Page 53 of Bad Seed
I really, really hoped he would, but my little list of demands was his way to bow out gracefully.
Sorry, I’m only in it for what’s between your legs. Be seeing you never.
But not only is he here, he brought us to a vineyard with fancy dinners on tiny square plates and a hundred wine glasses. A man like that could…no, should have supermodels hanging onto his biceps for dear life. So what’s he really doing here with me?
“You never mentioned what brought you to Loomis,” I say trying to delicately flake off my fish square covered in orange something. With each stab of my fork, it splits apart. “Las Vegas to here is quite the change.”
“I’m still adjusting to the cold and quiet,” he says.
I think about how startled he got with the coyotes and joke, “Though there’s a lot more screaming now.”
“What?” He snaps up, his eyes back to piercing.
“From the…when we were outside. Remember?”
A smile rises on his lips but nowhere else. “Right. The coyotes. That was new.”
“Is it for business?” I ask, trying to chip even an inch off of his backstory.
Aubry places down his wine glass and stares into the crimson depths. “In a way. I was…weary of my old job and wanted a change. Needed a change before I lost it.”
“I get that,” I say. He whips his head up to stare at me in disbelief. “When I finally graduated college I got a job doing shit with my degree. It was in a big gray building in a big gray office moving tiny gray numbers from one gray box to another. I was losing my mind. The pay was frankly shit, about on par with what I get now, and I was exhausted body and soul. When I found dust on my camera, I knew I needed a change.”
It’s not glamorous, but I’m surviving.
Smiling at him, I say, “Just got to get my food pics out there more. Do videos.” I sigh with my eternal war against the algorithm. “And maybe I can give up the day job too. What, um, what about you? Same thing?”
He collapses his hands together in what I’d call a prayer if they weren’t clenching. “There was a…night that went bad.” Closing his eyes, he sucks in a breath and releases it like a meditating dragon. “I’d had worse. I’d cleaned up worse without batting an eye, but something about it, about the…cargo. I couldn’t do it anymore.”
“Cargo? I thought you were a bouncer?”
“We would help with people’s bags in and out of the casino,” he says so fast I blink. It makes sense.
The waiter returns, still giving me the stink eye, and Aubry’s back to his usual quiet and contemplative self. I could talk circles around him, I probably have, but he doesn’t seem to mind.
As Trent’s reaching across the table to clear things, I blurt out, “So, about your banana sauce…”
At that moment, the whole restaurant goes dead quiet. The final strings echo in the air, people poised to clap, and they all hear me asking Aubry about his banana. Heads swivel toward the girl in her ratty tee and my face hits five-thousand degrees.
“I was just wondering about it, about you in the Philippines. Did you move here when you were a child?”Am I shouting? I feel like I’m shouting.
“Ah, no. I was born back east. New Jersey. When I was ten my parents were going through some…” He’s stone, his face blank, his eyes staring through me. “Troubles. They decided to send me to my Lolo’s, my grandfather’s farm. Where I got to learn all about…vegetables.”
“That sounds nice.”
“It could be when there weren’t any tourists.” A little smile rises before crashing back under the waves. “Every day was a reminder that I didn’t belong. I couldn’t speak Tagalog tagging me as an outsider. But I also wasn’t…American enough to blend in with the tourists.” He swallows deeply and his mouth parts. Pulling in a quick breath, I brace for something, but Aubry just smiles. “What about you?”
“Born and raised in Sacramento,” I say with joy, but notice as he pulls apart his hands there are little red marks across the back of both. “There was one other Indian girl in my grade. She drove a Tesla and had an elephant at her sixteenth birthday party. If I’d tried to talk to her, I’d probably have burst into flames.”
I start to laugh at the idea, but he’s staring at me. Probably wondering why I brought her up. Why did I bring her up? “I had friends,” I say, then wince at how pathetic that sounds. “Um, I did soccer for a bit. My dad’s idea. Well, his first idea was to get me into cricket, but when I ran away from the ball it became soccer.”
Aubry’s face brightens. “I spent morning, noon, and night with my ball. Every day kicking it around the farm when I wasn’t doing chores.”
“I was awful,” I confess.
To my shock, he leans across the table, and says, “Me too.”
We both laugh when fingers glance up my palm. I twist my hand around, seeking out his. As our fingers entwine, I gaze into his eyes. My heart pounds faster than ever and I melt in my chair. Even though he’s been inside of me so many times I lost count, I’m blushing over a simple handhold.
