Austentatious

by Alyssa Goodnight

  “All signs point to ‘hell no,’ ” he admitted, with a wry smile and a self-deprecating shrug.

  Beck laughed. “Ahhh, the Magic Eight Ball. Ours was a love-hate relationship. I loved to ask, but invariably hated the answers. Same sob story with the Ouija board too.”

  Gabe eyed her over the rim of his iced tea glass before informing us, “Well, you’ll love this. She was obsessed with The Amazing Race and was screening potential matches up front for their able-bodiedness, just in case.”

  I couldn’t help it: I stopped chewing and stared, and when Gabe moved to shove another bite of food in his mouth, I lunged across the table to block him.

  “Wait! Did you put on a good showing?”

  Gabe lowered his fork, careful to look sufficiently put-upon. “I’m pretty sure I passed muster in the able-bodied department, just not in the willingness department.”

  “You’re kidding. I would have thought you’d be into that.”

  “I might have, but she was only interested in my body—and not in a good way. She all but pulled out a clipboard and measuring tape in the middle of dinner.”

  I felt a giggle bubbling up but forcibly suppressed it.

  “And after the busboy cleared the table, she actually wanted to arm wrestle.”

  The mental picture this conjured was nearly too much for my self-control. I tipped my face down, feigning interest in my nearly empty plate.

  “So did you?” Leave it to Beck to ask the million-dollar question. My head popped right back up again in my desperation to hear the answer.

  Gabe swung his unreadable stare between the two of us, probably wondering how he’d ended up getting double-teamed, with hard-core participation from a complete stranger. Given what I’d just been through, I didn’t have a whole lot of sympathy for the guy.

  “No. There wasn’t a lot of room, and besides, she’s ...”

  “What?” Beck challenged. “A girl?”

  I cut in. “Maybe in the interest of full disclosure, you should specify ‘Unwilling to submit to feats of strength’ in your profile,” I teased. I forked up a last bite of waffle. “Have there been any other recent matchups?” I probed.

  Beck propped her elbow on the table and dropped her chin in her hand, apparently just as curious.

  “As a matter of fact, I’m in the question-and-answer phase with a doctor,” he informed us, sounding distinctly stuffy. “And I wouldn’t mind a second opinion.” He grinned at his own pun, and with his eyes trained on Beck, it was obvious he didn’t require a third.

  “A second opinion on what?” Beck asked, clearly up for whatever this brunch threw at her.

  “Her get-acquainted question.”

  “Let’s hear it,” she encouraged.

  “She asked which three things I’d want with me if marooned on a desert island.”

  “Not too original, but lots of potential there,” Beck allowed.

  “I used to play that game with my grandfather,” I interjected. “My three things were a playhouse with working kitchen and bathroom, my favorite blanket, and a suitcase full of clothes.” I sipped my sour-sweet mimosa, proud of those long-ago, very sensible decisions.

  “So math wasn’t your strong suit early in life, huh?” Gabe said with a smirk.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It never occurred to you that your tally went way beyond three things? Why didn’t you just tote along a luxury resort, complete with staff and swimming pool? Hell, why not a Super Walmart?”

  “That’s not the same at all,” I protested, looking to Beck for a little backup. Her amused, slightly sympathetic expression told me I was on my own. “All right. What would you take, Jack Shephard?” I asked, laying on the sarcasm.

  His teeth appeared in a flash of white—clearly I’d played right into his hands. “Okay, three things?” He propped his elbow on the table and made a show of ticking them off on his fingers. “One of those gadgets that can turn salt water into fresh drinking water, an inflatable raft—with oars, and an EPIRB.”

  “What’s an ee-perb?” I asked, waspish even in ignorance.

  “An emergency position indicating radiobeacon. It’s a device that can send out traceable signals to the Coast Guard and other rescue teams.”

  I was speechless. For about two seconds. Then I blurted, “You know with the oars, you’re over three.”

  Glancing over, I noticed that Beck was clearly impressed—with him—not so much with me.

