Page 54 of Leave a Mark
“Yeah. Every chance I get. Live music, dancing — it’s the best.” Lee could easily imagine dancing with Wren. She was small, light, and she looked at home in her body. “We should do that. Soon.”
Wren laughed again, but it sounded skeptical.
“What?” he questioned. “You don’t think it’d be fun?”
“Hmm,” she hedged. “I just have a hard time picturing us together. On the dance floor.”
Lee frowned. He heard more beneath her words, and Lee sensed that whatever it was, he wouldn’t like it.
“I can totally picture us together.” He knew she couldn’t miss the conviction in his voice. And, she didn’t either, because she was silent for a moment.
“Yeah, but…” Her voice dropped away. “…people like you… and people like me…”
He was right. He didn’t like it. “What?” he pressed, frowning. “What about people like you and me?”
He heard her sigh over the phone. “They don’t really go together… I mean—” she stammered “—they don’t reallyworktogether.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said, willfully playing dumb. “We’re two people. Just people. Why can’t we dance together?”
“Not just dance,” she corrected. “I mean anything.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is.”
“So, you tell me,” she began, a challenge in her tone. “What would people think if they saw someone like you and someone like me out together? At a restaurant or on a dance floor? They would totally fuckin’ stare.”
“Well, yeah,” Lee said as though it were obvious. “They’d be thinking,‘Look at that lucky bastard with that hot girl. Damn, I wish I was him.’”
Wren gasped. It was quiet over the phone, but he heard it. Even though he was pissed and battling her resistance, the sound of her gasp felt good. A moment passed.
“I should probably get back…” Her voice had lost some of its fight, but that didn’t mean Lee was winning, not if she was walking away. He certainly wasn’t ready to let her go.
“Where are you right now? Exactly?" Lee shut his eyes and waited.
“I told you,” she started. “I’m at Agave.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “But where? Humor me.”
“Man, you’re weird,” she muttered, but he could hear the smile return to her voice. “Okay… um… I’m inside now. I came in from the patio to get away from the band. So now I’m standing sort of by the hostess station near the front entrance.”
Lee could picture it: the yellow and orange doors, the blue walls, the hostess stand to the left, the dry-erase menu board on the right.
“In the entryway, there’s a step that separates the foyer from the dining room,” he said, his eyes still shut. “Are you up or down?”
“Wow. Do you have a photographic memory? Down. By the front doors.”
Wren was still smiling, he knew, but her voice had softened. It pulled him closer. He wanted to be there with her then, and he couldn’t. But he liked knowing exactly where she was.
“Where are you?” she asked.
In his head, Lee was standing in the foyer at Agave, smiling at the girl covered in birds and flowers.
“I’m…” He opened his eyes to a near-empty cafeteria. Only a few of the other tables had patrons, and Lee had chosen one in the corner facing the lobby. “…I’m in the caf. At a table by myself. Eating a turkey avocado wrap that needs more avocado.”
Wren giggled across the line. “Okay, that cheered me up. At least I’m surrounded by old friends. And no shortage of avocados here.”
