Talk to him, I thought to myself. Just go up to him after the show and tap him on the shoulder and say, Hey Mark, when I feel like drinking alone, I watch you.
Smack. I’d sound like a crazy person.
I love watching you in the dark when I’m by myself.
Ew.
I like to watch you move.
Wrong. All wrong. I truly was turning peculiar.
I tried not to stare through the glass too long as Mark Drury took a seat at the bar inside. I cursed Elizabeth for telling me to leave the store. I cursed myself for wearing a dark blue dress on a hot spring day. But my gumbo had arrived, so I was committed. Plus, what if he had a girlfriend? You’re just talking to him. You’re just saying, Hey, love your work.
A few minutes later, the bartender handed him a takeout coffee and a wrapped sandwich. Bag pinned between his lips, newspaper held in his armpit, he pulled several napkins from a stainless steel dispenser near the door and headed straight for me. In my head, I was screaming, Here! Sit with me! But my eyes were shaded by my giant sunglasses. I was like a fish, mouth opening and closing, pressed up against the silencing aquarium glass.
Then, before I knew it, he was sitting at the table next to me, joining some dark-haired woman who had an empty seat at her table. They introduced themselves and fell into an easy banter as they ate. Watching him grin at her, making her laugh, hurt my stomach. I regarded my imaginary rival as discreetly as I could. She was pretty and fit, but I bet she didn’t know that Mark had chosen the band name the Careless Ones from The Great Gatsby, a book she’d probably never read, having cribbed notes in junior high from people like me. Bet she wouldn’t even like Mark’s music. Minutes later I watched him say goodbye to her by punching his number into her phone, imagining that he was giving it to me.
What happened to me? Where did I go?
“Are you okay?”
Had I said that out loud? I had said it out loud … directly to the dark-haired woman who’d been talking to Mark Drury and was now sitting alone. She stood, picked up a glass of water from her table and moved in slow motion towards me. She placed the glass in front of me, a concerned look on her face.
“Are you okay?” she asked again.
To this day, I have no idea why I said yes when she asked if she could join me; I so rarely spoke to strangers. But as my mother would say, “Some things are fatefully divine and some are just divinely fated.”
3
CASSIE
IT WAS INEVITABLE. Will and I both tried to avoid being alone, but the Café Rose was small with narrow hallways and dark corners.
“Thanks for staying late, Cassie,” Will said, the night the drywall got delivered. He’d asked me to watch for the truck.
“I wanted to.”
“Wonder if you could do me one more favor.”
“Sure,” I said. “What is it?”
“You know what it is,” he answered, his voice barely above a whisper. Crossing his arms, he leaned back on the cool glass door of the fridge.
“Is it this?” I asked, loosening the clasp on my apron and letting it fall to the floor.
“Yes. That’s it. Can you do me another favor?”
“I can,” I said, my voice so choked with longing I sounded underwater. I slowly lifted my shirt over my head, my hair cascading through the neck hole. I threw it down to the tiles. I wasn’t wearing a bra.
“Is it this?”
“Yes … you are … so beautiful,” he murmured. My skin had that effect on him and I knew it.
“Your turn,” I whispered.
Without hesitating, he whipped off his shirt and threw it near mine, his hair shocked upwards. Then he shoved off his jeans, leaving his white boxers on. This was our game.
“I won’t touch you. I promise,” he said. “I just want to look at you. That’s not wrong.”
I undid my jeans and stepped out of them, hooking my thumbs in the strings of my bikini underwear. He nodded slightly, aching for me to take those off too. I hesitated, looking out at the pitch-black street. What time was it? How long had we been alone in here like this? I inched my underwear down around my thighs and brought them to the floor. I was now naked.
“Come closer, Cassie. I want to smell your skin.”
“No touching.”
“I know.”
I took a few steps towards him. Six inches from his bare chest, I stopped. At that distance I could feel our body heat mingling, his hot breath on my skin.
I let my hand travel up to my breast, cupping it for him, letting my thumb circle my nipple. A moan escaped his throat as he extended a hand. I stepped back.
“You promised,” I whispered.
“I won’t touch you. But you can touch yourself, Cassie. That’s not against the rules.”
True. I let my other hand travel down across my stomach, the muscle in my forearm flinching as I tentatively felt myself, how wet he was making me, relishing how insanely excited this was making him.
“This is too much, I can’t,” he said.
He was crazed. That’s the only way to explain why, with one deft forearm, he swept the condiment table next to us clean of the bowls and utensils, the trays of salt and pepper shakers, the ashtrays that hold sugar packets, the napkin holders—it all went crashing to the floor. Any other time I would have been pissed. But that night I was thrilled by his impatience, his ferocity. He spun me around and urged me down onto the table, my arms stretched to hold the edges.
“You said you weren’t going to touch me, Will.”
“I’m not going to touch you. I’m going to fuck you,” he groaned, pulling my knees apart and standing naked between my spread thighs. He now held his heavy erection in his hand, stroking it, his fierce eyes on me as he prodded into my wetness, a hesitant inch, then another one, teasing, making me yearn and reach, asking, begging for him to fuck me, to fuck me hard, Oh, Will, my quivering thighs bracketing his narrow hips, my nails digging into his forearms as he—
“Excuse me. Is this seat taken?”
Oh shit, my fantasy broke like a bubble. A man—a real one—now stood looming over my metal patio table at Ignatius’s, his face shadowed from behind by the high, hot sun.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. “The patio’s full and I noticed you have a table for four all to yourself. Very selfish.”
“Oh. I’m so sorry. Yes, of course,” I said, plucking my purse from one of the chairs at my table. I must have looked like a dozy ape, chomping on an ice cube and staring into the middle distance, fantasizing about Will—again. This bad habit had to stop or I would drive myself mad.
“I’ll just eat my sandwich and drink my coffee and read my paper,” he said. “And we can pretend we’re not sharing a table for lunch.”
“Good plan.”
He had mischievous blue eyes, and though normally I didn’t like beards, even short, groomed ones, his was sexy.