The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel (25 page)

Some kindly reminiscence with an old friend wouldn’t do it. Removing Birdwine required something ugly and immediate, spiced with the danger that came only with the unknown.

I was going to McGwiggen’s, an old-school midtown dive that had survived gentrification with its steeze intact. It was an easy walk, even in heels, especially if I didn’t mind a cut-through between buildings. I didn’t. I put my hand inside my bag, wrapped around my mace with a finger on the trigger, and took the turn. Walking down this dim road, narrow, lined with back doors and trash cans, was like walking back into my past.

My past had no Hana, her fate hovering out of view, secreted beyond a dark horizon. The only lost girl here was me, eager for something that felt more like a fight than straight-up sex. I walked into an old, familiar darkness, into a former Paula, one reincarnated by the staccato beat of my heels against hard concrete, the faint smell of decay. I remembered this hunger. It had lived in me before William, before Nick, and definitely long before damn Birdwine. I learned it at thirteen, in love with a dead-eyed mother who smelled like an ashtray and cried when she drank wine. It deepened as Kai and all her last names, all her incarnations, died. I was left with Karen Vauss, a parolee who kept her eyes focused faintly to the right of me. She pawned her mandolin, traded her bright silk skirts and bare feet for a waitress uniform and ugly orthopedic shoes. Karen Vauss did not tell stories often, and so she didn’t tell me who to be. She could barely stand to look at me.

But boys would look. I learned that, fast. Boys would follow me and beg and yearn, and I could push them down and own them, for an hour or two. I could invent a new self under each new gaze, could be unhungry, powerful, alone.

I wanted that again. Right now. I could feel the ghosts of all the girls I’d been behind me in the alleyway, creeping in my wake. I could almost hear my own past footsteps as an echo. For a moment it was so real that I spooked myself. I stopped and turned to look. There was only silence and darkness. I walked on.

I’d had boys in the back rooms at parties, in garden sheds, in gas station bathrooms, on rooftops with their parents sleeping soundly below. I’d had one up against a wall on a dark road much like this one, his back to the bricks, his knees bent so I could get my legs around him.

Now I needed a new male body with a different shape, a different smell, to push myself against. If I pushed hard enough, I could shove myself all the way past Birdwine. I wanted a new mouth to reinvent my tastes, to scrape fresh mint over bourbon off my tongue.

The front entrance to McGwiggen’s was around the corner, but there was a smoked glass door here in the alley. It let into the hallway by the restrooms. Wes, the bartender, must have seen me come in on the security camera, because he’d already pulled a tray of balls and was popping the cap off a Corona as I came into the center room. I claimed a table by the back wall, though I knew it had dead rails and a five-inch tear in the felt near the foot spot; it gave me a good view of the bar and the front door.

My only concession to the present was my cell phone. I dug it out and jammed it in my back pocket. If Julian buzzed me, I would feel it. Then I put all thoughts of siblings from my head. I scoped the local talent while I racked for nine ball. Slim pickings, but it was early yet.

The old white guy on the end had a healthy overinterest in my solo game, but he either was twice my age or had lived hard enough to look it. He was as welcome to the view as any tourist, but I wasn’t going to take him home. Four stools down was a real prospect, a black guy, maybe forty, broad through the shoulders with his head shaved down to dark stubble. He was looking, so I looked back. Then he smiled, showing me the gap between his two front teeth. That blew it for me.

I kept one eye on the front door as I played against myself. I was overstriking, but it felt good, especially when I sank my shots. I liked that rebounding clatter, the balls landing in the pocket with a gunfire smack of sound. A regular I knew came in; we nodded to each other, but I wasn’t interested. He was someone I would likely see again. A young man came in the back. Cute, but clearly a fetus. Wes took his fake ID and sent him home to mother.

I was racking for my second game when a man with some potential walked in the front door. He was a white guy, very fair-skinned, with dark blond hair. He was maybe five ten in his boots, built slim and elegant. My age or close to it. He paused to scan the bar, and when he got to me, he smiled. A good smile. Like I was exactly what he’d been looking for.

He had a pretty-boy face I didn’t mind at all: narrow jaw, sculpted nose, high cheekbones. Add the rangy build, the fair skin, and the light eyes, and he was the opposite of all things Birdwinian. That alone put him ahead on points. I smiled back.

