Chapter 2
The man is staring at me. Hard.
Jeez.
I’m standing at the open door of my car with one hand still on the frame and there is an enormous man in the gravel forty feet away and he has stopped walking.
He is staring at me, and he is not doing anything else.
He’s not moving. He’s not even blinking.
Just holding that birthday present.
I look around to see if he’s here for someone else. Nope.
Just us. Me and a man built like a grain silo standing in a parking lot in a leather vest covered in patches. He is looking at me the way you look at a dog that got out of its yard and he has a brown box with a fancy ribbon on it in his hands.
My neck starts to itch.
Where is the photographer?
That’s all I’ve got in my brain because he’s short-circuited the rest of it.
Where is the photographer? Where is the photographer?
Where in God’s name is the photographer?
I’m in the right place, I know it. This is the only overlook in town. There is a minivan with a stick figure family on the back glass and a soccer ball sticker.
There is a pickup truck that needs a tow. And there’s me. And there’s him.
That’s it. That’s the census.
Nobody with a camera. Nobody with lights or a bag or a clipboard or whatever it is people shooting blind date photo sessions bring. Nobody who looks even slightly like a woman named Anna who has ignored all eleven of my phone calls.
And the sun is going down.
I smooth my hair back with one hand, which does nothing at all, because it’s pinned. I do it anyway and thanks to a case of the nerves, I do it twice.
When she doesn’t materialize, I check my phone, which has no signal. Again lame, I already knew it had no signal.
Please walk out of the trees. Please be down on the trail getting a shot of the water. Please come up here with a camera around your neck and tell me where to stand.
Nobody comes out of the trees.
I put the phone back in my bag on the passenger seat and I make myself breathe.
Oh god. When I look up again he still hasn’t moved.
This was a terrible idea. I shouldn’t have come. Which is triple confirmed when I look over at the mountainous man in the motorcycle outfit. I’m pretty sure he hasn’t blinked.
Oh, no.
Nearly two weeks ago I had two glasses of white wine at the Booster Club auction, which for me is roughly a lobotomy, and I signed the wrong clipboard.
I meant to bid on a facial at Macie’s Day Spa. Instead I won a Stranger Session with Hot Date Pics, which is a photoshoot where they put you with a man you have never met and take pictures of the two of you like you’re on a date.
For fun. People do this for fun.
I called that woman every day to get out of it. I got a chirpy little recording every single time.
So here I am. Being the responsible adult who shows up because I can’t stomach the idea of not doing what I should do.
It’s a condition.
According to that auction and the email that followed, a man is meeting me here.
And here is a man.
Lord. This isn’t any man. He looks like he eats machine guns for snacks. And he’s still not moving.
Which means one of two things. One, motorcycle man is a stranger who is here for entirely his own reasons and I am about to have the most embarrassing conversation of my adult life.
Two, he’s him.
He is the man. The blind date.
And the worst part of all—he has his first look at what he’s been signed up for.
And he stopped walking.
I shift, tugging at the collar of my dress which has somehow become unbearably itchy. Or maybe he’s giving me hives with those narrowed eyes.
“Hello,” I call in a choked voice to see if he will respond.
Nothing.
Not a flicker of any emotion. And definitely no, hello, back.
Stares aren’t new to me. That happens when you’re six feet tall at fourteen years old.
Since then, I have been the biggest person in almost every room I have ever entered, including rooms with men in them.
I know what happens like I know my own checking account balance. There is a thing that happens on a man’s face in the first half second. Surprise. Intrigue. Disgust. Then they go blank-faced. Mostly.
It’s like a shutter coming down, and I have a filing cabinet full of those half seconds.
This one has gone on for what feels like a year.
There is not one single thing happening on his face. Stone cold. Probably his nickname.
Fine.
Great. Cool. Normal. I’m used to this. Just not this extent of agony.
When I take my hand off the car door and I shut it, the sound echoes across the whole bluff like a gunshot.
Let’s go, Vera. No use delaying this any longer.
With my spine stiff, I walk toward him, because there is no way I’m standing by my car and waiting for a man to come to me.
The gravel is rough in these shoes. But the dress feels good. Always does. It’s a nineteen fifty-two Lucienne Day designed dress in bottle green, and I got it out of an estate sale for less than twenty dollars.
That’s my secret.
So I force my I-have-a-secret-smile. The armor one.
A car zooms past and I pray it’s the photographer, but it hits the curve at sixty and keeps going, so I keep walking.
He is much, much bigger up close.
That’s not a thing that happens to me. Men are not bigger up close. Men get smaller up close.
This one keeps going up.
Black hair. Blue eyes. A bandana tied backwards over most of his hair.
No beard, which seems odd for a big motorcycle man. He has a jaw you could open a beer bottle on, and a leather vest with a patch on it that says something I can’t read yet. His jeans fit. And I mean fit. His boots have been places.
Then there’s the birthday present.
“Hello,” I say, and this time my voice comes out perfectly normal. “I’m Vera. I’m so sorry, I think I might be in the wrong place, or possibly the wrong decade. Are you here for the?—”
And I stop.
Because I cannot make myself say the word photoshoot out loud to this man. I would rather walk into the river.
“Are you waiting on somebody?” I say instead.
He doesn’t answer.
He puts the box in my hands.
“This is yours,” he says in a deep voice that’s more thunder than not.