Sympathy for the Devil

by Christine Pope

  “Well,” Micaela said, then hesitated. She’d just finished the last of her appletini and looked slightly wistful. Sounding a little too hearty, she continued, “I’m sure she’ll work through it.

  Jennifer had a dubious expression on her face, as if she wasn’t sure at all, but I guessed tact prevented her from coming out and saying so. Instead, she remarked, “I think we need another round,” and lifted a hand to flag down the waiter.

  He reappeared, carrying the crab cakes and quesadillas we’d ordered, then took our request for the next round. Looking sour, Micaela asked for a Diet Coke, while I branched out into a caramel apple martini, and Jennifer and Nina both stuck with their original choices.

  “Anyway,” Jennifer said, with the air of someone who wanted to get on to the good stuff, “Nina was telling me that you’d met someone new?”

  “Well, um — sort of,” I replied, feeling a little cornered. I flashed Nina a sideways glare, and she gave an almost imperceptible lift of her shoulders by way of apology.

  “‘Sort of’?” she echoed. “I mean, he did take you out on your birthday, didn’t he?”

  “Does this mean you broke up with Danny?” Micaela demanded suddenly.

  “No, I did not break up with Danny,” I said. “I’m just trying this whole dating more than one guy at once thing. I mean, it worked well enough for Nina in college.”

  “Oh, yeah, that was great,” Micaela remarked, her tone caustic. “Who was that guy — Eric? — you know, the baseball player — ”

  Nina and I both answered at once. “Aaron.”

  Micaela waved a hand. “Whatever. Anyway, Nina, it was so much fun having to stall him in the hallway that one time you got your dates mixed up, and he showed up while you still had David Lippman in your room. You barely got David’s pants back on and him out the window before Aaron came charging in.”

  I’d actually forgotten about that. Sometimes Nina’s man-juggling had gotten a little complicated. “I’m not being quite that extreme,” I said with a laugh.

  The waiter reappeared with the next round of drinks, and I plowed on into the caramel apple martini. This one really did taste a lot like the Halloween treat of my childhood — with an added kick.

  “Well, if you do dump Danny for good, let me know,” Micaela remarked. “I’ll take him off your hands.”

  I choked on a mouthful of martini. “What?”

  Nina and Jennifer both gave her disbelieving stares.

  She looked back at the three of us and shrugged. “Hey, I think he’s kind of cute. Besides, your biggest beef with him is neglect, right? Well, with my schedule, I need a guy who isn’t clingy. Sounds like a match made in Heaven to me.”

  “Don’t be so sure about that,” I said.

  “Why not? At the very least we could just be fuck-buddies or something.”

  Boy, was she off-base. “Sounds like a great plan, except for the part where he’s a rabid Catholic who doesn’t believe in premarital sex.”

  My comment made all three of my friends snap their heads around to give me a shocked look.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Nina asked.

  “Nope,” I said, then took a large sip of my martini. Yummy.

  Her tone accusing, she said, “You never told me that.”

  “Well, it’s sort of embarrassing, isn’t it?” I said. “I mean, who likes to go around advertising that they’re a forced celibate?”

  Jennifer shook her head once again, and Micaela said, “Hey, I can still work with that. I’m Catholic, too, you know.”

  Nina made a skeptical noise. “Yeah, right.”

  “Uh, yeah,” Micaela retorted. “All right, so I haven’t exactly been observing lately. But my family is — there aren’t a hell of a lot of Methodists in Boyle Heights, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Sounds great to me,” I commented. The rapid-fire martinis were starting to make me a little swimmy. “I’ll put a bow around his neck and send him on over to your place next chance I get.”

  “You are too much,” Jennifer said. “He’s a person, not a DVD you can swap back and forth.”

  I shrugged. I knew that Micaela was half-joking, and so was I, but it really wasn’t that bad an idea. I didn’t want to leave the boy completely off on his lonesome, and Micaela was right — between her screwy schedule and his tendency to disappear for long stretches, she and Danny would probably make a much better couple than he and I ever had. Of course, there was the minor complication that he’d never expressed even the slightest interest in Micaela, but that could be corrected without too much trouble.