I lost sight of him while I broke, but when I lined up for a bank shot on the one ball, there he was. He’d taken a stool directly opposite my table. His back was to the bar so he could face me. He was giving me the sex eye, and I gave it back as I walked around the table for my next shot.

He wore a generic navy blazer over a plaid shirt with that yoke-shaped piping at the top that made it read vaguely western. He had on western-style boots as well, but he didn’t read to me like an outdoorsy kind of fellow. His pale hair was short enough to be corporate, worn brushed back from his temples.

I blew the angle, and the two ball went wandering off to sit behind the nine. He lifted his beer to me in a rueful little toast. I toasted back, and he took it as permission to come over. I liked the way he did it, too, a slow, unhurried stroll, directly to me.

“Kin I buy you a drank,” he said, his drawl so exaggerated that I laughed.

“That’s the worst fake southern accent I’ve ever heard,” I told him.

He grinned, and his teeth were perfect. Straight and even.

“Well, when in Georgia,” he said with no accent at all. He could be from anyplace, and I liked that, too. “How about it?”

“I have a drink,” I said. I nodded toward my beer, half-f, sitting on the bar rail behind me. “Want to play?”

“Sure,” he said, and reached for my cue. His hands were so well kept they looked almost manicured, nothing like Birdwine’s callused bear paws. He didn’t bother to rerack or restart, just looked to make the shot I’d bungled. I took it as a tacit understanding that neither of us gave a crap about winning at nine ball tonight. “What’s your name?”

“Lady at the Bar, right now,” I said. “But it could be Fond Memory.”

“I like that second option,” he said, flashing those white teeth again. He walked away around the table, talking soft to make me follow. “Would it hurt my chances if I said my name was”—he paused, sizing me up—“Cowboy Passing Through?”

“Nope. I didn’t come to find myself a husband.” I liked the honesty inherent in his chosen pseudonym. It said plainly that he was looking for a ships-in-the-night scenario, which made up for the costume feel of that shirt, those boots; I’d never seen a more unlikely cowboy. Accountant passing through, maybe. His ring finger was bare, but I checked anyway, saying, “I’m not looking for someone else’s husband, either.”

“I’m not married,” he said, but then amended it. “Well. Not anymore.”

Good enough. He shot, and I picked my beer up and drank deep, swallowing, feeling the cold of it warming as it came to my center. I watched the lean and sway of his chosen angles. He sank two before he whiffed and passed the cue back. As I bent to shoot, his gaze slid frankly up and down my body, a balm against the burn inside my chest.

We had begun an old dance, and a familiar one. I’d learned it the way a future deb learns to two-step at cotillion. I didn’t ask any more questions; I didn’t care. He could be a banker or a busboy, from Austin or Albuquerque. His clothes were nondescript, excepting that slight faux-western flair, but he had fresh-cut hair, and some serious cash had gone into his teeth. I liked that he’d put more care into the body than the packaging. His forearms were corded with lean muscle, and I suspected I would find a gym body, complete with skinny-guy six-pack, when I peeled the blazer off and yanked open his shirt.

My little garnets, swinging from the chains, chimed in my ears as I bent and shifted, my body swaying toward him, then away around the table. We played the game, and sometimes I was chasing, sometimes letting him chase me. It was so familiar that the man himself began to seem like someone I remembered. In his movements, he became the avatar of every Kappa pledge that I’d seen once, then never seen again.

I’d done this dance with football boys, built thick like human walls. With basketball boys, long and delicious. A shy chess player approached me at a mixer, on a dare. I liked the way he rocked with nerves; there was an instinctive understanding in the sway of hip and thigh. I’d gone back to his dorm room, and there I’d made him king of all the dorks. I remembered a culinary arts major who cooked for me, and this same dance was in his deft hands, working the knife. I’d let him suck the butter off my fingers. And now this cowboy. Yes, I knew him. I knew a thousand of him, seemed like. He was a deep bell, tolling low down in my memory as we moved.

No one had sunk the nine ball, but I straightened up and slotted my cue into the wall rack. I had already decided. He would do.

He grinned, and his gaze got sharper and more eager.

He came around the table toward me, and I heard another bell, a real one: the ding and buzz of a text landing. I stepped back, reaching for the phone in my back pocket.

“One sec, I have to check this,” I said. “My little brother’s having a day.”

