Free Desk Jockey Jam by Ainslie Paton Page B

surf.  Better
to battle grommets than the in-crowd.
    Instead he surfed a crowd
of big-noters and Friday night heroes, wingmen and Barbie dolls to reach their
table.  Before he even got there he faced a choice.  Two empty seats: one on
the left of Bree, one at the other end of the table.  She made the decision for
him by looking up and smiling.  Had she been drinking?  Because that smile was
different.  It had teeth and cheekbone; it had bright eyes and a magnetic
quality.  There was nowhere else to sit except beside her.  He skirted the
table, put his hands on the back of the chair to her left and a sudden wave of
insecurity hit him with such force he almost swam against the tidal pull around
to the other available seat.  She can’t have been smiling at him like that.
    She looked up and did it
again.  “I won’t bite.”
    He sat down with all the
grace of a bloke whose knees were ruined by years of jogging on cement.  “Don’t
hold back on my account.”
    “Holding back isn’t my
thing.”
    He grunted.  “I’ve
noticed.”
    “You were going to sit
over there,” she gestured to the seat, Doug was folding into.
    “Thought about it.”
    She laughed, lifted her
glass, not a wine glass, not a cocktail or a spirit.  He saw the bubbles of
mineral water.  “What stopped you?”
    He should’ve said a smile,
something surprisingly real in the seaweed of fake, but he was still processing
the laugh.  She’d laughed at him, not with bitterness, but the way you did when
something amused you.  “Thought it’d annoy you more if I sat here.”
    “You must think my
tolerance is pretty damn low?”
    “My power to annoy is shit
hot.”
    She laughed and there it
was again, a tear in the fabric of his known universe.  “I can see that,” she
said.
    “This is our longest
conversation about,” he hesitated remembering the conversation in the cafe,
“sport, mechanical failures or the state of the sun.  Why are you humouring me?”
    “Don’t get used to it.”
    He considered her.  He’d
never been quite so close to her before.  With the slightest movement of his
knee or elbow he’d be touching her.  He gestured to the bottle of Evian on the
table.  “You’re not drunk.  You’re probably not high,” he looked over his
shoulder.  “Am I wearing a sign on my back that says ‘kick me’ and you’re being
perverse?”
    “Yes.”
    “Yes?”
    She shrugged.  “Do I need
a reason to be civil to you?”
    “Hell yeah!”
    She reached for the Evian
bottle and poured it into the glass in front of his place setting.  “I guess I
like it better when we’re not at war.  It’s less exhausting.”
    He considered that.  He
considered her.  Her suit today was a fitted dress and a lightweight jacket. 
Her caramel coloured hair was in a swirl at the back of her head, but the heat
had made soft curls of the short pieces that framed her face and neck.  She had
freckles.  He wasn’t blind especially where it came to a good looking woman,
but he’d never noticed how big her eyes were, how plump her lips.  She only wore
the faintest trace of makeup and it was either Bree, or the wine being poured,
that smelled crisp like his shirts did fresh from the dry-cleaner.
    “Do I have lipstick on my
teeth?”
    Caught out staring.  “Ah,
no.”
    “So what are you looking
at me like that for?”
    “Like what?”  Like he was
appreciating modern art, but was surprised that he liked it.
    “Like I have two heads.”
    He was keen for a beer.  He
should’ve ditched this and gone for a surf.  Bree was having a go at him, but
he’d lost the thread, didn’t get the joke.  He was desperate for this
conversation take a new tack.  He used an old faithful Neanderthal fallback,
“Huh?” while signalling their waiter to suggest he’d lost interest in anything
but liquid sustenance. 
    Her laugh was a soft huff,
but she took the hint, turning to Rowan on her right and joining in a
conversation about the