  “Not even oral?” Nina asked suddenly. Talk about one-track minds.

  “Okay, TMI!” said Jennifer, sounding more than a little exasperated. “I’m trying to eat a crab cake here.”

  Oh, right, there was food. I leaned over and snagged a section of quesadilla. After biting off the point and savoring the spicy cheese and black bean salsa, I replied, “Not even that.”

  “Honey, no wonder you’ve sounded tense lately,” Nina said.

  You don’t know the half of it, I thought. After all, sexual deprivation is no fun, but it’s even worse when you’ve got more than a year of tension bottled up, and then you meet a guy who swings your gauges over into the red. I guessed I probably should have just counted myself lucky that I hadn’t torn Luke’s clothes off the night before.

  Then, unbelievably, his voice.

  “Christa?”

  I paused, martini glass halfway to my mouth, then turned to look back up and over my shoulder. Luke stood there, a martini of his own in his right hand. He wore a dark suit of such casual elegance it had to be Armani or something similar, with a deep wine-colored shirt underneath.

  Speak of the Devil, I thought. Then, Is he following me?

  “Oh, um, hi,” I said lamely.

  Nina made an ostentatious throat-clearing noise.

  “Right,” I added. “Luke, this is my friend Nina — and Jennifer — and Micaela.”

  He extended his hand to each of them in turn, wearing that gorgeous half-smile of his. “Ladies.”

  Jennifer’s gray-blue eyes were about the widest I’d ever seen. Micaela gave Luke a frankly appraising glance. And Nina — well, Nina was looking from Luke to me and then back again, with about the same expression you might expect from someone who had just spotted a UFO. Or a unicorn.

  “I didn’t know you were coming here,” I said, my tone about two shades away from outright accusation.

  “I’m meeting a business associate for some drinks. He happens to be partial to the melon martinis here.”

  Business associate? What kind of business associate would the Devil have? I tried to look past him to see if some other well-dressed denizen of the underworld was loitering near the bar, but none of the men there stood out in particular. Lola’s attracts its share of L.A. hipsters, but no one else in the bar radiated that air of indefinable chic which Luke seemed to possess in spades.

  “Is he, now?” I asked, eyes narrowing a bit.

  Luke’s gaze caught mine, and I thought I saw the corner of his mouth quirk ever so slightly. Then again, it wasn’t very well lit in there. I could have been imagining things. “I’ll let you ladies get back to your evening. It was very nice meeting all of you.”

  With that he gave us all a nod and another smile, then sauntered off in the direction of the entry to the main restaurant.

  Naturally, Nina was the first one to break the stunned silence that followed his departure. “Oh. My. God,” she said at last.

  Close, but no cigar, I thought.

  Micaela set her Diet Coke down on the table and let out a low whistle. “Girlfriend, he is fine.”

  “Where on earth did you meet him?” Jennifer asked.

  “At The Grove,” I said. “We just sort of — bumped into each other.”

  “And you had the guts to pick him up?” Nina demanded.

  “Well, actually — ” I couldn’t help smiling. “It was sort of the other
way around.”

  There was an impressed silence.

  “That’s great,” Jennifer said, after a short pause. “That means he must really be into you.”

  “I think so,” I replied cautiously. “I don’t want to rush anything, but — ”

  “Rush it,” Micaela said. “Believe me — you don’t want to miss out on a piece of that.”

  If it weren’t for him being the Devil, I would have been inclined to agree with her. I certainly wasn’t the sort of girl who indiscriminately hopped into bed with men, but it had been a long time. There were exceptions to every rule. And, as Micaela had pointed out, the guy was fine.

  “So how many times have you seen him?” Nina again, always wanting to know every little detail. I loved Nina to death, but she was used to being the center of attention, the one who attracted all the guys (and women, too, apparently), and the fact that I’d somehow managed to snag one at least several steps above my usual pay grade had, I think, aroused just the tiniest bit of jealousy.

