“Let’s have a drink.”
She expelled a soft little sound of surprise that he found strangely erotic. “O-okay,” she agreed.
The bell rang to notify everyone that intermission was drawing to a close, and Daniel really needed another drink before facing round two. “Just meet me downstairs in the lobby when it’s over,” he said. “You need a drink before you head back into the fray?”
Her expression made him think she was a little flustered by the speed at which things between the two of them were progressing. Which was good, he thought. Why should he be the only one here who felt muddle-headed?
She nodded. “Please. An appletini.”
“Not a cosmo?” he asked. After all, that was what all the other women he’d met tonight had been drinking.
She shook her head this time. “Too trendy. I don’t like to be like everyone else.”
He shrugged off the strange irritation that settled on his shoulders at hearing her say that. And it bothered him even more to realize the irritation he felt was for himself. “Consider it done,” he said.
With that, Daniel took off for the bar and Julia 6’s appletini. Surely that was going to be the next trendy beverage of choice for party-girl barflies, he told himself as he went. Because in spite of the naturalness with which they’d connected, and in spite of the ease with which he’d talked to her, and in spite of his singular reaction to her, he reminded himself that Julia 6 was like every other woman.
And damned if he wouldn’t prove it tonight.
BY MIDNIGHT, JULIA AND Daniel were talking again, with a lot more than four minutes allotted them, at Marquee, arguably New York’s hottest club. She watched as the bartender placed an appletini and a Scotch and water on the bar before Daniel, who dropped a twenty and a ten beside them to cover the twenty-two-dollar tab, telling the bartender to keep the change. Another gold star, she thought, for the generous tip.
And yet another for the fact that the two of them had been talking naturally and comfortably about everything under the sun since leaving the speed-dating party, without a single awkward moment to muck things up. Julia couldn’t remember the last time she’d been able to talk to a guy with such ease right after meeting him, and she was perfectly content to keep doing it. Talking, she meant. Not, you know, doing it. And looking at Daniel, she could see that he was perfectly content to keep doing it, too. Talking, she meant. Not the other thing. Which earned him yet another gold star beside his name.
At this rate, by night’s end, he was going to be his own galaxy.
After collecting their respective drinks, they threaded their way through the throngs of people milling about beneath the boxy yellow-gold lights, until, miraculously, they saw a couple surrendering a table to their right and quickly ducked into it. But instead of sitting opposite each other, they made a silent but unified decision to fold themselves onto the sleek, red-leather banquette by the wall, side by side.
The music wasn’t blaring quite as loudly here, and they wouldn’t have to shout at each other to talk. Despite that, when they first sat down, they only sipped their drinks and gazed at each other for a moment, as if neither could believe how quickly the night had moved. Julia hated to think about it ending. Then she wondered just how it would end. And if it would still be night—or morning—when it did.
She shook the thought off. No matter how comfortable she felt with Daniel, she barely knew him. Glancing down at her watch, she told herself to find out everything she could ASAP.
“So…what do you do for a living?” she asked, surprised that neither of their occupations had come up yet in conversation.
That was good, though, right? That they’d had so much else to talk about, they hadn’t even touched on what was usually the first thing two people getting to know each other discussed.
She wasn’t sure, but she thought his smile fell just the tiniest bit as she concluded the question, and he seemed to hesitate for a moment before replying, “I’m sort of self-employed.”
For the first time since meeting him, Julia felt a hint of dismay. Had he sounded evasive just then? He’d been answering her other questions straight to the point all evening. Why not now?
“Doing what?” she asked. Surely she’d only imagined his hesitation. It depended on what he was self-employed as. If he said he was a male escort, she could see where it was coming from. And she could see where she was going to. Out of his life. Fast.
Again, he sounded as if he were being deliberately vague when he told her, “I kind of work in the arts community.”
Uh-oh, she thought. Maybe he was gay and still in the closet, and that was why he was hesitating. He was by far the most attractive and appealing man she’d met in a long time. He was well groomed and fashionably dressed. And her karma being what it was—namely, bad—it would be almost mandatory that any man she was attracted to who wasn’t a jerk was either gay or terminally ill, or had a chemical dependency or stalker tendencies.
“What part of the arts community?” she asked.
Seeming resigned now to having to give her a more complete answer, he sighed and admitted, “I’m a writer.”
She brightened. A writer? Well, no wonder he hadn’t wanted to tell her what he did for a living. “I’m a writer, too,” she said. “I’m on the staff of Tess magazine.”
“Tess,” Daniel echoed. “Women’s magazine, right?”
She nodded.
“I think I’ve seen it around.”
Well, duh, she thought. Tess was only the training manual for every bad girl in the making, telling today’s young women not only what to do, say, wear, drink and buy, but also where to go. Uh, for clubbing and shopping and traveling, Julia meant.
“So what kind of stuff do you write?” she asked Daniel.
He seemed to hesitate again before finally telling her, “Right now, I’m working on a…a kind of travel piece that I hope will sell to Cavalier magazine.”
“Cavalier,” she echoed in the same tone of voice he’d used to identify Tess. “Men’s magazine, right? I think I’ve seen it around.”
“Touché,” he replied with a grin.
Oh, she’d love to touché him.
“But it’s not exactly a woman-friendly magazine, is it?” she added. “I mean, it’s not as bad as Playboy or Penthouse, but it isn’t exactly The Journal of Sensitive Men, either.”
“I like to think of it as the magazine for men who never quite left their college fraternities behind.”
Now Julia was the one to grin. “Apt description.”
“And I like to think of Tess,” he added, “as the magazine for women who think Barbie is the quintessential female consumer.”
“No, we think the Bratz dolls are the quintessential consumers,” she countered with a chuckle. “Barbie’s middle-aged now, after all. Not to mention monogamous.
