by Zoe Chant
But she was never playful like this.
Carlos pulled out her chair for her when they got to the table. Almost laughing, she sat down. He sat gracefully across from her, and smiled at the hostess as she handed them menus.
“All right,” he said to her, once the hostess had left, “now that we’ve done the dance of sitting down—”
Pauline snorted.
“—we can turn our attention to more important matters. Like food.” He opened his menu.
Pauline opened hers, and tried not to blanch at the prices. He was paying, right? He was certainly paying, given how he’d been acting with her so far.
Soon enough, her attention was caught by the menu items, though. A Korean burger? Sweet potato fries with sriracha aioli? Dumplings wrapped in prosciutto?
“I’ve never eaten any of these things,” she said, fascinated.
“Should we order one of everything?” Carlos asked, eyes glinting.
“I’m hungry but I don’t think I’m that hungry,” Pauline retorted.
“Maybe we’ll have to come back, then.”
Startled, Pauline looked at him. Did he not think that this was a one-time thing?
Maybe he meant that they could go on a few dates while he was here. A real fling, and not just a single fun date.
And even though she’d resolved against it, Pauline found herself weakening in the face of his hopeful smile.
“Maybe,” she murmured.
“For now, though, what looks the most interesting?” He raised his eyebrows.
Pauline thought everything looked interesting, but her attention was caught by the braised-goat ravioli and the Korean burger the most.
“They just keep putting things together that I would never think to put together,” she said. “I want to see what it’s like.”
Carlos was smiling. “Well, how about we each get one of those and we can share.”
“Oh—but—you should get what you want,” Pauline objected, feeling suddenly flustered. The way Carlos was looking at her...
“I want to try both of those, too,” he insisted. “And I want you to get to try them. We both win.”
Pauline sighed. “Well...if you’re sure.”
“Absolutely.”
“I suppose you must eat at restaurants like this all the time, in New York,” Pauline said before she thought about it. As the words came out of her mouth, though, she heard how naïve they made her sound. Like some ingenue in an old movie. Of course they had weird expensive restaurants in New York City.
But to her surprise, Carlos shook his head. “Once in a while, for a business meeting, but most of the time I was too busy with work to get out and try new places.”
“What a shame,” Pauline said sincerely. She’d never thought about that—having the money and the opportunity to do things, but not the time.
“It was,” Carlos said, looking regretful. “I suppose now that I’m retired, I could’ve just stayed in New York and experienced all the things I didn’t do when I was working seventy-hour weeks.”
She blinked. “You’re retired?”
Unless he was twenty years older than he looked, this was a startlingly early retirement, wasn’t it?
Before he could answer, though, the waiter appeared. They ordered—Carlos asked if she wanted wine, and Pauline declined, because she wasn’t much of a drinker. “Just water for me, too,” Carlos said with a smile at the waiter, and Pauline couldn’t tell if he was trying to make her comfortable, or if he genuinely didn’t want any himself.
Either option was nice, she had to admit. She didn’t like men who drank too much, and there were plenty of them around.
When the waiter disappeared, Carlos turned his smile back to Pauline. Was it her imagination, or did it warm a few notches when he focused on her?
“I’m taking early retirement,” he told her. “I’ve done all I wanted to in the business world. I worked hard, I got lucky, and I’ve come out of it with plenty of resources, invested in ways that’ll keep them working for me.”
His tone was matter-of-fact. It didn’t even sound like he was boasting, just stating the truth.
“So now I don’t really know what to do with myself,” he continued with a rueful laugh. “I took this vacation as a way to connect with my old friends, see if they could give me any ideas about how to make myself useful, find a fulfilling way to live the rest of my life.”
“Wow,” Pauline said after a second. “That’s really...admirable. A lot of rich guys would just go live on an island somewhere, drink fancy cocktails and chase beautiful women.”
Carlos laughed. “I’d get bored in a hot second. I always need to be doing something. I’d drive all the beautiful women crazy, because they’d want to relax on the beach with their cocktails, and I’d be prowling around looking for responsibilities.”
What a dream. A man who actually looked for responsibilities.
But now that he said it, Pauline could see what he was talking about. Carlos didn’t relax into a chair; he sat up straight, fiddled a bit with the silverware, glanced around the room. He wasn’t quite fidgeting, but she could see the energy in him, like he was just waiting for the chance to jump up and do something.
A lot of women probably would find that crazy-making.
Pauline, though...Pauline had spent her entire marriage trying to motivate Gary into wanting to expend more energy than it took to sit on the couch and watch TV. With very little success. The idea of a man who’d be out ahead, looking for something to do on his own...
“So you’ve been married to your job all these years?” she asked tentatively.
Carlos laughed and nodded. “Never took the time to look around for a woman to settle down with. I felt like it’d be doing her a disservice, anyway, since I spent so much time at the office. No one wants a partner who can’t ignore an emergency email at eleven PM.”
True enough. That might be going a bit too far down the other side of the road to responsibility.
“What about you?” His eyes were penetrating.