  “You’re definitely a nerd,” Beck said around a laugh, and I wondered if she was remembering her recently voiced opinion on nerds. “Very impressive,” she added, in a tone that confirmed she was indeed. “If your plan is to get off the island. If you want to stay, I think I’d go with sunblock, a toolkit—if you get oars, I get a toolkit—and a change of clothes. Not a big fan of the coconut bikini. Still, between the two of us, we’d be pretty well equipped.”

  “What would the doctor bring?” I asked, interrupting the kickoff meeting of the mutual admiration society.

  “She hasn’t responded since I sent back my answer.”

  “Maybe a little EPIRB scared her off.”

  But by the look of things it wasn’t scaring Beck, and Gabe definitely wasn’t spooked by Beck’s aura of pink. Leaving the lovestruck fiends to discover just what it was they were dealing with, I excused myself to score a cranberry-orange muffin.

  Without distraction, my own heady, inescapable infatuation came frothing to the surface, and I wondered, crazily, if I could really walk away from magic. This whole situation was like my own personal fire swamp—I just had to get my bearings before I was sucked in or tackled by the R.O.U.S.’s. Blinking away delusions of The Princess Bride, I grabbed a little pod of butter and turned away from the buffet.

  When I got back to the table, it was to find that Gabe had moved his relationship with Beck efficiently into the question-and-answer phase.

  “So, do you have any more piercings ... anywhere?” You could almost hear the yearning—my guess was he was hoping for a belly ring.

  “Not yet,” Beck answered, letting the words trail off into possibility.

  “What about tattoos? Like ’em? Hate ’em?”

  I sat silently, riveted by this awkward mating dance of Gabe’s, and ate my muffin.

  Beck took a sip of her mimosa before answering and then licked her lips. Gabe stared, clearly enthralled with everything about her, and so did I, fascinated by the pair of them.

  “I actually have one, but I don’t think I’d get another one. It stung quite a bit, and I think I’ve outgrown it already.”

  She was good. She had Gabe and me both hanging on her every word, desperate to know where she was hiding her tattoo and what it looked like. I glanced at Gabe, wondering if he was man enough to ask her. If not, I’d do it myself, but I figured I’d give him first dibs.

  Gabe was looking as if he wanted to lunge across the table for her right then and there. I was actually feeling a little third-wheelish and so leaned slightly away from them, trying to stay out of peripheral vision.

  “Wh-what did you get?” His voice cracked ever so slightly.

  “It’s corny,” she warned, blushing till she was pink all over from the neck up. “I got a little red heart with big billowy white wings.”

  “Really?” For some reason, this surprised me. Gabe just continued to stare, sort of slack-jawed now. “Where is it, or is that to remain undisclosed?” I teased.

  “Lower back,” she confided, her tone and expression clearly expecting censure. Not from this pair of awestruck geeks. Personally, I was of the opinion that tattoos could be very sexy in tasteful moderation (and on someone else’s body).

  “Can I see it?” I asked, fully content, in this situation, to be living vicariously.

  For the briefest moment, Beck seemed startled by my request. Then her lips quirked in a mischievous smile as she reached around to pull the waist of her skirt down a couple inches to give me a peek.

  “I like it,” I
told her, suddenly feeling a little surge of nerve and inspiration, poised for some pins and needles of my own. Figuratively speaking.

  I’d weighed the pros and cons, for Sean and against, and there was no contest—I should walk away. But the pros wouldn’t concede defeat—they were scrappy, devious little fighters, ceaselessly nibbling at my resolve, playing out the what-ifs like a Choose Your Own—Potentially Very Sexy—Adventure. And they’d won this round.

  Schooling my voice to sound offhand around the uproar in my brain and body, I asked, “Either of you busy Thursday night?” Had me thinking about where their relationship could be by then ...

  An uncomfortable beat of silence passed as the two of them turned to gape at me.

  “You’re gonna go?” Beck asked, quick on the uptake and clearly ecstatic.

  “You do remember that Thursday is a work night, right?” Gabe said.

  Ignoring him, I pressed, “I’m not getting a good read here. Yes or no?”

  “I’ll go!” Beck offered enthusiastically. I was beginning to think that, regardless of the situation, Beck was always up for some crazy escapades.

