“So your obvious attempt to cut my visit short didn’t pan out.”
“Shut up and let me look at that.” She stepped over to him and he lowered the towel so she could examine his sore jaw. “Not swelling, that’s good. An inch closer to my foot, you’d have been drinking soup through a straw for the next two months.”
“Hold on, that was your foot you hit me with?”
She shrugged and said, “Yeah?” then rested her fingertips on his jaw. “Work it again.” Rook moved it back and forth. “That hurt?”
“Only my pride.”
She smiled and held her fingers there on him, caressing his cheek. The corners of his mouth turned up slightly, and he looked at her in a way that made her heart flutter. Nikki stepped away before the magnet pull gained real force, suddenly worried that deep down she might be some sort of freak who got turned on at crime scenes. First on Matthew Starr’s balcony and now here in her own kitchen. Not the worst thing, to be a bit of a freak, she thought, but crime scenes? That was sure the common denominator. Well, that and, um, Rook.
He shook the ice out of the towel and into the sink, and while he was occupied, her mind raced to figure out just what the hell she was thinking, asking him up there. Maybe she was loading too much meaning into this visit, projecting. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, right? And sometimes coming up for ice was just coming up for ice. Her breath was still high in her chest, though, from being close to him. And that look. No, she said to herself, and made her decision. The best course was not to force this. He had his ice, she’d kept her promise, yes, the smart thing would be to stop this now and send him on his way. “Would you like to stay for a beer?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” he said with a grave tone. “Is your iron unplugged? Oh wait, there’s no electricity so I don’t have to worry about my face getting pressed.”
“Funny man. Guess what? I don’t need no stinking iron. I’ve got a Bagel Biter over there and you don’t want to know what I can do with that.”
He took a moment and said, “I’m good with beer.”
There was only one Sam Adams in the fridge so they split it. Rook said he was fine with sharing hits off the bottle, but Nikki got them glasses, and while she got them down, she wondered what had made her ask him to stay. She felt a naughty thrill and smiled about how blackouts and hot nights brought on a certain lawlessness. Maybe she did need guarding—from herself.
Rook and his virtual lighter disappeared into the living room with their beers while she scrounged a kitchen drawer for some candles. When she came into the living room, Rook was standing at the wall adjusting the John Singer Sargent print. “This look level to you?”
“Oh…”
“I know it’s kind of forward. We know about my boundary issues, right? You can hang it somewhere else, or not, I just thought I’d swap it for your Wyeth poster so you could get the effect.”
“No, no, it’s good. I like it there. Let me get some more light going for a better look. It might have found its home.” Nikki struck a wooden match and the flare-up anointed her face with gold. She reached down into the curved glass of the hurricane lamp on the bookcase and touched the flame to the wick.
“Which one are you?” said Rook. When she looked up, he gestured to the print. “The girls, lighting the lanterns. I’m watching you do the same thing and wondering if you see yourself as one of them.”
She moved to the coffee table and set out a pair of votives. As she lit them, she said, “Neither, I just like the way it feels. What it captures. The light, the festiveness, their innocence.” She sat on the sofa. “I still can’t believe you got it for me. It was very thoughtful.”
Rook came around the other end of the coffee table and joined her on the couch, but putting himself at the far end with his back against the armrest. Allowing some space between them. “Have you seen the original?”
“No, it’s in London.”
“Yes, at the Tate,” he said.
“Then you’ve actually seen it, show off.”
“Mick and Bono and I went. In Elton John’s Bentley.”
“You know, I almost believe you.”
“Tony Blair was so pissed we invited Prince Harry instead of him.”
“Almost,” she chuckled and glanced over at the print. “I used to love to see Sargent’s paintings at the Fine Arts in Boston when I was going to Northeastern. He did some murals there, too.”
“Were you an art student?” Before she could answer, he raised his glass. “Hey, look at us. Nikki and Jamie, doin’ the social.”
She clinked his glass and took a sip. The air was so warm, the beer was already hitting room temp. “I was an English major, but I really wanted to transfer to Theater.”
“You’re going to have to help me with this. How did you go from that to becoming a police detective?”
“Not such a huge leap,” said Nikki. “Tell me what I do isn’t part acting, part storytelling.”
“True. But that’s the what. I’m curious about the why.”
The murder.
The end of innocence.
The life changer.
She thought it over and said, “It’s personal. Maybe when we know each other better.”
“Personal. Is that code for ‘because of a guy’?”
“Rook, we’ve been riding together for how many weeks? Knowing what you know about me, do you think I would make a choice like that for a guy?”
“The jury will disregard my question.”
“No, this is good, I want to know,” she said, and scooted closer to him. “Would you change what you do for a woman?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“You have to, I’m interrogating your ass. Would you change what you do for a woman?”
“In a vacuum…I can’t see it.”
“All right, then.”
“But,” he said and paused to form his thought, “for the right woman?…I’d like to think I’d do just about anything.” He seemed satisfied with what he’d said, even affirmed it to her with a nod, and when he did, he raised his eyebrows, and at that moment, Jamie Rook didn’t look like a globetrotter on the cover of a glossy magazine at all but like a kid in a Norman Rockwell, truthful and absent of guile.
“I think we need better alcohol,” she said.
“There’s a blackout, I could loot a liquor store. Do you have a stocking I can borrow to pull over my face?”
The exact contents of her liquor cupboard in the kitchen were a quarter bottle of cooking sherry, a bottle of peach Bellini wine cocktail that had no freshness date but years ago had separated and taken on the look and hue of nuclear fissionable material…Aha! And a half bottle of tequila.
Rook held the light and Nikki rose up from the crisper drawer of the refrigerator brandishing a sad little lime as if she’d snagged a Barry Bonds ball complete with hologram. “Too bad I don’t have any triple sec or Cointreau, we could have margaritas.”
“Please,” he said. “You’re in my area now.” They returned to the couch and he set up shop on the coffee table with a paring knife, a salt shaker, the lime, and the tequila. “Today, class, we’re making what we call hand margaritas. Observe.” He sliced a lime wedge, poured a shot of tequila, then licked the web of his hand at the thumb and forefinger and sprinkled salt on it. He licked the salt, tossed back the shot, then bit the lime. “Whoa-yeah. That’s what I’m talkin’ about,” he said. “I learned how to do this from Desmond Tutu,” he added and she laughed. “Now you.”
In one fluid move Nikki picked up the knife, sliced a wedge, salted her hand, and brought it all home. She saw his expression and said, “Where the hell you think I’ve been all these years?”
Rook smiled at her and prepared another, and as she watched him, she felt herself relaxing her sore shoulders and, inch by inch, coming untethered from the state of alertness she had unwittingly adopted as a lifestyle. But when he was ready, Rook didn’t down this shot. Instead, he held out his hand to her. She looked down at the salt on his skin and the lime between his thumb and finger. Nikki didn’t look up at him because she was afraid if she did she would change her mind instead of taking the leap. She bent toward his hand and darted her tongue out, quickly at first, but then, choosing to slow the moment down, she lingered there licking the salt off his skin. He offered her the shot and she fired it back and then, cradling his wrist in her fingers, she guided the lime wedge he was holding to her lips. The burst of lime juice cleansed her palate, and as she swallowed, the warmth from the tequila spread from her stomach to her limbs, filling her with a luxurious buoyancy. She closed her eyes and ran her tongue on her lips again, tasting the citrus and salt. Nikki wasn’t at all drunk, it was something else. She was letting go. The simple things people take for granted. For the first time she could remember in a long time, she was flat-out relaxed.