Page 94 of Never Alone
I shrugged. "Yeah. When I'm too tired to cook."
"When do you get too tired to do anything?"
"After I finish working on the house."
"Right. So you eat out alone? That's sad, isn't it?"
"I don't eat out alone. I take the guys."
"Cole, you're really not making a strong case about beingnotgay."
"Do you want me to prove it to you?"
I'd said it before I'd finished thinking it.
In the passenger seat, Tessa's jaw came open.
"Did you just?—"
"What?"
Tessa was looking at me suspiciously now. There was a small smile on her face she wasn't quite hiding.
"Nothing," she said.
I pulled up half a block from the restaurant. The closest spot I could find on King Street on a weeknight. I parallel parked. Cut the engine.
We got out. I came around the front of the truck and met her at the curb. The evening was warm, the sky still light. She fell in beside me, and we walked.
We walked the half block in silence—not the bad kind, not even the awkward kind. The kind where two people had just said something neither was planning to say and were waiting to find out what came next.
The restaurant was on the corner. The sign was small. The light through the window was warm and gold.
I held the door for her. The bell above it rang. She stepped inside, and the gold light caught her hair as she went past me.
I followed her in.
A waiter showed us to a table by the window.
It was a small place. Twelve tables. Brick walls, tin ceiling, candles on the tables in glass holders—the small kind that didn't do much for light but did something for the way it landed on a person's face. The waiter handed us each a menu and went away.
I opened mine.
I looked at her over the top of it.
Her hair was down. The honey at her roots caught the candlelight. She was reading the menu the way she read everything—fast, focused, her finger tracking the lines. She didn't know I was looking at her.
"What are you getting?" she said, without looking up.
"Steak."
"I'm thinking shrimp pasta. Or—there's a seafood tower."
"That sounds suspicious."
"Why?"
"Anything called a tower at a restaurant is going to be a quarter of what it ought to be."