  “Well, my birthday, of course,” I replied. “And then Friday night — we went to Musso & Frank’s and then to the Observatory — ”

  “The Observatory?” Micaela asked, eyebrows lifted. “Since when are you into astronomy?”

  Nina cut in, “Christa said it was ‘lovely.’”

  Micaela gave a little laugh, but Jennifer, bless her, came to my defense. “And it probably was. I think it was great that he came up with something besides just the same boring old dinner and a movie deal.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Then he came over for drinks last night — ”

  “You never told me that,” Nina said.

  I guessed I hadn’t. Right then I wasn’t sure whether that was simply because it had slipped my mind or because I really didn’t want to discuss Luke with her. I think I’d been hoping to keep things low-key for a little while longer. Well, he had sort of put the kibosh on that by showing up here, of all places. He’d made it sound as if it were simply a coincidence, but I knew better than that.

  Without trying to seem too obvious, I looked off in the direction he’d disappeared, but I didn’t see him. Oh, well.

  “So he came over for drinks — ” Micaela prompted.

  “That’s all. We had a glass of wine and talked, and then he left. I’d had sort of a rough day, after all.”

  “That’s it?” She looked disappointed. Maybe she was trying to live vicariously through my (so far) nonexistent sex life.

  “He was very supportive about the whole thing with my father and Traci,” I added.

  “You told him that?” Nina sounded shocked.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  She gave a dismissive shrug, but she did appear to be genuinely surprised. “Honey, I make it a rule never to drag guys into my sordid family life until we’ve been going out at least a month.”

  “You don’t have a sordid family life,” I pointed out. It was true; her parents still had a very solid marriage, and Nina’s equally gorgeous younger sister was a star student at Columbia University.

  “Okay, whatever. I just figure, why dump the angst on them in the beginning and scare them off?”

  I had to admit that was a valid point — in most cases. However, Luke already knew all about what was going on with my family, so there would have been absolutely no point in trying to hide things from him.

  “It was fine,” I said. “I don’t think I scared him off. After all, he came over to say hi to all of us. And he held me for a long time last night before he left.”

  “Held you,” Nina repeated.

  “Yes,” I said. And it was wonderful....

  “Looks like we’ve got a keeper here,” Micaela remarked.

  Jennifer nodded. “He does sound awfully nice, Christa. What does he do?”

  That question again. I didn’t think a reply of “guarding the souls of the eternally damned” would fly here, so instead I just trotted out the old “independently wealthy” line again.

  The slightest gleam entered Nina’s green eyes. “You know guys will say that when they’re actually just unemployed.”

  “Oh, really?” I retorted. “Then unemployment benefits must’ve gotten a big bump-up lately, considering he picked me up for our first date in a Bentley Arnage.”

  “Holy shit,” Micaela said, in respectful tones. Out of all of us, she was probably the only one who might have previously seen one of those cars in person. You got a lot of exposure to that sort of thing when you worked in the film industry.

  Another silence fell. I took advantage of the break in conversation to flag down the waiter and order another round. Remembering Luke’s mention of the melon martini, I requested one of those and looked over at Nina and Jennifer. Micaela was still forlornly nursing her Diet Coke.

  “I’m good,” Jennifer said. “Some water, though, please.”

  “Another Downright Dirty for me,” Nina said. “I’m not driving.”

  “Rub it in,” Micaela sighed.

  The waiter departed, and Nina chewed meditatively on her last cocktail onion. “So somehow you managed to find an unattached, gorgeous, rich man who likes to hear you talk about your messed-up family and who enjoys buying you expensive dinners.”

  “And who sends me roses,” I added.

  “Roses,” Micaela said, her tone flat.

  “Yes. He sent them the morning after our first date.”

  Nina and Micaela exchanged a significant glance. Jennifer just looked pleased that at least someone in this town knew how to treat a girl on her birthday.

