Steering her toward a set of damask sofas, facing one another as if they were on the fucking Titanic, the captain offered, “There’s wine.”
“Yeah.” Wine would be good, a whole fucking bottle.
Li Wei had been so handsome, so smart, so kind. Suave yet funny. Perfect. A sharp dresser yet not pretentious like his parents… or hers.
Sitting on that couch, Eugenia swallowed the full cup of Bordeaux in three gulps.
All of this witnessed by the man mirroring her seat on the opposite couch. A man to whom she’d never lied, and who had never lied to her.
A man waiting for an explanation for the look on her face.
“I would have said yes… to this song. I would have said yes, had a wedding, saved children’s lives on the operating table, maybe even had one of my own. But the ground started shaking, and he forgot to ask in the chaos. I don’t know what happened to the ring. Maybe still at the campsite?”
“Did you want a boy or a girl?”
This was too much to bear. Grief hard enough, and anger far more comforting. “Why the fuck are you playing PJ Harvey?”
“Because you hum her songs while you work.”
“I do not!” Humming was for suckers and fools who thought there was a happy ending in this shit place.
“Alecia, play Arcade Fire.”
And the torture ended, the captain refilling her glass.
She sipped the second round, accepting that every last survivor had some kind of PTSD, and unfortunately hers had been witnessed by someone who’d use it against her.
A man she knew hated small talk during his scheduled sex sessions. So small talk it would be. “I saw Arcade Fire live when I was seventeen. Lied to my parents and snuck out. Got a wristband to buy beer and sat on the shoulders of some bruiser whose name I don’t remember. Small venue, but the best show I’d ever seen.”
Lifting his glass, the captain saluted her. “My favorite was MUSE, the Simulation Theory tour.”
“Oh… that was a good one.” No argument there.
Li Wei had stood at her back, cuddling as they rocked to the music. As they marveled at the monster when it burst out over the stage. Both of them drunk on Goose IPA.
“What was his name?”
“None of your business.” Truly and deeply. Abso-fucking-lutely none of his business.
“So you weren’t looking for the one. You already had him.”
“The fact that you think I might reduce my happiness to the outdated concept of the one goes to show how little you know me.”
That earned a smirk. “Did you just call me old?”
“You are old.” Maybe not old enough to have fathered her, but still old.
“And you are very young.” Followed with another raised glass and a devilish grin.
“But I won’t be your brand of young in ten years, assuming I fuck one of your men every night.”
“You never answered. Boy or girl?”
Okay, maybe small talk wasn’t working.
Standing, wine glass in hand, she left the couch and the game of twenty questions to poke around his room—touching everything in an effort to annoy him. To feel. To remember regular things.
There were so many colors.