Chapter 4 #2
"I checked the maintenance map. I swear to God, Noor, I checked it twice."
"This."
"What?"
"This is why they call you Jinx."
"One of the reasons."
There is another pause. The sprinkler swings again. We are both spattered, again, with a fresh band of cold water that makes both of us flinch in unison.
And then — and I will remember this until I die — Noor Abbasi laughs.
She laughs the way I have not, in three weeks, ever heard her laugh, and she laughs hard enough that she has to put a hand on my forearm to steady herself, and she laughs hard enough that she drops her tablet — actively drops it; it is no longer the sprinkler's fault — and she laughs hard enough that water runs into the corners of her eyes and she has to wipe it away with the wet sleeve of her blazer, which makes everything worse, which makes her laugh harder.
I start laughing too. I cannot help it. I am laughing because she is laughing, and I am laughing because I am cold and wet and I have just destroyed her tablet and somehow she is the one comforting me, and I am laughing because — I will admit this here, where no one can read it — I have wanted, since the first day I met her, to make her laugh, and I have spent three weeks trying with the careful, delicate jokes of a man who is courting a woman he has agreed not to court, and the thing that finally cracks her is a sprinkler.
"Noor."
"Don't."
"Noor."
"Don't say it."
"I think your tablet might be —"
"It's dead, Jinx. It's dead. Let it go."
"I'll buy you a new one."
"You absolutely will not. I have insurance. The insurance is for events like this. You think I didn't anticipate something like this?"
"You anticipated this?"
"I anticipated something. " She wipes her face again. The eyeliner is now fully on her cheek. She does not appear to care. "I have a contingency for water damage. It's in my master document. Section twelve, paragraph three."
"Section twelve, paragraph three."
"Yes."
"Noor."
"Yes."
"You are not a real person."
"I am the realest person you have ever met."
She is still laughing. I am still laughing.
The sprinkler is still going. We are standing in the middle of a fairground in late August at three-fifteen in the afternoon, and we are drenched to the skin, and I have just called her Noor twice in the same minute — not Ms. Abbasi, not anything in the contract, just Noor — and she has not corrected me, and her hand is still on my forearm, and the contract is, I think, dissolving by the second under the spray of a rogue sprinkler.
The sprinkler finally shuts off. It shuts off mid-arc, with a kind of regretful gurgle, and the silence that follows is so complete that I can hear water dripping off her hair onto the gravel.
We look at each other.
She is a mess. I am a mess. The blazer is ruined. The tablet is dead. The site walk-through is, by any reasonable measure, a disaster.
She says, "Jinx."
"Yes."
"This is going on the roster of terrible things you have done that I am keeping in a file."
"You have a file?"
"It's labeled Brennan Incidents. It currently has nine entries."
"You've been logging me?"
"For research purposes."
"Noor."
"What."
"That is the most unhinged thing I have ever heard."
"You are in no position to call anyone unhinged. You are standing in a parking lot you sprinklered."
"That's not a verb."
"It is now."
She pushes a wet strand of hair out of her face. The motion is small. The motion is, somehow, the thing that does it — the thing that makes the universe hiccup, the way it does sometimes, and slide the world half an inch to the left.
I step closer. I do not mean to. My feet just — my feet just do it.
She does not step back. We are standing very close in a wet parking lot, and her hand is still loosely on my forearm, and I can feel the warmth of her through the wet sleeve, and I think: Rule One.
Hand on the small of the back is permitted.
Not a kiss. A hand. I am running a contract review in my head in an empty parking lot in front of a woman who has just laughed at me harder than anyone has laughed at me in years, and that is, I will note for the record, an absurd thing for a man to be doing.
I put my hand on the small of her back.
It is wet. The blazer is wet. The shirt under the blazer is wet.
Her skin under all of it is, presumably, also wet, and warm, and just under the surface of my palm, and I have not exceeded the contract, because the contract permits a hand on the small of the back, and there is, technically, no audience, but I am claiming the contract anyway, because the contract is the only thing keeping me upright.
She does not move.
She looks up at me.
I look down at her.
The sprinkler does not start again, which is both a mercy and a tragedy, because if the sprinkler started right now I would have an excuse to take a step back, and I do not, in this moment, have any excuses left.
"Jinx," she says. Quietly.
"Yes."
"We should get out of these clothes."
She hears it the moment she says it. I see the half-second where her eyes widen and her mouth opens to clarify and her brain runs three fast revisions of the sentence she has just uttered, and then she gives up on the revision and just closes her eyes and breathes out through her nose.
"I meant," she says, eyes still closed, "before we get hypothermia."
"I know what you meant."
"Did you, though."
"Noor."
"Yes."
"I will drive you home."
"Thank you."
I take my hand off the small of her back.
I miss it immediately. I pick up her dead tablet and I pick up her bag and I walk her to the parking lot, and I drive her home in her own car because I do not trust her to drive while wet, and I leave my motorcycle at the fairgrounds and arrange to have Mateo come pick me up later, and when I drop her off in front of her building I sit in the car for a moment after she's gone inside, and I think:
Two years, you've been chasing this patch. Two years. Don't blow it for a girl who built a contract specifically to keep you from blowing it.
I think it. I tell myself I'm going to listen to it.
And then I drive home, and I take a shower, and I pull off my soaked jeans, and the receipt — the one from the gas station on Route 9, the one with the seven-item list — falls out of the pocket onto the bathroom floor, the ink completely run, the words completely gone.
There is no list anymore.
I look down at the smear of pencil on the wet paper, and I think, very clearly, all right, then.
Then I get in the shower, and I let the hot water hit me, and I do not, technically, smile.
But I do not, technically, frown either.
I stand there for a long time, and I think about a woman at three-fifteen in the afternoon laughing in a fairground, and I think about the way she didn't step back, and I think about the way she said Jinx and meant me, and I think about the fact that the worst thing in my life has, finally, after twenty-four years, started to look like something good.