Moments In Time: A Collection of Short Fiction (63 page)

He eyed me strangely.

“You don’t strike me as a ‘people person’.”

“Maybe that’s because you don’t really know me,” I retorted, taking a larger sip of wine that time.

“True,” he said with a smile, “and I’d like to remedy that, but I’m a pretty good at reading people, and you seem like a bit of a loner to me. Private. Introverted.” His smile widened impossibly. “That’s why I had to work so hard to get you here. Other girls would have caved much earlier.”

“So you’re saying you’re only in it for the challenge?” The words had seductively left my mouth before I could stop them. Playing that game with Robbie was playing with fire for sure. I put my glass of wine back down, silently vowing to not touch it again.

He leaned forward slightly, creating an entirely new kind of tension between us.

“I’m not sure what I’m in it for yet. I’ll let you know when I have a better handle on that.”

We engaged in a staring contest across the tiny table. Thankfully, a bread plate landed in front of us, breaking our gaze.

“You said you wanted a job that allowed you to travel. Is that something you’ve done a lot of in the past?” he asked, dropping any hint of a sexual undertone from his voice entirely.

“Yeah. A bit.”

I could hear the reluctance in my voice, the subject of conversation drifting in a direction I wanted to avoid entirely.

“I’d love to travel, but my job does the opposite of yours—it tethers me,” he replied, taking a bite of un-buttered bread. “You’re lucky. You can go wherever you want.”

“True, but sadly I can’t go and seclude myself in the middle of the Bering Sea to indulge that introverted personality of mine.”

“Good point. However, I’m sure you can find some middle-of-nowhere town to go to and escape this bustling metropolis,” he teased. “You must have enjoyed one of the places you’ve worked in enough to return to it. Where have you been?”

“Too many places to count,” I scoffed, hoping to evade specifics.

“Do you have family all over? Do you get to see them in your travels at all?”

“I don’t really have much family, and the family I do have I’m not close to.”

His eyes narrowed slightly, analyzing my response. He looked so shrewd that it made me wonder if he might really be as astute as he claimed to be. I hoped that if he was he’d also know when to leave something be and not continue to press. If he didn’t get the hint, I was going to need a way to get out of our date ASAP.

Then he smiled, the action softening his expression.

“Crab fishing is an interesting profession,” he started, seeming to change the subject intuitively. “People seem to be drawn to it for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is to start over.” He paused to take a sip of his beer, looking at me over the rim of the glass with all-knowing eyes. “Some seem to think we’re all uneducated miscreants, which is clearly untrue because I just used ‘miscreants’ in a sentence and I highly doubt that the average dropout could do that,” he joked. I couldn’t help but choke on a tiny laugh in response. “The truth is that most of us are legacy fishermen, following in the family business, but there are those who are not. Those that come to the Alaskan fishing grounds to escape something in their past: drugs, rap sheets, family issues . . . . ”

“That’s interesting,” I replied, absentmindedly filling a silence that fell between his observations.

“It is. But what I find most interesting is how much your answers have in common with theirs when someone asks them about their lives.” The hair on the back of my neck instantly shot up. “Like I said, I’m really good at reading people. It’s clear that you have something you’re hiding, something you don’t want to tell me about. I brought this up to tell you that I don’t need to know what it is. Your business is just that: yours. If you want to share it with me, I’m happy to listen. If not, I don’t mind. I want to get to know you, Cristina; the you that you are now.”

If he had surprised me before that moment, then he’d shocked the hell out of me now with his keen observation. In all my years of fleeing my past, no one had even come close to dissecting me so accurately, let alone so quickly. A man who I’d initially taken to be a cocky, womanizing smart ass proved to actually be as shrewd a judge of character as he had claimed. He was goddamn near psychic.

I don’t know how long I sat there, staring at him in shock, my game face surely long gone at that point. I had no idea how to recover from my reaction. My kneejerk response was to hide my face, so I grabbed wine glass number two and drank from it―heavily.

