Page 26 of People In Love
This is the redhead, Shay says. Who showed up on Saturday, and then again today, looking all shifty and besotted?
He is not besotted, Nora says.
He is shifty, though.
That’s just Bren, Nora says. He’s somehow super confident and really awkward, all at once. I don’t know how it’s even possible, but that’s him.
Oh, it’s possible, Shay says. Kind of like Jesse Eisenberg. Or Cillian Murphy.
I guess?
Andy Warhol, too. Come to think of it, practically every white male artist who ever made it big. Penis equals god-given confidence, equals the prerogative to be socially awkward aka a demonstrable dick. And yet there they are, getting rich and famous anyhow.
Except Bren isn’t rich, or famous. Or an artist.
He is a dick, though?
No, Nora sighs, he’s not. Just does some dickish things, maybe.
Like not telling you he got tattoos, Shay says.
Right.
Or turning up at your engagement party, to surprise you. Thatdouche bag.
Nora stares at the laptop background, which is a photograph of Horace asleep on the art café floor. Then she walks her feet slowly in a quarter-circle, spinning the desk chair so that she’s facing Shay, who’s watching her from the doorway. Bangles on her own rose-tattooed wrists, which Nora barely notices, or at least has never asked about.
Am I overreacting, Nora says.
You? Shay flashes her sharp-toothed smile, her nose piercing twinkling like a fleck of glass. Never.
Nora nods, once, and Shay snickers. Looks over her shoulder, tells a customer she’ll be there in one sec, then looks back at Nora who is now chewing her thumbnail.
He is fit, Shay says. The redhead.
Bren, Nora says.
The tattoos and the shark scar might just have tipped him from nomadic hipster into dark, dangerous question mark, Shay says.
He’s definitely a question mark, Nora says. The laptop has rebooted, is ready for the password now. She types it in but the screen shakes, rejects it.
And he’s single? Shay says, and Nora bashes the keys too hard as she retypes. Yes, she says. Or at least, she thinks so.
You don’t know?
He’s not exactly forthcoming, in that area.
I thought you said you were best friends?
And I thought you were off men, Nora says, still so hot, from rushing back; how is she sweating, like this, when it’s February.
Men, yes, Shay says. Question marks, no.
Well with Bren, life would be a series of question marks, Nora says, and Shay says sign her up. When Nora shoots her a look she says hey, no judgement, please! That not everyone gets to be as lucky as her, in full requited love with a nice normal guy who washes up and pays half the mortgage and understands pink tax. Some of us have to scrape the barrel with the Brens of the world, okay? And Nora wants to say that Robin is more than just a nice normal guy, and that to be with Bren would hardly be scraping the barrel, but both seem to imply things she does not want to, should not need to prove, and so she saysneither. Tries the password again, her hair still soaking into her scarf.
_
That night, Robin is home before her, and he has called this venue that he loves, doesn’t she love it, too? It isbeautiful. A white box in the middle of a silver birch forest, glass roof, lots of light. Definitely different. Debatably intimate, but that’s on them, and their guest list.
