He talks about the places he has been to – Papua New Guinea, India, Russia, the Andes. To hear him speak, it sounds like he has roughed it – sleeping on the floors of mud huts, trekking across the scorching desert, scaling cliffs with zip lines and carabiners. The places that he speaks about are so different from the luxurious environment that we are in that I wonder if he’s leading me on. But he sounds earnest and passionate as he describes the little mud-fortified straw houses on the savannah and the elongated necks of the Burmese tribal women – buoyed only by ringed necklaces – in the mountains.
“So how about you?” he asks me. “Where did you grow up?”
Me? I’m a little embarrassed to be talking about myself, especially when I don’t even have a patch on where Alex has been to. But he hangs onto my every word, as if I’m one of his anthropological subjects he has to write a dissertation on.
“So you grew up in South Texas, huh? And your Mom, she works in a bank?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to your Dad?”
“I never knew him,” I say, taking a spoonful of the palate-cleansing sorbet they serve between courses. “He went away after a fight with my Mom when I was ten. Never saw him since.”
Oh yes. I remember crouching underneath my bed in the room, trying to get the screaming and shouting out of my head. I hear a slap, the last of a long succession of blows and slaps over the years, and the slam of the door. That’s the last I ever saw of my Dad.
Somehow, Alex intuits this.
“He beat up your Mom?”
I’m surprised. “How did you know? I never mentioned it.”
“You flinched.”
“I flinched?”
“Yeah. It was when you said it.” He puts down his vodka and stares at my face. His intensity goes up a shade, if possible. He says softly, “Did he hit you?”
“N-no.”
This man is unnerving.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Because if anyone ever hits you, they’ll have me to answer to.” He says this with the dead seriousness of someone who knows he can hire assassins.
Inwardly, I shiver.
Our main course arrives. I have ordered the halibut, and Alex the lamb.
“You’re not enjoying your food much,” he observes, seeing me cut my fish into little pieces and taking a tentative bite out of one.
“I’m stuffed, that’s all.”
“Liar. You’re a bundle of nerves.”
How perceptive.
“Well, you do unnerve me. All this,” I wave my hand around, “unnerves me.”
There – my frank and honest declaration.
He’s solicitous again. “You don’t like it?”
“I do . . . it’s just that . . . I’m not used to it, that’s all.”
“You’d rather we go to Sal’s diner and have a greasy burger and fries?”
I laugh. “I’m more of a salad person.”
“I can tell. You have a great figure.” He raises one eyebrow and lowers it again. “Don’t worry. I can see the look on your face. I’m not going to jump you, Liz. Not tonight, I firmly promise. This is just a date. No strings attached.”
That’s good. He’s not going to jump me.
Why do I feel so disappointed?
He adds, “There are chaperones all around, as you can see. The pilot, Arabella, the rest of the stewardesses. Everyone’s around us to make sure I behave myself around you.”
Hang on. This is exactly what I wanted, isn’t it? I’m the one who pulled away from sex that last time.
And he owns the damned plane. He can tell them to stay where they are – cocooned in their pilot’s cockpit or the back or whatever they call those compartments stewardesses hang out in. He still can misbehave, and they won’t do a damned thing.
Right?
Nevertheless, after this admission, I find myself relaxing. I recover enough to take more bites out of my halibut, which has been steamed to perfection. Alex knifes his lamb, smiling and watching me.
“Am I really such an ogre, Liz?” he says.
An ogre? A god, more like. I like to think of him as Hermes – the mercurial messenger god.
“Not an ogre. Just remarkably unpredictable.”
“I can live with that.” He tips his handsome head back.
Oh, but I can stare for hours at his profile – at that exquisitely sculptured face and those deep, deep alluring eyes.
Outside, the windows have darkened into night.
“Just where are we going, Alex?”
He flashes me a smile. “Nowhere tonight. But somewhere tomorrow, I hope.”
It sounds like a metaphor.
“Nowhere?”
“We’re just cruising, circling the skies. This is a date thirty thousand feet up.”