  “Well, that settles it,” Nina said at last. “Either he’s a serial killer, or he’s the world’s only perfect man.”

  “Oh, ha-ha,” I replied, but my sarcastic tone sounded a little weak to me. Now, I knew Luke wasn’t a serial killer, but I also knew he wasn’t the world’s only perfect man. Technically, I didn’t think he could be called a man at all.

  Bringing up that point, however, would only result in disbelieving stares and a few pointed questions asking whether I’d switched medications lately. So I simply went on, “He’s not a serial killer. I already checked his refrigerator. No body parts.”

  “Thanks, Nancy Drew,” Nina said, but I thought she’d gotten the point. Even if she might be a little jealous, she did care about my happiness, and I thought I’d made it clear that the remarks were getting a little annoying.

  Micaela remarked, “In that case, you need to get him to elope right away — and make sure you get out of any pre-nups he might try to push on you.”

  Mercifully, the waiter came back with our drinks at that point, and I took my melon martini and sipped at it, ignoring that last comment. I knew the jokes were just part of the way we interacted. However, it was a little hurtful to think they didn’t believe I could hold on to a guy (at least a guy as fabulous as Luke) for any length of time without tricking him into a precipitous marriage.

  Jennifer, being the peacemaker of the group, apparently noticed my stony silence and pushed the conversation in another direction, asking what the three of us thought of seafoam green for her bridesmaid dresses. We were all in the wedding party, and already my involvement in Jennifer’s upcoming nuptials had taken roughly three times as much effort as I’d thought it would. Still, I knew she was probably trying to keep me from getting more upset than I already was.

  Micaela made a caustic remark to the effect that seafoam green would make both her and me look as if we were dying of seasickness. I had to agree; some greens worked on me, but not anything that pale. Nina said she thought it would be great with her eyes, and Micaela sighed. Then Jennifer ventured that maybe she could go a little darker, but too dark and it wouldn’t work for a late spring wedding, and —

  I tuned them out, shifting slightly in my chair. Movement out of the corner of my eye caught my attention, and I focused on the next room, where I saw Luke stride away, probably heading to the front door. Beside him walked another man, older, also in a dark suit. He was not as tall as Luke,
his gray hair was thinning, and his nose was definitely oversized, but in the glimpse I caught I liked his face. There was something very kind in it, I thought, something gentle and unassuming. The stranger looked a little out of place in a restaurant that usually was filled with a hip crowd of twenty- and thirty-somethings, but he didn’t appear to notice that he stood out like a crow at a polar bear convention. He smiled, maybe at something Luke had said, and then the two of them passed out of my line of sight.

  Puzzled, I turned back toward my friends, but I still wasn’t paying much attention to their conversation. Instead, I wondered about the strange older man who must have been Luke’s “business associate.” He didn’t look much like another demon in disguise. But who...?

  My heart seemed to stop in my chest. No, it couldn’t be. It had to be someone else.

  “Are you all right, Christa?” Jennifer asked suddenly. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, but my hand shook a little as I set my glass down on the table.

  It wasn’t possible. Or was it?

  Had I just seen God at Lola’s Martini Bar?

  Chapter Eight

  Danny called me Monday morning, sounding diffident even for him. “Um…I was wondering….”

  “What?” I snapped. My head was pounding, even though I’d taken a couple of ibuprofen about an hour earlier. So much for the wisdom of not mixing alcohol in order to avoid a hangover. Or maybe I just hadn’t eaten enough to cushion the vodka. In any case, Monday morning was turning out to be even less of a picnic than usual.

  “I thought maybe we could have lunch on Wednesday,” he said.

  That sounded a little weird. We hardly ever went out to lunch, even on the days when he had appointments in my building. Then again, maybe he was just trying to do some damage control. I thought of Micaela’s comments of the night before and grinned slightly. No doubt Danny would turn about fifteen shades of red if he knew she had been discussing his potential as a “fuck-buddy.”