Imaginary Lines (New York Leopards 3)

I waved away her concern even as I tried to get a peek at Evan. He seemed tall. And fuzzy. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

She squinted at Abe, without the excuse of having bad eyesight. She must have missed the to-do about him earlier. Off with Evan, no doubt. “You look familiar.”

He waved a hand. “I have one of those faces.”

She accepted that and turned back to me. “Okay, you sure? You’re good?”

“Positive. Have fun.”

They disappeared before I realized it, and Abe took my hand and led me out of the apartment and over to the street. “Let’s find you a taxi.”

“What if I don’t want to go home?”

He looked at me so quickly I could’ve sworn he’d misinterpreted that. His eyes darkened. “What?”

“Um...” My voice came out as a stammer. “I just meant I’m having fun. I want to keep having fun.”

His mouth cracked in a grin, and he shook his head. “You should have fun with a bottle of water. I hope you don’t need to work tomorrow.”

I bobbed my head in fervent agreement. “Me too.” I consulted my brain, and found out that I didn’t. However—”Wait! It’s a Saturday tomorrow! Today. Do you? You have to do meetings and stuff. Why are you here?”

He tucked a loose curl behind my ear. “Because I didn’t want you to fall off a roof.”

I frowned and tried to step back, but misjudged the curb and stumbled. He caught my waist with both hands and mine automatically went to his biceps for balance. I stared at him, breathing hard. Could I do this, as a friend? Nope. Line. There was a line, and it was in the air between us, and there was no air between my fingers and his skin. I reluctantly removed my hands and locked them behind my back, trying to remember what we’d been talking about. It was on the tip of my tongue. My mental tongue. Was there a word for that? A part of the brain just out of reach from the rest, locked away by a fog of intoxication—Wow. I should write that down. “Abe. I am a poet.”

“No, just drunk.”

I tried to explain the eloquence of my turn of phrase. “No, these words—they’re doing things that my words never do. They’re dancing—Look, a taxi!”

He shook his head. “It’s going downtown. You need to catch one in the opposite direction.”

The car couldn’t just make a U-turn? “That’s stupid.”

He walked me across the street and hailed a cab.

The cab driver was chattering loudly into a hands-free headset, but he paused as Abe placed me in one side of the cab and walked around to the other.

“Abe, I’m fine. You don’t have to come with me. You live in Tribeca, right? That’s the opposite direction.”

He shrugged that off and got into the car with me. For a minute, I watched the lights of the city flashing by. My head was still spinning, but slower now.

“You know what I was thinking, before you got here?”

“Before I got here?” I parroted, confused. “But I got here first.”

“No, I mean—before you got to New York.”

“Oh. What?”

“That I was restless.”

I turned to look fully at him. “How so?”

He wouldn’t look at me. “Just... Restless.”

I tilted my head, inviting him to tell me more.

“Like I’ve been waiting for something but I don’t know what.”