“Oh—I was married.” Pauline waved a hand, as if she could dismiss the whole thing as though it had never happened at all. “It was a mistake. We were twenty, we’d been dating for four years and we thought that that meant that getting married was inevitable. Turned out we wanted totally different things from life.”
“Oh?”
Pauline hesitated. Talking about kids on the first date was usually a bad idea. It could send a man running for the hills, make him think that you were trying to latch onto him as a potential dad as fast as possible.
On the other hand, they were both past the age of having kids, weren’t they? Besides, so what if it did spook Carlos? It wasn’t like he was sticking around for the long haul no matter what. She had nothing to lose here, really.
So she steeled herself and said steadily, “I wanted a family. Very badly. But Gary didn’t. He put me off for years and years by saying that it wasn’t the right time, that we were too young, that we had to wait until he got a better job...but eventually it became clear that he just didn’t want to raise a child. So we got divorced. By then I was thirty, and there weren’t any other men around here whom I could see myself raising kids with at all.”
Put that way, it sounded pathetically bleak. And as though Pauline just couldn’t get it together...which was true, she supposed. She’d been a complete doormat in her twenties, hesitantly trying to steer Gary in the direction of what she wanted, and totally folding whenever he put her off.
“You didn’t think about moving somewhere else?” Carlos asked tentatively. “A bigger town or a city?”
Pauline shook her head, semi-regretfully. “I could never live in a city. I need the countryside. And I grew up here by Glacier, I love it more than anything. I tried to live elsewhere for a bit—I was in Missoula for a year when I was thirty-two—but I hated it, and I missed home so much. So I came back here, and—” she shrugged, “—here I am.”
“Are your p
arents here? Your family?”
“My parents passed away a couple of years ago,” Pauline told him. “My mother had cancer, and my father just—wouldn’t take care of himself after she died. He had a heart attack a year later.”
It had been a slow, sad decline, and it had taken all of Pauline’s time and energy, first taking care of her mom through her illness, and then trying to convince her dad to take better care of himself. Which he’d refused to do, until it killed him.
“I’m sorry.” Carlos’ face was troubled. “It sounds like you’ve had kind of a rough time of it.”
Pauline shrugged uncomfortably. “No rougher than most people. I’ve had my problems, but they were all...normal. No great tragedies or terrible suffering.”
Not like some of the people in town. Stella had been stalked by her ex. Mavis, who had come to town recently and was mated to Carlos’ old commanding officer Colonel Wilson, had been separated from her daughter Nina for seven years before they were reunited. Pauline couldn’t even imagine that kind of pain.
No, her life had been hard at times, but she’d just...kept on trucking. Like people did.
“Divorce is terrible suffering, I think,” Carlos said softly. “Losing both your parents in a year—that’s terrible suffering, too. Just because there weren’t, I don’t know, explosions or police cars doesn’t mean that you haven’t suffered.”
Pauline shook her head, feeling tears prick unexpectedly at her eyes. She didn’t know what to say to that.
Fortunately, the waiter arrived at just that moment with their food. “Oh, look at all this,” Pauline said gratefully. “I can’t wait to try it.”
***
Carlos
Carlos shouldn’t have pushed, he knew. It was a first date—he had no business prying into Pauline’s unhappy history, much less pressing her to admit how painful it had really been.
So he was lucky the waiter had saved him.
But he still just wanted to enfold Pauline in his arms and tell her how brave she must have been, how hard he knew it had to be to care for your dying parents, or to wait out a slowly failing marriage.
Kids. Carlos had never really thought about them. When he’d been younger and poorer, he’d been determined that he’d give any potential kids a better upbringing than he got, so he’d set the whole concept aside until he had more money. Then in the Marines, then married to his job—it was the same problem as it would have been with a wife, except much, much worse. Kids needed their parents around, helping them, supporting them, playing with them, going to their games or their concerts.
He would’ve been a terrible dad, and he knew it. So he never really thought about it.
Now, though—
Well, now it was probably too late. He was looking at fifty in a few years. That was too old for a baby, to be sure.
He looked at Pauline, who was surveying their food with obvious delight. She’d be a good mom, he bet. Responsible, thoughtful, willing to put years of effort into taking care of people whether they were grateful for it or not—
What are you thinking?
He didn’t know. Surely he wasn’t considering having kids with a woman he’d just met. When he’d never even wanted kids.
Shaking his head, he let the thought go and focused on the food. He cut the burger in half and slid half of it over on the little plate the waiter had provided. “Here, try it.”
Pauline surveyed it, smiling. “What’s this? Coleslaw?”
“Kimchi.”
She lifted it to her mouth and took a bite. Her eyes went wide. “It’s spicy!” she said through the mouthful.
Carlos couldn’t take his eyes away. How long had it been since he’d seen someone be so delighted by something new? Businessmen were always trying to prove how jaded they were, talking about how they’d seen it all. How anything that was trying to impress was really nothing special.
Out here, though, everyone seemed to be...ready to be delighted. Even by stuff they saw every day, like the Park and the mountains and the sunset.
And especially by new stuff, like kimchi burgers. Pauline swallowed her mouthful and grinned wide. It lit up her face, crinkling her eyes and making her twice as beautiful. “That is a taste I’ve never experienced before in my life,” she said.
