Page 16 of Rooke
“It’s neither. I just don’t know that many straight twenty-three-year-old males who like to read romance novels. Let alone any twenty-three-year-old guys who’ve taken the time to analyze the storyline so much.”
“I’ll admit, it’s not a genre I’d get caught dead reading typically.”
“Then why did you read it? Why did you come?” I ask. I can’t help myself. It’s the first thing I’ve said in a while, and it feels like my cheeks are blazing. For a moment, everyone is looking at me like I have three heads and no nose. Rooke sets his wine glass down and just…looksat me.
“I read the book because I wanted to know more about you. What interests you. What excites you. What turns you on. I came here tonight because I wanted to see you again. Okay?”
I stand. My legs are shaky, barely able to support my weight. “No. It’snotokay. How could you think it would be?” I don’t think I’m going to make it out of the room before I burst into tears. My eyes are stinging, burning, blinding me. I bang my hip on the doorframe as I hurry to escape and pain spirals through me like a jangling set of keys. Taking the stairs two at a time, I don’t stop my frantic scramble until I’m in my bedroom, my back pressed up against the sealed door with my heart banging manically in my chest.
No one follows me.
No one calls out my name.
NINE
DUE DILLIGENCE
ROOKE
People always say they want to know the truth. They make big speeches about how important it is to them and they harp on about the consequences of deceit, but when they’re faced with the truth, they suddenly don’t want it anymore. The truth requires you to be brave. The truth requires you to face awkward situations. The truth requires you to stand your ground, to bear it, not run away and hide from it.
That’s what Sasha did. She ran. I have no idea why, either. It would have been very easy for her to tell me politely that she isn’t interested in pursuing a romantic relationship with me. Fuck, I wasn’t even suggesting wehavea romantic relationship. I don’t know her. I don’t know the first fucking thing about her. I was merely trying to change that. I was also just giving her a straight answer to her question. I could have lied to her, made up some bullshit excuse for coming across town to come see her, but it would have been pointless. Why else would a guy read a fucking romance novel that a beautiful woman dropped in front of him?
Downstairs, I can hear Jake playing guitar. He’s pretty fucking good, been playing for as long as I’ve known him, and that’s coming up on ten years now. He gets morose when he plays, though, so I give him his space and stay in my room. I’m not in the mood to make friendly, unimportant conversation anyway. I’mbrooding. My mother tells me I’ve perfected the art, but Sasha Connor is causing me to really master my technique. How can she be so closed off? Fair enough, she’s older. Eleven years, to be exact. But what the hell does her age matter? She’s a beautiful woman, and I’m seriously fucking attracted to her. There’s something about her, some look or smell or idiosyncrasy of hers that keeps gnawing at me, demanding I think about her, and I can’t put my finger on it. It could be something as simple as her perfume. It could be the way her lips purse as she forms her words. It could be something more complicated, like the way her pupils fix and dilate as she listens to me speak. It’s plaguing me day and night, and I fucking know myself. I’m not going to be able to let the idea of her go until I understand why I’m so drawn to her. To do that I need to know everything there is to know about her.
I open up my laptop, galvanized. If she won’t sit down at a table with me, I’m just going to have to do things the underhanded way. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. MySpace, if she used to have an account. I’ll ransack every single social media profile she has online if I have to. I’ll trawl through her awkward family photographs. I’ll run her name through a search engine. I won’t stop until I find what I’m looking for, and when I do find it, that one thing that is drawing me so intensely to her, I’ll jettison it from myself and I won’t care about the woman anymore. That will be that.
Only, Sasha has no Facebook account. No Twitter or Instagram, either. How can that even be possible? In this day and age, everyone has a handful of social media profiles. Everyone. Even Oscar is on Instagram and Snapchat; the old boy has the funniest fucking feed I’ve ever seen. So how can Sasha be a complete non-entity online? It must be a mistake. I try Facebook again, scrolling through the profile pictures of a million Sasha Connors before I finally have to accept defeat and give up.
Google has nothing on her, either. She’s like a goddamn ghost. I’m about to give up altogether when I’m struck with a bolt of inspiration, however, and I decide to type in her name along with the museum’s name:
Sasha…American Museum of Natural History, New York City.
One point eight million responses returned. Well shit. That’s a lot of responses. There are only three links that look like they might be relevant, though. The link at the very top is an academic article about a deep space exhibition that was held at the museum nearly six years ago. Sasha Varitas, though. Wrong name. I skip over that and click on the second link down:How species adapt and evolve. A new theory of evolution that has scientists rethinking the engineering behind the human eye.
The internet connection up here isn’t stellar. As my laptop thinks about loading the page, I take a swig of the beer I’ve been nursing for the past hour. When the information appears on the screen in front of me, I don’t bother reading the text. I scroll down, down, down until I hit the bottom of the page, on the hunt for referencing data, or maybe even a photograph of the contributing author. Sure enough, just as I’d hoped, a tiny professional headshot of Sasha stares back at me from the screen. Her dark hair is much shorter, almost cropped into a boy cut, and she’s wearing a slash of bright red lipstick that pops against her pale, smooth skin. Her mouth is pulled into a quirky, strange smile that makes it look like she has a secret she’s trying to keep. Her eyes are sparkling in a completely unfamiliar way.
Sasha Varitas, head curator at the Natural History Museum, recently released her debut novel, Biomechanics and the Origins of Man. She will be signing copies at The Red Letter bookstore in Tribeca this Thursday, 17thSeptember from 7pm.
Huh. So shewascalled Varitas. She’s divorced, then. That surprises me. It shouldn’t—she’s old enough to have been married and gotten divorced, but it just never occurred to me. She doesn’t look her age. She seems younger than she actually is, I suppose.
Sasha Varitas. Sasha Varitas. I type that name into the toolbar of the search engine, and this time I’m rewarded with an entire page of results. Page after page of results, in fact, and all of the links have Sasha’s name in them.
Curator at the AMNH in tragic accident.
Sasha Varitas, 29, loses son in fatal collision.
Christopher Varitas, 6, drowned. Mother and father said to be distraught.
Car topples from Brooklyn Bridge. Woman rescued from submerged car, while son drowns.
My eyes scan over the results, the back of my neck prickling with sharp pins and needles. This is fucked. Like,seriouslyfucked.
At approximately 7:50 a.m. today, a woman driving her young, disabled son across the Brooklyn Bridge to the Carl Gallson’s School for the Profoundly Deaf was struck by a large refrigerated vehicle, launching her sedan through the barrier and sending it crashing into the water forty feet below. Motorists claimed traffic stopped immediately, and onlookers crossing the bridge by foot were screaming in panic. Local harbor patrol officer, Keaton Banks, happened to be on the river and close by at the time of the accident, and saw the whole thing take place. With little thought for his own safety, Banks entered the freezing East River and proceeded to dive down to the submerged vehicle.
One woman informed CWT News that she was convinced Banks was dead. No one surfaced from the water for a full ninety seconds. Crowds of dismayed bystanders are said to have been openly panicking and crying at the scene. Eventually Banks appeared with the body of a young woman in his arms. Banks then focused on keeping both himself and the intermittently conscious woman above water while his patrol vessel moved into position and performed a rescue.
Police trawlers recovered the submerged vehicle late this afternoon and confirmed the discovery of a deceased child inside the back seat. The victim has been named as Christopher Allan Varitas. Christopher’s mother, Sasha Varitas, is currently recovering in the hospital, having sustained a serious head injury, broken collarbone, and a number of fractured ribs. Banks was treated for mild pneumonia and is set to be released from the hospital within the next twenty-four hours.
