Page 23 of Blind Date with a Werewolf
Maybe he’d let his opinion show too much, because she said, “I’m going to the ladies’ room. While I’m gone, you shouldthink about how I am a grown woman who can think for herself and make her own decisions.”
“That sounds like an argument you are having with someone other than me,” Asil said, soft voiced.
She sighed, the outrage leaving her shoulders as she got to her feet. “And I need to think about overreacting.”
When she returned, she asked, “What do you do for work?”
He shrugged. “I manage money,” he told her truthfully—but didn’t tell her it was his own money he managed. “Boring. Which is one of the reasons I grow roses.”
The waiter came and they ordered their food. She got a salad with steak on it—which he had never seen the point of. Salad should be salad and meat should be meat. He ordered a steak, medium rare out of deference to her “well-done, please” order. People who liked their steak burned to a crisp often had unhappy reactions to the way he preferred to eat meat.
When the waiter left, Asil asked, “What do you like best about your work?”
“It’s never boring,” she said, playing with her wineglass. “I meet all kinds of people, you know? Good and bad. Broken. Strange. Survivors.” She laughed at a thought.
“What?” he asked.
“Last week we found a place for one of the regulars—one of the guys who’s been homeless for decades. It was a studio on the second floor. The first thing he did was open his window and pee on the head of his caseworker. And his neighbor. And the mailman.”
That had, at various times and places, been a common pastime for schoolboys—though they had been more likely to use chamber pots. Asil gave her a smile.
She grinned at him. “I’ve known him for years, we have a certain rapport—and I’m in charge of the case manager he peed on. So he and I had a visit.”
Asil waited.
“I asked him why he was peeing on people,” she said. “He started laughing. ‘It’s fun,’ he told me. ‘You should see their faces.’ ”
Asil laughed. This was going to be an enjoyable evening, he thought, no lionesses or graduate students in distress to rescue on this date. Not-date.
“How did you stop him?” he asked.
She paused, watching his mouth for a moment, took a breath, and shook her head. “You are too pretty.”
“That is true,” he said, “but I want to hear the rest of the story.”
She laughed, looked at him, and then shook her head again. “Okay. Well, I couldn’t argue with him about it being funny. His caseworker’s expression was”—she raised her eyebrows and made an exploding gesture with her hands—“pretty extraordinary when he burst into my office. So instead, I asked him, ‘What would you do if someone peed onyou?’ He jumped to his feet, already mad. ‘I’d beat them up,’ he told me. ‘You can’t let that kind of disrespect stand.’ I looked at him—and he deflated. He’s not stupid, just differently educated. He told me, ‘I guess if I don’t want to get beaten up, I’d better not pee on people.’ ”
“Did he stop?” Asil asked.
She nodded and the amusement faded from her face. “I hope it will work out for him. It’s hard for the ones who’ve been out on the street that long. He sleeps in his closet when he’s notback out with his cronies sleeping by the river.” Her expression was wry. But then she shook off the story. “My turn for a question. Why do your friends think you need a friend?”
He lowered his eyes and thought. There were several things that he could have said, all of them true but not the truth.
Her phone rang.
He’d been going to tell her something interesting—she knew people. Something interesting—or something light and funny to cover up whatever had caused his expression to turn thoughtful.
She glanced at her phone, intending to send it to voice mail if it wasn’t important. Joshua.
“I’m sorry. I have to take this.”
She got up and moved to the front of the restaurant to the empty benches by the door—halfway across the restaurant from her table, where her voice wouldn’t bother anyone.
In the relative privacy offered by the alcove, she accepted the call.
Joshua said, “Tami? I’m sorry to call but we’re trapped in Mama’s place and I’m pretty sure I smell smoke.” His voice had dropped in the last year, but it cracked when he said “smoke.”
“Trapped?” Tami asked calmly—because panic never makes any situation better. Joshua was claustrophobic—and had good cause to be so. If there was smoke, someone in that neighborhood would call the police. “You and the girls? Or all of you?”
