Ink & Secrets

CHAPTER ONE:

“You've been staring at that phone for eleven minutes,” Nora said.

“Whatever it says, it's not going to change.”

She's right. I know she's right. I put it face down on the counter anyway.

"Was it Anderson?" she asked.

“Anderson Literary. Four months for a form letter”. I rested my elbows on the bathroom sink.

"They didn't even use my name”.

Nora puts her mug down with more force than necessary. “Dear Author. They wrote Dear Author to someone they made waiting for four months”.

"It's normal."

"Stop making excuses for them." She gathered her coat from my chair. "Come for a drink. Just one. You don’t have to talk about it”.

I want to say no. I want to keep living here in this apartment with the dripping tap that I can't get around to fix, my manuscript that keeps coming back, and the picture on the windowsill of my parents at a beach they drove eight hours to get to.

My mother, caught mid laugh. My father teetering as if she's just released her grip. I look at the picture too long. And finally, I take the coat she's held out.

The Night Lounge is just the kind of place I can't afford and don't belong.

"This is very expensive," I said.

"It is," Nora agrees. "But I have a membership credit and the universe owes you an overpriced drink in a nice chair." She held the door open.

"I'll be right behind you. I just need to call a client back. Five minutes I promise."

Maybe I should've waited. I should have stood on the pavement and waited for her five minute call to become its usual twenty.

But, I just went inside.

It's a lift with walls covered in mirrors. It took me thirty floors up where it dropped me in a room bathed in natural light and the peaceful, intelligible hum of people who are very much at home here.

I grabbed the last stool at the very end of the bar. I ordered the cheapest thing from the menu which, although being only just, was still quite an alarming thing. I gave a look at the city.

That's when I noticed him.

He is two seats away. Not close enough to need his thanks. Close enough that we both ignored each other while we pretended we're the only people in the room.

He had a drink that is light coloured and he is looking out, not at his phone and not at nature. Not off into the distance but into the middle of the distance and with that expression of a man who has been controlling his eyes all day and has run dry.

Dark suit. Dark eyes. This kind of stilledness you have been perfecting for years. He has a drained look: nothing to do with sleep.

I looked away. I know that kind of tiredness. I don't want to recognize it in a stranger's face. My wine arrived. I drank it. I looked at the city.

"You ordered the Malbec," he said.

Turning around, I saw him still staring into the distance. But the sentence was clearly addressed to me. It was not a question. Just a casual remark, said in a very easy detached manner like a weather report.

"I did," I said.

"The 2019 is better. They keep it behind the counter." He turned his glass in his hands. "You'd have to ask."

I can now look at him properly. He looked a little younger than I was expecting for someone who is this close to early 30s. Perhaps with a face that is more complicated than the gaze that is seemingly set to control mode.

"This one is fine," I said.

"Fine isn't the same as good."

"No," I agreed. "But fine gets the job done, and sometimes that's enough."

He looked at me then. A real look, the kind that doesn't pretend it isn't looking. Something behind his eyes gives more away than he probably intends.

The ghost of something crosses his mouth. Not a smile. The smallest possible warmth, like a fire someone's been careful to keep low.

"Fair point," he said.

We both looked away. The silence resettled but differently. Something has been established. Two people who exchanged words and chose not to make anything of them. A kind of agreement.

"Long day?" I asked. I don't know why. I brought a book specifically to avoid this.

He turned his glass again. "Long year."

"Same."

He looked at me. This time the look stays. "Are you here with someone?"

"A friend. She found someone more interesting." I pause. "Temporarily."

"And you hadn't. Yet."

There's something almost careful about the way he said yet. Like he noticed the opening and chose to step through it. I let it sit.

"You?" I asked.

"Alone. Deliberately." A beat. "Usually it's more convincing."

We talked unlike other bar conversations, we spoke like two individuals who are over performances. He said he was in a room of people every single day that wanted things from him and haven't had a break from it in a very long time.

I told him that I knew what it was to be managed rather than seen.

He said: "That's an interesting way to put it."

"I write," I said. Then catch myself.

"I was. I mean sometimes."

"What kind?"

"Stories. The kind with too many feelings and not enough commercial viability." I lifted my glass.

"You?"

"Numbers. I run a company."

"What kind?"

He paused. "The kind that looks better from the outside."

I studied him. The careful phrasing. The exhaustion underneath the control.

"Most things do," I said.

He almost smile again. Closer this time.

The city goes dark below us. The bar filled around us. Neither of us noticed, because somewhere in the last two hours the conversation stopped being casual and became something I don't have a clean word for.

He told me he hasn't slept properly in months. I told him I stopped writing for three years after I lost someone and only just started again.

He said: "What made you start again?"

"I haven't figured that out yet. Maybe I'll write about it."

He smiled. A real one. I catch the edge of it before he reels it back.

"Tell me something," he said, leaning forward slightly. Not toward me, just forward. Into the space between his glass and the bar. "Something you've never told anyone in a bar before."

I should deflect. I'm good at deflecting.

Instead I said:

"I think grief broke the best parts of me. And I can't tell if they're actually broken or just waiting. It's been four years and I still don't know."

Silence. Long enough that I start to regret it.

Then, quietly differently from every other thing, he said:

"The parts that break are usually the parts that were real. That's not a flaw. That's the point."

I stared at him.

He is looking at his glass again. His jaw is set, the way it was when I first noticed him, but it's different now, not performance, not management. Something real, uncomfortable and present.

"Elena!" Nora, appearing from behind me,

“There you are, I've been looking everywhere"

I turned. I let her pull me toward a table she's found. I didn’t look back for a full minute, because I know if I look back now it will mean something.

When I finally do just once, he is watching me leave.

Not with the absent look of someone watching a room. Something specific. Something that looks uncomfortably, like a man trying to hold onto a detail he's afraid of forgetting.

I faced forward. I followed Nora. I told myself it was a conversation, nothing more, strangers in bars talk, this is ordinary, the world is full of people who say true things and disappear.

I told myself this several times.

I think about his voice for the rest of the night.

I don't know his name. I don't know anything about him. And I already know, without wanting to know it, that I'm going to think about that for a long time.