.
When he looks up, he pauses. “Oh,” he says.
“Oh,” I say.
Neither of us does anything.
Then his mouth does the thing from the café, one corner lifting a little higher this time. “How’s the Barolo?”
“What?” I blink, because it’s the first easy moment we’ve shared since the courtyard. “It’s… wine.”
“It’s a fifty-dollar bottle at the store,” he says. “Which, in a restaurant, means it’s a hundred-and-eighty-dollar bottle.”
The lid doesn’t hold, and I laugh, loud and startled. Then he matches the laugh, and for one second the seriousness goes out of his face, his mouth doing that small private smirk that seems rarer than it should be.