  I glanced at Gabe, daring him to say no now that Beck had agreed to go. He was looking at her, his expression bland, but I could guess what he was thinking: If he went for it with Beck, would she hang on long enough for date number two? Hard to say.

  “Okay, I’m in,” he finally said. “If you tell me why we’re going.”

  “Because he asked me.” And because I really want to see him again—just one more time—this wildly sexy rock star with a come-hither accent and an inexplicable “thing” for me. “And because I’m not a snob.”

  “Reason enough,” Beck agreed, staring across the table at Gabe as if daring him to find a flaw in this reasoning. “Maybe even because you want to give things one more chance?”

  I shot her a quelling glare.

  Gabe seemed content with that, and by mutual agreement, we turned the conversation back to the mundane. But when Beck casually presented her theory that there might be vampire bats living amongst the gargantuan urban bat colony beneath the Congress Avenue Bridge, it was obvious that Gabe was smitten, and for him, there would be no turning back at all.

  Having both parked on a side street a block from the restaurant, Gabe and Beck walked off together post-brunch. I suspected Beck was both pleased and disappointed with this arrangement. I knew she’d love some extra face time with me to dish over the details of the wedding, the man, and the journal, but I got the feeling she’d like a little more time with Gabe too. The way things were going, the face time between them might shortly involve Gabe getting an up-close and personal view of that sparkly pink nose stud.

  I’d probably be getting a call later, from one or both of them. But until then, I was actually a little relieved to be alone. I only wished I could escape the tug-of-war in my head. Cueing up a CD guaranteed to pry my mind away from my problems, I let KT Tunstall take me far away. To the extent that my turn into the parking lot of Waterloo Records was not a conscious decision.

  And yet I knew exactly what I was doing there. Waterloo Records had a reputation for supporting local music and for stocking the CDs of SXSW performers, not that I’d ever come looking. But as of this moment, I had a personal interest in perusing their selection.

  Rather than poke around browsing, I went straight to the counter, a woman on a mission, and found myself face-to-face with two tall, scruffy, very interesting-looking guys.

  “Hi. Do you guys know if you happen to carry any CDs by Loch’d In? They’re a Scottish band performing at South by Southwest this year?”

  “Definitely,” said the scruffier-looking dude, coming around the counter to help me in my search. His immediate, positive answer whipped my vital signs into a frenzy, and it barely registered that he was still talking.

  “They’re actually scattered a couple of places around the store,” he informed me as I trailed along behind him. “Easiest to find is right here.” His tattooed arm gestured toward a display of CDs. He then flipped through a half dozen jewel cases before he turned and extended his hand, holding out the object of my search.

  “Great,” I answered, my voice almost unrecognizable as I reached for the CD. My eyes were riveted on the cover, mesmerized by the long, slippery neck of a sea monster surfacing behind the band as they stood on the shore of a loch—and by Sean’s face staring back at me.

  Two minutes later, I was back in the car, clawing at the shrink-wrap with my short, blunt fingernails, trying to catch an edge in the plastic and rip it off. I could feel an unfamiliar urgency coursing through me ... and then—finally—it was free. Clumsily I pushed the disc into the changer, sparing one final glance for what I could only assume was the Loch Ness Monster. I was 99 percent certain that the photo had been digitally enhanced.

  Desperate once again to be doing rather than thinking, I shifted the car into gear and pulled out of the parking lot just as the haunting music from last night’s Web search filled the car.

  Somehow I managed to find my way home with the deep, dark edge of Sean’s voice coursing over me, through me, into me. I could picture him, singing these words, and it wasn’t so hard to imagine him singing them to me. It wasn’t until the CD changer clicked over to the next disc in the queue that I realized I’d been sitting in my driveway, oblivious to the world, for at least a half hour. Evidently the stand I’d intended to take against Fairy Jane had been cut off at the knees, and my willpower was fading fast.

  It didn’t help that when I walked inside, threw my keys on the counter, and ripped away Saturday’s page in the quote-a-day calendar, Sunday’s read, “ ‘Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.’ Emma.” Apparently I needed to get a little cheeky, and everything would work itself out. That didn’t exactly sound like a strategy to live by.