“Do you like it?” he asked.
“I can’t tell!” she laughed, and took another bite.
You should have new things to delight you every day of your life, Carlos thought, and took a bite of pasta to hide his confusion with himself.
***
Pauline
This food was crazy.
Pauline still couldn’t even quite tell if she liked the burger or not. It was a bit spicier than she was used to, but the flavors were just so interesting. She finished off her half in record time, and then glanced guiltily over at Carlos, who’d only taken a few bites.
“Not to be a pig or anything,” she half-laughed.
He grinned. “I love watching people enjoy things. Eat as much as you want.”
There was a while, then, where everything was about the food. Pauline almost wanted to ask if they could have another date here tomorrow night, because she wanted to try everything else on the menu to see if they would all introduce her tongue to such new and odd sensations.
When they’d slowed down to the point of picking at the last of the fries, Carlos leaned back and asked, “So, what was it like growing up out here, in the middle of all this wilderness? I was a city kid, and the only time I’ve ever spent a lot of time out in the wilds is when I was in the Marines.”
Which must have been a very different experience. One Pauline was incredibly curious about herself, but she wasn’t going to ask about it unless he volunteered, because she knew it might be painful to talk about.
Instead, she said, “I’ve never been as much of an outdoorswoman as some of the people here—not like Lynn, for example.”
Carlos chuckled. “I don’t think anyone’s as outdoorsy as Ken and Lynn. They made it their jobs.”
“I can’t imagine that, really,” Pauline confessed. “I like having a home, being in the home, taking care of it. But I also just...” She struggled to explain.
“Just?” Carlos asked softly.
“In the mornings,” Pauline said, “I make myself a cup of coffee, and I take it outside. And I look at the whole vista around me, the trees and the mountains. If I can swing it, depending on the time of year, I watch the sun rise. Even in the winter, I’ll step out for just a minute and breathe in the air. It’s like I’m soaking in the mountains, and that gives me the strength to get through the rest of the day.”
“That sounds lovely.” Carlos eyes were far away. Imagining doing it himself?
“When I was living in the city, I’d step outside and there’d be people and cars and concrete, and—” Pauline shook her head. “I couldn’t do it. I need the mountains around me.”
“A lot of people around here seem to be...connected to nature.” Something in Carlos’ voice made her look at him. He had a careful expression on his face. “Sort of a family thing. Lynn and Stella have it, and so do the men who were in my unit.”
Pauline smiled. “You’re talking about shifters.”
Carlos grinned. “You cracked my code.”
“I did.” She set her fork down and leaned back in her chair too. “Yes, I’m a shifter, too. An owl.”
His eyes widened. “An owl. I’ve never met an owl shifter before.”
Pauline shrugged, a bit uncomfortable at his sudden scrutiny. “There aren’t too many of us. A few around here. My dad was one, too.”
“But not your mom?”
Pauline shook her head. “She was afraid of heights.”
Carlos laughed, surprised. “I guess that wouldn’t work out so well.”
“Nope.”
The laughter faded, and Carlos looked at her consideringly. “So you fly through the forests here?”
Pauline nodded. “I try to get out a few times a week.
It’s refreshing.”
“A few times a week,” Carlos sighed. He looked...wistful.
“It must have been hard to shift, in New York City,” she said tentatively. “I mean—you are a shifter as well?”
“Oh, my manners,” he said, looking a bit flustered, and she bit her lip to hide a smile. “Yes. A tiger.”
A tiger. “Oh,” she said on a let-out breath.
He raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“I just—I feel like I should’ve been able to guess,” Pauline admitted. “I can’t imagine you as anything else, now.”
Carlos smiled. “I’ll take that as a compliment, thanks. And I can’t imagine myself as anything but a tiger, either. Even though you’re right: it was almost impossible to find time and space to shift, in my old life. Between the sprawl of the city and the demands of the job...” He shrugged. “I managed it every month or two, usually.”
Pauline felt cold. “I can’t imagine only being able to shift every month or two. I think I’d go crazy.”
“I got used to it,” he said quietly. “I couldn’t shift much as a kid, either—we lived in New Jersey, where there’s not a lot of open wilderness, so we were mostly confined to little woods, with my mom constantly watching for people.”
“That sounds really hard.”
He hesitated. “I didn’t think so at the time—it was the most exciting thing I got to do. But now, looking back...I wish we’d had space to run.”
“Kids need space to run,” Pauline said firmly. “Whether they’re shifter kids or not. Shifter kids just need different kinds of space.”
Carlos smiled. “Well, when you’re a big predator that no one expects to see outside of a zoo, that space can be hard to find.”
“I can imagine.” Pauline felt the force of how lucky she was, living out here—and in a form that no one would remark on if they saw it.
“Now I’m talking about me again,” Carlos said with an air of realization. “I wanted to hear more about you.”
Pauline raised her hands. “There’s not really much to tell! My life has been pretty boring. Grew up here, went to high school with Lynn—she was a year behind me—got married like a lovestruck teenager, got divorced like a smarter adult. I’ve worked a few jobs, but mostly it’s been waitressing.”