“A little too close for comfort, I see,” he said as I guzzled my Merlot. “Sorry about that. I sometimes forget that what I see so easily might not be best pointed out to the subject of my ob
servation. I’ll try to rein it in a bit next time.” He smiled wide. “Scout’s honor.”

“I’m going to need more wine if this night is going to turn into an impromptu analysis of my life,” I quipped, throwing my glass back to swallow the last of its contents. “You might need a couple more, too.”

His smile widened as he flagged our server down.

“Another round, please. And keep them coming.”

• • •

Two more rounds, a dinner, and dessert later, we found ourselves giggling our collective way out of the restaurant, much to the apparent joy of the patrons and staff alike. We had gotten more boisterous as the hours had passed and the alcohol set in. I think I would have been happy to see us leave, too, if I had been a sober observer.

“Taxi!” he yelled in jest, flagging down random cars in the street. It was all for show, and was cheesy at best, but the way he did it was just so entertaining that I had to laugh. “You know you’re not driving home, right?”

“Yeah,” I agreed, still recovering from my outburst. “That’s why we called the cab, remember?”

“Right,” he said, pointing to me for emphasis. Just as he did, the small, yellow sedan pulled up to The Crab Shack. “Your chariot, my dear.” He opened the door for me, sweeping his arm as he bowed slightly.

“You need to be stopped,” I chuckled. “Wait. How are you getting home?”

“My hotel’s only a few blocks over. I’m going to wind my way over there and stumble up the stairs to my room.”

“Why don’t you just share the cab with me? We can drop you off first.”

“I’m good. I like to walk,” he explained, leaning in closer to me than he had all evening. “I sit on my ass for weeks at a time on the ship. Walking is a welcome change of pace. Besides, I need to burn off the calories in that cheesecake. Can’t have it spoiling my girlish figure, now can I?”

“It would mar your man-candy status.”

The mischievous sparkle in his eyes brightened.

“Now you’re catching on.”

“Okay, well . . . ,” I hesitated, not really knowing how to end the night. “Thanks for dinner. It was fun.” I tried to smile as genuinely as possible, stifling the nerves rising within me. Why they were rising at all was a mystery in and of itself.

“Agreed. We’ll do it again soon,” he replied.

“You think so?” I asked incredulously, slowly getting into the back seat of the cab.

“I know so,” he said, shrugging to emphasize his carefree confidence.

“And how could you possibly know that?”

He bent down, leaning his head into the vehicle.

“Because you had more fun than you’ve had in longer than you’d care to admit. Because tonight opened your eyes to possibilities you’d forgotten even existed. And because you’re secretly dying to see me naked.” Before I could muster a response, he kissed me gently on the cheek and pulled away. “See you soon, Cris.”

He closed the car door and patted the hood of the taxi to let the driver know he was clear. The cabbie pulled out, asking me where we were headed, and it was all I could do to tell him. A jumble of questions and images ran through my mind, making it increasingly hard to think.

Especially the thought of Robbie naked.

I spent the short ride home trying to sort out just how I was going to avoid the lovely distraction that his presence promised. There was no room in my life for him, and, quite frankly, it wasn’t safe for him to be a part of it. Those that knew me suffered because of it. I liked Robbie; no amount of self-delusion could make me deny that.

And it was because I liked him that I vowed to never see him again.

chapter 4

Robbie

With sobriety came clarity. When I awoke the next morning, I realized I would be lucky to get Cristina to go out with me again. I was probably lucky that she hadn’t run from the restaurant, never to look back, after I practiced amateur psychology on her the night before. For whatever reason, that night I couldn’t seem to stop tempting fate, pushing her with my assessment of her actions and her past. Not exactly a great game plan for a first date, but it was the one I enacted.

