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“Are you sure?”
“Yes, definitely. Go.” Evie glares at me. She knows me too well. The uber pulls away and as soon as it’s out of sight, I prepare to walk home.
“Meeting them there, huh?” says a voice behind me. I turn and look at the man behind me. I know him. Well, I don’tknowhim, but it’s Jake—that guy they were talking about.
“Yeah, well, you know I was going to but—” I hold up my phone so that he can see that it’s powering off, “Oh shit, my phone is dead. And with no cabs in sight. Looks like I won’t be able to call an uber. Guess I’d better go home and charge it so I can tell them what happened.”
“Yeah,” he laughs, and it gets me; I’m not going to lie. Heisbeautiful, and maybe it’s in a typical way, but right now all I see is his smile and it’s downright infectious. Either that, or itisthe whole emotionally unavailable thing. More than likely, it’s a mix of both. “I kind of figured as much. Do you really want to go home though, or do you want to do something else?”
Do something else?Is he the something else? Is he not even going to put in any effort because he can tell that I’m broken and always kind of looking for something to temporarily fill the void? I wonder what gave it away. Was it maybe that I was the only one in the fancy club with a ripped-up black tee and equally destroyed jeans on? Or that I was the only person in the room that wasn’t bright and shiny, and not even pretending to be? What the hell, I’ll bite.
“Like what? And be very specific,” I challenge.
There’s that smile again. “I mean go somewhere quieter. This place is terrible. I don’t want to go home, but I don’t want to fucking stay here.”
“Really? I would have thought this was your kind of place.”
He shakes his head before he says, “Not at all. There’s a place a couple of blocks from here. You wanna go listen to yourself think, have a drink, and an actual fucking conversation?”
“Do people still have ‘actual fucking conversations’ these days?” I ask, surprised I haven’t talked him out of it yet.
“Some of us try,” he says, shrugging.
“And do I strike you as a riveting conversationalist?”
“You do, actually,” he says, “I spotted you inside looking incredibly out of your element and, at times, I'd even say distressed, and I thought to myself, ‘There’s a girl that can really have a conversation.’ And I was right. We’re doing it right now. So, what do you think?”
“Wow, you really see me,” I say, my voice dripping with sarcasm, because it’s kind of my thing, but really, he kind of did. I was out of my element, maybe even distressed. “Alright, I’m in. Where are we headed?”
“Right this way,” he says with a dramatic gesture. “I’m Jake, by the way.”
I don’t tell him that I already knew that.
“Ruby,” I say.
After walking a couple of quiet, rainy blocks toward downtown, we stop at a small, unmarked staircase. He tells me that this is the place and starts to descend the stairs. I was pretty sure I’d been just about everywhere in this city, that I knew it like I knew my own body, or even better—like the crescendo in my favorite song—but I had never been here and I had never noticed this staircase, nor would I have thought to.
“Watch your step,” he says.
I follow him down the dark staircase. “So, is this a ‘Saw’ thing or…”
“More like a Dexter thing,” he replies.
“Great,” I say.
He pushes the door open, and we step inside. I’m surprised at what I see. It’s dark and warm and expansive, with rich bar tops and concrete floors. The tables and chairs look like they had been purchased from assorted flea markets, none of them matching, with some looking like they belonged in someone’s grandma’s kitchen, some looking like outdoor garden seating, and a few old 80’s style recliners thrown in for good measure. The walls are covered in flyers for basically everything—from screamo bands to open mic night, chess clubs to a therapy group, book clubs to murder mystery night. There is a moderately sized stage in the back-right corner, and on it there was a woman, probably in her 40s, playing the cello. I mean really, really playing the shit out of the cello. None of it quite fit, and it was for that reason that it all did.
I hear Jake mutter something about heading to the bar, but I must have just stood there, frozen, watching for a while. It almost felt wrong. Watching her, I felt like I was watching something private, eavesdropping even, on something that wasn’t for me. It was like she was possessed by something great, and she had to get it out. Where the hell am I?
After what felt like a couple of minutes but was undoubtedly more, Jake reappeared with a couple of drinks. “Do you want to sit? Or just stand here or…”
It takes me a moment to come back to Earth, to gather myself, because I did not expect to find myself in the presence of such vastness, such raw talent, at 1:00 AM in a downtown basement dive bar on a Saturday night that I’d kind of been dreading all day. I wonder what it takes to put yourself on display like that. It's certainly something that I was missing. “Um yeah, sorry. Or no, I don’t want to just stand here, let’s sit,” I say, and we make our way to an empty table nearby.
“She is an absolute badass,” I say.
“Yeah, no, I know. She plays here a lot,” he says.
“Do you come here a lot, then?” I ask, “I mean, sorry but…this just doesn’t seem like your vibe.” I’m not sure if he’s offended. It’s not my intention, but I am genuinely curious. What does this place hold for a prep school, yacht club-looking guy like this?
