Page 69 of First-Time Caller
“Liar.” Lucie points a slim, accusatory finger at my nose. I grab it and then lower our hands to the table. I am irrationally pleased when she doesn’t pull her hand away. “I think you’re a closet romantic,” she tells me.
“Decent human being,” I correct.
“Secret swoony boy,” Lucie parrots back.
I snort. She twists her hand under mine and our palms brush together. I trace my thumb over the grease stain on the bridge of her knuckles. “I think if anyone could convince me to believe in it, Lucie, it would be you.”
She grins into the top of her IPA, cheeks pink. “By sheer force of will.”
I squeeze her hand. “Something like that.”
Two beers later and Lucie picks up a laminated menu with a stain that could be ketchup or could be the leftovers of a bar fight. She took her hand back about an hour ago, before the aforementioned beers, and I’ve been silently scheming on the other end of the table for ways to get it back.
It’s an impulse I don’t particularly want to investigate.
Lucie studies the menu with the focus of a NASA physicist. “You know what I need?”
I take a long pull of my beer and wonder if she’d notice if I propped my arm along the back of her chair. What she’d do if I tangled my fingers in her hair. I’m pleasantly buzzed on beer and proximity, the smell of her shampoo and that fucking green dress. “A gin and tonic and two more plates of French fries?”
“Yes,” she breathes, drawing out the word until it’s six syllables long. She’s been eyeballing the drinks at the table next to us with an expression I can only categorize as longing lust. Her eyes narrow. “But also no.”
“No?”
“I need to have fun, Aiden. I never have any fun. I am always the least fun person in the room.”
“That’s not true,” I tell her. “We’re in the same room three nights a week and I can guarantee I’m less fun than you.”
She has the decency not to argue with me. “What do people even do for fun?”
“I’ve heard rumors of a thing called television.”
She frowns at me. “Aiden. I’m being serious.”
“So am I.”
She shifts in her seat, her knees bumping mine beneath the table, her face open and eager. “Do you remember the first time we talked? When I told you I don’t want to try?”
I nod. Sometimes I think I hear her voice twisting through my dreams. Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I feel like she should be in the space next to me, her laugh ringing in my ears. “I do.”
“Well, tonight I don’t want to try. I don’t want to think about failed dates or the radio show or the . . . or the dillweed who stood me up tonight.”
I mouth the worddillweedwith a smile.
“I want to put money in that jukebox and hear ‘Thong Song.’ I want French fries and another beer and maybe even a shot. A shot, Aiden! I don’t think I’ve ever done a shot before.”
She’s picking up steam, her eyes growing wilder with every word. Concern starts to war with my amusement. She’s riding a hysterical edge that sounds like she’s about to cry.
“Lucie, are you—”
“I’m fine,” she says. She takes another noisy sip of her beer. “I just—while everyone else was having fun, I was mixing formula bottles and falling asleep reading about the very hungry caterpillar. I missed the part of life where you can be an idiot without consequence. I’m—I’m being nostalgic, I think. Or romanticizing. I’m very good at romanticizing.” She presses two fingers between her eyebrows and rubs, then averts her gaze to a TV above the bar that’s airing an old Orioles game from the early nineties. Cal Ripken walks out from the dugout with his hat raised, and the crowd goes wild.
Lucie sighs. “You can ignore me.”
“It’s impossible to ignore you,” I murmur.
“What was that?”
I shake my head. “Nothing.” Her lips are still tilted down at the edges, her shoulders curved in. “You know, if you’re looking for fun”—I give in and stretch my arm out across the back of her chair, my fingertips glancing along her bare shoulder—”they have a Skee-Ball machine in the back.”
