Free Mafia Girl by Deborah Blumenthal Page A

electrical currents begin pulsing. I head toward him, and he stands, and he has to be six-four because even in my heels he’s high above me.
    I kiss his cheek and breathe in his lemony scent. He must have cleaned up and doesn’t that say something? I slide out of my jacket and sit in the banquette next to him and live in the moment.
    “How you feeling?” he asks, pretending not to see the low-cut silk tank top.
    I shrug.
    “Your back, I mean.”
    “It’s mostly better.” I hold off on joking about Percocet because that would be playing into his law enforcement antidrug thing and I know that script. The waiter comes by and I order a Coke to avoid flashing my bogus ID.
    I can’t say it feels easy or natural or comfortable or any other emotion that I’ve ever felt to be near him in a bar, his thigh inches from mine. What it feels is otherworldly, as though the rest of humanity is closed off behind glass like the dioramas in the Museum of Natural History, and there’s just the two of us.
    “I didn’t know if you’d call,” I say.
    “Neither did I.”
    I look in his eyes and stare at his lips and force myself to look away.
    I start toying with the black leather and gold bracelets on my arm, tightening them, loosening them, tightening them again and feeling twelve years old again and not me. And where did that come from? Because right now I need my Gia alter ego on steroids, the one who says what’s on her mind and isn’t gnawing at the inside of her cheek.
    I’m convinced that in cop school they teach you never to say anything that advances the conversation so that the other person will feel forced to fill the silence. I snap to and start wondering if he’s like this just with me or with other girls too which tightens my insides because for the first time I think of other girls.
    Does he have a girlfriend? What a complete jerk I am. I mean, look at him, how could he not?
    “Why didn’t you know…if you’d call?”
    “Gia…” he says, lifting his head and looking at me. I’m looking back at him and fixated on those lips again and how they’re parted now. I expect flames to shoot up and burn us.
    “This is totally off the wall.”
    “What is?”
    “My seeing you, my sitting here.”
    “Because you’re a cop?”
    “Because of a lot of things.”
    “Does that scare you?” I say.
    “What? Being with you?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You know what scares me, Michael?
    “What?”
    “Not being with you.” Then I swallow extra hard and close my fingers around his upper arm and just leave my hand there and try to pretend that I’m not breathing ragged because I’m touching his skin.
    Did I really have the nerve to say that? Why didn’t I just shut up? And how can my mouth come out and say what I’m thinking? But it does and I can’t seem to control that, and here we go again with my head telling my mouth what it wants to say, not what it should.
    Michael tries to pretend my hand isn’t where it is, but he stirs and something inside him changes. We sit there without talking, surrounded by ghosts of things in his head, and he mostly looks down at the fake black marble table. And then he stares inside his glass at his drink before he lifts it and drains it, and I watch his throat as the liquid goes down.
    I don’t know where things are going to end up so I pull my hand away and lean against him and he feels warm and solid. I run the tip of my shoe up and down his calf and then wait, but he still doesn’t do anything except open his clenched fist and press his opened hand against the tabletop. And I watch and wonder what that hand would feel like…if it were touching me.
    He licks his lips. “You don’t even know me,” he says finally.
    “What do I need to know?”
    He squints and looks at me to see if I’m serious, and then his face softens and he smiles his smirky cop smile. “I never met anyone like you.”
    I give him back a smirky smile.
    Out of nowhere, because I can’t