“Did you always want to manage money?” he asked.
“I always loved numbers, the patterns, the absolute answers and clarity of math, but no, for a long time I didn’t want to be ordinary, but this is my talent, so I ended up . . .” she shrugged, and he finished her sentence.
“Extraordinary.”
She flinched, but it was probably because a seagull swooped in, squawking to see if they had chips to share. Grip stared it down and it turned its back to them.
“You don’t think I’m extraordinary,” Mena said. “You think I’m, I don’t know, serious.”
“Ice princess. Stick up your bum.”
“What? Really?” She glared at him.
He could only see himself, twin reflections in polaroid sunglass lenses, but he knew a glare when it was aimed at him. “Little bit.” He showed her a small space between his thumb and first finger. “But then you got on the back of my bike and you changed my mind.”
She looked at the sky. “I hate to think.”
“Now I’m going with smart and—”
“If you say cold, I’ll do something unprofessional, like kick sand at you.”
Beach play, tempting. He went with, “Frosty, you know like when you take something out of the freezer, and it has that layer of frost on it that melts on contact with your hand.” He liked that description, because out of the office all the coolness of Mena had burned off and he was left with a person he liked, as if this warmer version was her natural state.
If his instinct proved right, they were going to make a good team.
She did something with her hair to secure it more firmly. He tried not to watch because it wasn’t a performance, just a woman fixing her hair after it had been squashed by a helmet. He watched anyway. Mena Grady was A-grade watchable content.
Which he had to get over.
Any time now, dickhead.
“What was it about me that made you think we’d met before?” she asked.
Good question. He looked at the world through the filter of its beats. Every place had its own signature sound, but so did every person. It wasn’t always up front like the crash of the sea or the low-grade rumble of traffic. You had to listen carefully to a person, to what they said and didn’t say, to what they did, to pick up their beat. And sometimes a person’s sound changed and that told you things about them too.
Evie before she reunited with Jay had sounded angry and frantic and sometimes brittle, even when she was joking around. Now that she was secure in their love, she sounded verdant, creative. Her beat was the same but the sound it sent out was different, richer.
If he tried to explain that to Mena, she’d assume he had a screw loose.
Especially if he said he’d recognized her beat, a complex composition of melodies alternating between shy and daring, because that didn’t make any sense to him either.
“I was just checking that we hadn’t shared a nod before.”
Behind those shades she probably rolled her eyes.
“You’re laughing at me.” He wagged a finger at her.
“Only on the inside.”
“That’s where it counts most.”
“Do you feel like we’re bonding now?”
“If I say yes, you’re going to get with the riot act, aren’t you? I haven’t shown you what makes me happy yet.”
“Just remember, I’m not judging and I’m on your side.”
He groaned. “Here we go.”