Free The Restoration Game by Ken MacLeod

was looking down at and carefully turning the pages of one of the shelf-full of wedding magazines that Suze had, to my certain knowledge, begun accumulating about an hour after John had slipped the rock on her finger.
    Alec noticed me hovering just outside his space, and looked up. His eyes widened, he smiled and then mouthed along to the very line in the song that always makes me feel appreciated. Then he said: “Why don't you come on over…” and it was like he was waiting to add my own name to the end of that line.
    My mouth went dry all of a sudden.
    “Uh, hello,” I said. “I'm Lucy. Uh, Suze said…”
    “Hi, Lucy,” he said. “I'm Alec. Alec Hamilton.”
    I couldn't place his accent. Australian?
    “As in Alexander Hamilton,” I said. Forgetting that everyone who has a name that can be quipped about has heard the quip, often.
    “The Founding Father,” he said. “Yup.”
    He glanced down again at a two-page fashion spread in the magazine, shook his head a little, closed the magazine and laid it back on the shelf, and retrieved his glass from the shelf above. He just stood there looking at me, as if he were pleased to see me. He didn't say anything.
    “Why were you looking at Brides?” I asked, and then wished I hadn't, because it sounded like I thought he needed to justify his strange behaviour.
    Alec didn't seem at all embarrassed.
    “I was checking to see if all wedding dresses are the same.” He grinned. “They are.”
    “Oh no, they're not,” I said. “There are hundreds of different styles.”
    Most of which I'd seen while schlepping around bridal shops with Suze, so I spoke with some authority.
    “Most of which look exactly alike,” Alec said.
    “Well, maybe they do to you , but not to—and anyway, why would you even be interested?”
    He slugged back some red wine. “When I was about five,” he said, “my parents took me to a wedding. Being a boy, and a brat, I found it all really boring but I do remember being impressed by the bride. I thought she looked…like a queen in a fairy tale, you know? Romantic, I suppose, though I didn't know that word then. She was in one of those big elaborate dresses they had in the eighties.”
    I gave my shoulders and hips a tiny wiggle, to remind him or myself that I was in an arguably big and romantic dress too. He gave no sign of noticing.
    “These,” he went on, nodding sideways at the shelf, “don't look so spectacular. Very plain.”
    I recalled Suze at her fitting. She'd looked like a queen all right.
    “You should see one on a bride in real life,” I said. “They look totally different when they move.”
    I gave my skirt another little shake, like: see?
    “I'll take your word for it,” he said.
    It seemed a bit of a conversation-stopper.
    “Well,” I said, laughing it off, “having established that you're not that interested in wedding dresses…what are you interested in?”
    “I'm interested in lots of things,” he said. He moved his neck and shoulders as if to ease some tension. “Animals, history, weapons, costumes, words, books, tools, card games, rocks, fossils…”
    “Ah,” I said, delighted. “You're a fan!”
    “A fan?”
    “You know—science fiction.”
    “Never read the stuff,” he said, in that dismissive way normal people have.
    I must have looked crestfallen. “Oh.”
    “I'm a zoologist,” he added, like that explained it.
    “And you study kiwis,” I said, sounding knowledgeable.
    “Kiwis?”
    “That's what Suze said.”
    “She knows perfectly well I'm doing research on sheep.”
    “Sheep?” I couldn't help giggling.
    He was still looking straight at me. “I've heard all the jokes.”
    “Oh, I didn't mean to—but why sheep?”
    “Very important animal, it's absolutely crucial to our economy.”
    “Yeah, I suppose, but I mean Scotland has—”
    “The New Zealand economy,” he said.
    “Oh! You're from New Zealand! So that's what Suze meant.”
    Alec closed his eyes and shook his head.