And she didn’t run. She sat across the table from me with a strange blend of shock and relief in her eyes. Whatever she was hiding, she’d been doing so for such a long time that she no longer had to try to fool people; it came naturally to her. That was until she met me: Robbie, the master of disarming all who he encounters. Unfortunately, my gift of astute observation was one that others tended to not enjoy all that much.

I learned early on that
if I made a show of being a jokester―the class clown―nobody would take me too seriously. And I preferred that. So I became the happy-go-lucky guy that everyone knew and liked, hiding the depth of who I was to avoid isolation. Ironically, my chosen career essentially did that anyway. There were few people that knew the real me, and they were either far away or dead.

So why then did I decide that I should release my observational skills on a date with a saucy, intelligent woman who was sexy as hell? Detachment, plain and simple. If the date blew up in my face, I stood to lose nothing. I wouldn’t have to see her again. I could be back out to sea in no time and back to the life I’d carved out for myself, providing the condition of my arm permitted it and I still had a ship to go back to at all.

But now, having seen a glimmer of the truth that her hardened walls endeavored to withhold, I couldn’t help myself: wanted to know more. And, moreover, I wanted to show her more of me. To be accepted for what you truly are is all anyone can hope for, and I saw the possibility of that with Cristina. I wasn’t going to walk away. Not yet.

The chase was on.

chapter 5

Cristina

I managed to avoid the messages he left for me at work the next day. My head was throbbing, and I was barely functioning. Between the pounding in my cranium and Pam’s incessant interrogations about my date, I wanted to take a gun to my head and pull the trigger—anything to end the torture. On the upside, doing so would have kept Mateo from having the pleasure of doing it for me. A morbid realization, but true.

However, I knew that, short of moving again, I wouldn’t be able to avoid Robbie forever. Especially not with Pam on his side, horny saboteur that she was. And, as though my thoughts were prophecy, two days after our date, Robbie strolled into Radiology like he owned the place, smiling from ear to ear. The fact that I had clearly been avoiding him didn’t appear to faze him.

“I have a crazy idea,” he started as he approached the desk where Pam and I sat, doing paperwork. “I think I’m going to let you make me dinner. It’d be the perfect apology for ignoring me. What do you say?”

I could feel Pam’s eyes boring a hole into the side of my face as she and Robbie both awaited my response. With other employees also starting to take an interest in the sexy man staring at me, I needed to get him out of there as quickly as possible. A scene was not something I wanted to cause in the middle of the Radiology reception area. Robbie, on the other hand, seemed more than happy to stand there all day, not the least bit uncomfortable with the attention he was garnering. Flying under the radar was my M.O., and had been for years. I was practically sweating by the time I responded.

“Fine. Sounds great.”

“Excellent,” he replied with a wink.

“Here’s her address,” Pam offered, thrusting a fluorescent pink Post-it note toward him.

“What time should I be there?” he asked as he took to note from Pam.

“Early,” I said curtly. “Six. And it can’t be a late night. I have to be at work early tomorrow.”

He looked at me with a playful rise of his eyebrows.

“Cristina . . . what exactly are you suggesting? I’ll have you know I’m not that kind of girl.” Another wink. “I’ll see you at six sharp.”

Without anything further, he walked out, pink Post-it in hand. Though I couldn’t see his face, I was positive there was a look of self-satisfaction plastered all over it. I, however, was sure I looked as uncomfortable as I felt. Someone was going to catch hell for what just went down, and Pam was the perfect victim.

“Seriously, Pam . . . what the fuck was that? You just hand out my address like it’s nothing? Do you do that often?” As soon as the words left my mouth, my blood ran cold. I prayed that the answer to what I had originally meant to be a rhetorical question would be no.

“Jesus, Cristina. Of course, I don’t. Why are you acting so hostile right now? You’re the one that agreed to have him over. All I did was tell him where he was going. I’m pretty sure you would have had to if you actually wanted him to come.” I glared at her for a moment. “Wait, are you telling me that you weren’t actually going to have him over?”