Attach ments(37)

A guy standing near them, a bulky guy in a flannel shirt, eventually told Justin to shut up. “Some of us came tolisten to the music.”

“That’s your own fucking problem,” Justin said through clenched teeth and a puff of Camel smoke.

Lincoln grabbed his friend by the sleeve and pulled him back.

“What are you afraid of?” Justin demanded. “You’re a brick wall. You can take that guy.”

“I don’t want to take him. I just want to hear this band, the next band. I thought you liked metal.”

“This isn’t metal music,” Justin said. “This is horseshit.”

“A half hour,” Lincoln said. “Then we’ll go wherever you want.”

The table-saw band ended their set, and Sacajawea began setting up their instruments. It wasn’t hard to find him, Beth’s boyfriend. He was just as good-looking in person as he was in her photos. Willowy and wild-haired. All the guys in the band had long feminine hair. They were wearing tight pants and open, flowing shirts.

“What the fuck,” Justin said.

The crowd around them was shifting. The burly guys headed for the bar, and groups of women emerged from the shadows. Girls in low-rise jeans. Girls with pierced tongues and butterfly tattoos.

“Where did all these belly rings come from?” Justin wanted to know. The lights dropped, and Sacajawea’s set started with a blistering guitar solo.

The women pressed forward against each other, against the stage. Like Lincoln, most of the girls had eyes only for the guitarist. The singer—that would be Stef, Lincoln thought—had to woo them his way. He purred like Robert Plant and stomped like Mick Jagger. By the end of the first song, Stef was pulling girls onstage to grind against his mic stand. But not Chris. Chris was focused on his guitar.

Every once in a while, he’d look up at the girls in the audience and smile, as if he’d just noticed them there. They loved that.

“Let’s go,” Lincoln said to Justin, not sure anymore what he had come to see. He’d skipped D&D for this.

“Fuck you,” Justin said. “These guys rock.”

They did rock, Lincoln admitted to himself. If you liked that sort of thing. Sweaty, sexy, soaring acid rock. He and Justin stayed for the rest of the show. After it was over, Justin wanted to go the Village Inn across the street. He spent twenty minutes rehashing the concert and another two hours talking about a girl, the same girl he’d gone home with the night he and Lincoln had gone to The Steel Guitar together. Her name was Dena, and she was a dental hygienist. They’d gone out or stayed in almost every night since they’d met, and now Dena wanted to be exclusive, which was stupid, Justin said, because he didn’t have time to see anyone else anyway.

But being exclusive, practically speaking, Dena said, was different from being exclusive, officially speaking. The former, she argued, meant that Justin was still allowed to have sex with somebody as soon as he had fifteen minutes of free time and a willing partner. Which was exactly fucking right, Justin said. He didn’t want a girlfriend. He hated the idea of being with just one person—almost as much as he hated the idea of sharing Dena with anybody else.

Lincoln ate two pieces of French silk pie and listened. “If you really wanted to be with another girl,” he said finally, mulling a third piece, “you would be. You wouldn’t be here with me, talking about Dena.”

Justin thought for a moment. “Evil fucking genius,” he said, slapping Lincoln on the arm and scooting out of their booth. “Dude. Thanks. I’ll call you.”

Lincoln stayed at the restaurant to finish his coffee and think about whether the universe had rewarded Justin with true love at The Steel Guitar just to punish Lincoln for saying that Cupid could never get past the bouncer there.

The Village Inn had reached its 3:00 a.m. nadir when Lincoln got up to leave. The restaurant was empty except for a man sitting in a corner booth, wearing headphones and reading a paperback. Even in the early-morning, bacon-grease light, Chris looked flawless. The waitress filling the ketchup bottles was staring at him, but he didn’t seem to notice.





“HAVE YOU BEEN up to the newsroom before?” Greg asked Lincoln when he got to work Monday afternoon.

“No.” How did Greg know? What did Greg know? No, wait, nothing. There was nothing to know.

“I’m sorry,” Lincoln said, “what?”

“What? The newsroom,” Greg said. “You’ve been up to the newsroom before, right?”

“Right,” Lincoln said.

“Right, anyway. So you know where the copy editors sit?”

“Yeah, I think so.”