He eased back into a waiting slouch. We both knew we were done with the preliminaries; I was tempted to drop the phone in my bag and check on Julian later. Real life was not what I wanted buzzing and pinging in my pants just now.

But the last time we’d talked, he’d been acting as Birdwine’s hand puppet. Birdwine’s voice had rumbled in the background, and Julian parroted and paraphrased the details of their slow search as it crept toward Georgia. They had to check every route for any hint of Kai and Hana. It was painstaking and meticulous work, and my little brother sounded frustrated. He hadn’t wanted to stop, because the next lead might pay off, or the next one. Birdwine and I, more realistic, knew this kind of inquiry could take weeks.

“I’m going to call in sick again tomorrow and come back here,” Julian had told me at the end.

“Do you need me to get you and bring you back to your car?”

“No. Birdwine’s giving me a lift.”

It was the first time he’d called Birdwine by his name, and I didn’t half like the admiring tone. They’d apparently spent all day bro-bonding as they worked. Just what I needed—for disapproving Julian to join a pro-Birdwine faction the very day that I’d gone full and angry anti. Worse, Julian’s car was parked in my office lot. I hadn’t wanted to be anywhere nearby when they showed up.

I’d saved my file and said, “Good, because I’m going to McGwiggen’s.”

“Oh, what’s McGwiggen’s?” my guileless brother had asked.

“A pool hall,” I’d told him, but Birdwine knew that it was more than that. McGwiggen’s had a rep for getting its patrons laid efficiently; Birdwine wasn’t the only one who knew how to work a phone puppet.

I hadn’t talked to Julian since, and it had been a stressful day for him, no doubt. So I pressed the pause button on the cowboy, and I swiped my phone to life.

The text was not from Julian, though. It was from Birdwine. Directly.

Shoot me Julian’s cell number? Forgot to get it.

Just words. Nothing of consequence. But it was as if my naked foot had touched his chest, as if I’d felt his big heart beat against my instep.

I stopped. The whole world stopped. The air fell still around me, and I was still, too, unmoving inside silence. The buzzing of my body faded. The jukebox sounded like a distant, faded chiming.

I’d come here to wipe away my history with Birdwine, but in the moment of this simple contact, I fully understood that my foot was poised on something live. All I had to do was press down, stamp, and I
would
kill it.

I tried to remember the last time I’d gone to bed with a stranger. By the time I passed the bar, I’d had my dating life in hand. My last one-off had been—law school, when Nick started calling me sweetheart during sex. Love could be broken, in spite of what poetry and chick flicks said. I’d broken it much like this with William, then with Nick; it was what I did.

I couldn’t take this back, once it was done. I thought of Birdwine’s bruised face, silent and unforthcoming in his kitchen. He had a kid out there. A kid he never saw, that he had never mentioned. It was a bad bedtime story for a chick with abandonment issues, as he’d said, and maybe I could not forgive it. Perhaps forgiveness wasn’t in my nature.

I wouldn’t know. I hadn’t tried.

“You ready to get out of here?” Cowboy asked.

I blinked, reorienting. The world restarted. Now I could hear Guns N’ Roses blaring from the jukebox, but my internal song had stopped. I was done dancing. I gave him a rueful smile, and waved my phone at him.

“Yeah, I’m going to have to cut out. This isn’t going to happen.”

“I’m sorry?” Cowboy said, his voice gone higher than he had been speaking. A little edge of pissed-off had come into it. “Are you serious?”

“Stand down,” I said, uninterested in temper tantrums. I was thinking of Candace again. Not her skill set or her propensity for misdirection, but her hungers. At least she’d known what she wanted. “I’ve burned less than thirty minutes of your evening, and the pool table is going on my tab. Have a nice life.”

I walked to the rail and finished off my beer, picked up my bag.

“Wait, hold up,” he said. He’d seen that the pissed-off-baby thing wasn’t working. He tried another tack, walking around the table toward me, leading from the hip. “We’re having a good time, yeah? Let’s not stop. I’ll get us some shots, or, hell, we can move this back to your place.”

I think I blanched, and I knew I’d made the right call. I’d imagined our bodies intersecting, but I hadn’t pictured it in my loft. I couldn’t picture it, not in any setting where I lived my life. If by some miracle we found Hana soon, the last thing I wanted was this traveling man’s CK One lingering on my sheets.