Seeing Red(6)

“You said snake. It’s fish. Snaking is what you do to drains.”

“Oh.” He nudged his loose hair behind his ears and focused his stare on the crumbly cork, broken off half an inch beneath the top. He brought the bottle up closer and squinted at the unfamiliar label. Wine wasn’t one of his vices. He liked his booze to come with a burn, not a headache. Something about all those tannins or sulfites always made him sick when he partook.

No wonder the cork was so brittle. The wine was ten years old.

“Top shelf, huh?” He drove his knife in at an angle, and administered slow, cautious tugs.

“Hmm. Came with the room. Sommelier said they owed us a bottle of champagne, but I didn’t feel much like celebrating.”

Ouch.

He worked the rest of the cork out in one piece and handed the bottle back to her before easing his knife from the stopper. She’d need it back more or less intact to close the bottle off…assuming she didn’t plan on drinking the whole thing in one sitting.

“Thank you, by the way.”

When he looked at her, she tipped the bottle in acknowledgement.

The set of her lips was tight, and he knew it was difficult for her to make even that small concession. Wouldn’t do to harp on it.

“Of course. I…” He shut his mouth. He was going to say, I want you to be comfortable asking me for things, but he imagined her raising one of those perfect eyebrows and crinkling her little nose in response. Instead of talking, he put his beer to his lips once more.

He hadn’t forgotten the first time she cocked an eyebrow up at him. It was her first year of college, and he was in his, oh, second year of PhD studies? No, third? Who the hell knew anymore?

He’d been sitting on the wall outside the English department where Grant taught undergraduate composition, waiting for his friend’s class to let out. Meg had walked past him and then idled against the iron stair railing. She’d been waiting for someone he now knew was Carla. He didn’t remember what he’d said to her at the time, but knowing him it was probably crass or sounded far more suave in his native tongue than in English. Whatever it was he’d said, she’d cocked up that eyebrow, leaned her head to the side, and curled up her top lip.

The expression hadn’t required translation.

The waves rolling onto the shore provided him a welcome distraction for a while, and after a few minutes, the prickly tension in the air between them—the electricity he felt every time she was close—mitigated enough he could actually breathe deeply. Did she have that effect on everyone, or just him? He wondered what the dynamics of her last marriage had been like, because he was having a hard time understanding how a woman like her could get walked over by the asshole the music media called Tight Spike. Everything Seth had heard about the man indicated he was not only cheap when it came to tipping, but was also niggardly with his affections. Well, unless the people requiring affection wore little leather miniskirts and hung out on tour buses.

“Ohh,” she moaned.

He stole a look sideways and found she’d pulled her feet up beneath her. She rolled the stem of her wineglass between her palms. She stretched her neck by laying her head left, back, and right, and then let her chin fall to her chest. Her lips flattened even more, twitching at the edges as she worked out her kinks. “Neck’s been bothering me for two days,” she said, surprisingly volunteering him information. “I think I must have pressed it at some odd angle sleeping on the plane. Afraid to take anything for it. I’m too drug sensitive to take muscle relaxants. They’d have me knocked out until lunchtime tomorrow.”

She raked her fingers up her naked neck to the apparent site of her knot and squeezed, kneaded, sighed, before rolling her shoulders and leaving it alone.

All the while, he said nothing, although his instinct had been to volunteer to add his hands to the massage. He seemed to need not only a reason to touch her, but permission. Unfortunately, he lacked the latter.

He drank the remnants of his beer and put his feet on the ottoman. For a while, he concentrated. The seagulls dipped to the waves and pulled up at the last moment, sometimes with fish, more often without. He could get used to this kind of relaxing, to being away from all his toys and gadgets, being out in the air.

“You don’t sunburn, do you?” she asked, and her voice was curious, not accusatory.

When he looked at her, she was dancing her right index finger around the rim of her wineglass and studying his profile.

“Sunburn? No. Not really. Takes some doing.”

She chuckled. “That makes you a freak among redheads.”

That probably wasn’t the only thing that made him a freak, but it was a good enough place to start itemizing. “You can blame my late grandmother for it.”