  9

  In which Nic is vexed. And very possibly hexed.

  By Monday I was back to normal, or at least relatively so. I mean, how normal was it possible to be with a magical journal stashed amid your literary classics? Right now I was boycotting the interfering little book, endeavoring not even to glance in its direction. And after my Sunday afternoon marathon whipping up the day’s second batch of cupcakes (lemon with Texas “Big Hair” Meringue) with my new CD cued up to repeat, I’d declared a moratorium on Loch’d In. The CD was now stashed with the journal, and I was immune to bad influence.

  True to ritual, I had checked the quote of the day and been vaguely surprised at how particularly apt it was on this, the day of my performance review: “ ‘There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves.’ Emma.” But the coincidence was quickly forgotten amid the stress of the morning. I was desperate to hear the final decision on the open management position I’d applied for last month. It would be worth all the crazy uncertainty of the past couple of days, all the magical mumbo jumbo, if just this one little thing went according to The Plan. And then it was back to the antiques store for a chat with the Shop Nazi and a search for a magical key. Talk about living a double life.

  Fidgety and unable to concentrate for more than ten minutes at a time, I was up and down all morning, walking off tension, weaving through the maze of cubicles, gravitating toward Brett’s cube like an awkward bee to honey. The whole situation was a prickly catch-22: I had no idea what to say to him—how to explain—about the wedding, the sexy stranger, or my unexpected disappearance, and yet I felt like I needed to see him, if nothing else, to recalibrate my thought processes.

  But he was MIA. His lights were on and there were curly edged design schematics splayed over his desk, but Brett was disturbingly absent.

  Even Gabe wasn’t available as a distraction.

  I was just back from another go-round when my boss rapped on the door frame of my open-air cubicle and smiled. “Ready, Nic?”

  I followed him back to his walled office, fantasizing over the possibility of getting a door a
nd ceiling of my very own. The conversation started out great, with him congratulating me on an impressive slew of accomplishments (his words) and efforts above and beyond. I smiled in a self-deprecating manner and accepted the accolades. It was all very “Hallmark Special.”

  “I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised,” he finally said, beaming as he slid a sheet of paper across the desk toward me. “You deserve it, Nic.”

  This was it! I took a deep, shaky breath and bit my lip, holding it in as I reached for that crisp white sheet of paper that had the potential to change everything. Raising it, I glanced once more at my boss, now lounging back in his chair, a satisfied smile suffusing his face. My anticipation having now risen to a frenzied pitch, my gaze flitted over the page as my heartbeat thrummed in my chest.

  A quick scan showed me I’d moved up a pay grade—always nice—and scored a promotion. Woo-hoo! A little more clout was never a bad thing. But there was no hint as to whether it was to be managerial clout or just plain-jane engineering clout, and I needed to know. I lowered the page, my smile settled firmly in place, and looked my boss directly in the eye.

  “Any news on the open management position?”

  His smile fell away, and his gaze scuttled away from mine as he shifted in his chair, and suddenly my heart’s thrumming turned to thudding, my climactic moment having taken a disappointing detour.

  “The management team felt that right now you’re a much greater asset to us as a ‘hands-on’ engineer.”

  No doubt. Who else was willing to pick up any and all slack in a blind quest for management? The ultimate irony. He kept talking, but all I heard was a droning buzz, which I suspected was the pressure in my head as I resisted the urge to let fly with a string of curses. When his lips finally stopped moving, I smiled my pissed-but-polite smile, somehow managed to grit out my thanks, and swung through the door.

  “Oh hey, Nic,” he called, pulling me back. “Probably shouldn’t have, but I ate two of those cupcakes you brought in.” He smiled, patted his belly, and gave me a jaunty thumbs-up.

  Fan-freakin’-tastic. I smiled with teeth, and feeling like a human time bomb seconds from detonation, I focused on moving myself as far as possible from the greatest population density. I was in the hall when I finally went off, a mini mushroom cloud.