Read Online Wetware by Craig Nova - Free Book Online Page B

Let me tell you that this discussion has just gotten started.”
    “No,” he said. “Not this discussion.”
    “What do you mean?” she said.
    Perhaps one of the guesses he had made was wrong. He looked around, seeing the fans of palms, the green blades that looked so sharp. If he only had someone he could talk with about it. The light pulsed here, too, and he looked around the room for a dark recess where the throbbing might be less. Maybe he had picked the wrong indices. But then, he hadn’t had any time. Didn’t this matter? No, it didn’t matter at all. He was in the position of being right or wrong.
    He looked back at her.
    “I’m sorry,” he said.
    “What are you sorry about?” she said, raising her voice one shade above the conversational. The other people in the room turned toward her with all the speed of a reflex, but after they saw her, their expressions changed again, from mild alarm to a subdued smirk of amusement.
    “Leslie,” he said. “We don’t have to do this here. Not like this.”
    “That’s what you’ve got to say?” she said. “Great. Do you think I give a shit what these people think?”
    She stood up.
    “Do you?”
    “No,” he said. “I guess you don’t.”
    She pushed the small table in front of her out of her way and it fell over and lay there on its back, like a dead animal in a cartoon. The waiters who stood in a small group by the kitchen door had the sense to stay out of the way. Then she dropped her glass into the absolute silence of the room. She put a hand to her face, and when he tried to take her arm, she jerked away from him.
    “Don’t you dare,” she said.
    She went across the soft carpet, through the gazes of other people, even raising her arm once as though these glances were so palpable as to feel like spiderwebs. Blaine picked up the table and put it back up, right where it had been. Its legs had made little indentations in the carpet, and Blaine was careful to make sure that the table was placed so that the small metal caster, about the size of a nickel on each leg, went right back into the indentations. As though everything was put back precisely the way it had been. He thought about the indices. Then he picked up her glass from the floor and put it on the table with his. He signaled for the check. A couple of people still stared at him, but he avoided them. Maybe, he hoped, it would just look like a lovers’ quarrel.
    Outside, she noticed that the lights above her now seemed ugly. The bracelet on her wrist looked that way too, and she took it off and carried it like some dead thing. She couldn’t bring herself just to drop it into the gutter, but when she came to a cross street, she struck the bracelet against the corner of a building, the diamonds not breaking, but coming out of the setting and falling onto the street like flecks of ice.
    Then she stood there, her back against the wall, where she felt the cool pressure of the stone through her dress and against her shoulder blades. Blaine had often told her what a beautiful back she had and how, when he saw the movement of her defined muscles under the white skin, he was reminded of the movement of wings, not of a bird, but of an angel. She had thought this was idiotic, but with the cold caress of the building behind her, she remembered it with a mixture of fury and the desire to have him say something like that again. And as she stood there, she looked up the avenue, feeling the cool air. Then she looked down at the diamonds, which were spread out around her shoes.
    She realized that only a fool would walk away from them, and while she had the impulse to do so, she found that she was frozen like someone at the edge of a precipice. Too scared to move. She looked down, telling herself that if she could just leave the diamonds here, she could walk away from Blaine too, and never look back. She took a step up the sidewalk, but as she did so she knew she was bluffing and that such posturing was for no one