Author Games: Red Room

Task Eight: Jack DeWalch

His friends whispered that the redhead was a graduate student, that she frequented the Carrier's Club on Friday nights after her own friends had drifted to the Venetian across the road. As Jack watched her through the surging, lime-green glow, she pretended to laugh at something the bartender had said, her angular face twisted into a grin that barely crinkled her eyes; with a long-nailed hand, she accepted another cocktail from the smiling bartender, then another, and Jack suspected that this woman would not pay for any of her drinks tonight because she was a psychologist in training and because she knew how to manipulate men behind counters, because she was easily the craftiest person in this room. Dark, tightly-coiled locks bounced against her shoulders as she turned and caught Jack's gaze, and then another grin stretched across her face and her eyes finally did crinkle and Jack became aware of two facts uncomfortably quickly under the flashing lights of the music club. The first was that this woman had spotted Jack inside of the Carrier's Club before, that she was familiar with him and his habits; the second was that Jack could not engage this woman in conversation, because if he did, he would be irrevocably lost.

The woman pulled away from the counter, two drinks clutched in two hands, and Jack's gut twisted. Beside him, Wesley murmured a question about the band onstage—one of Jack's favorite local groups, a five-some that converted popular music into ear-catching rock covers—but Jack could not answer because his eyes were fixed on the woman's T-shirt, the logo of the band behind him emblazoned proudly across her chest. She had not yet glanced away from Jack, and, as Jack fought to keep his face flat and affectless, he made out the pendant hanging around her neck, the four points of the cross glimmering as her body grew closer and closer to Jack's corner of the bar.

Intelligent, observant, playful. Similar taste in music, similar religious baggage, similar detached attitude, as if the events that transpired within bars like these were both infinitely fascinating and disappointingly understandable. Here was a woman who offered Jack a challenge; here was a woman whom Jack would eventually fall in love with, whom Jack could respect and admire and draw strength for the terrible week ahead from. Here was a woman who would make free living worth living.

"I have to go," murmured Jack, shoving Wesley's hulking frame aside as he turned toward the door.

Wesley cocked his head backward, his throat undulating as he worked to swallow a large mouthful of craft beer. "Going?" he finally managed to say, but Jack's eyes were fixed on the woman still forging a path through the crowd, her half of a smile unfazed by his sudden movement away from her. The nerves in his stomach flared. "It's, like, ten-thirty, man, these guys aren't even halfway done—"

"I can't stay, I'm sorry." He risked a peek at Wesley, who was peering suspiciously at Jack from behind a rust-brown beer bottle, and then he caught one last glance of the curly-haired woman before he abandoned both her and the bar for the night. She winked, and bile burned at the back of Jack's throat; the band onstage screamed one final line about destiny calling them all forward, and Jack felt a sudden wave of dizziness pushing him backward as the logo on the woman's chest blurred, as the cartoonish tree design became a network of twisting branches and indistinct boundaries.

The bartender had never handed her her tab, Jack realized. Through some less-than moral means—by lying or flirting, by promising things she couldn't deliver—she'd gamed the drinks off of him after all.

With this realization, the nervous sensation coursing through Jack's body intensified, and he started toward the door.

"Come back," said Wesley brusquely from behind him, and then another voice joined Wesley's, low and husky and feminine: "Hey, wait up!"

He walked faster. He jammed his hands into his pockets, and he lowered his head so that he could not see the dark-clothed people he was forcing his way past or the startled stares he was receiving, and then he was gone, the November wind whipping against his cheeks and the blurry, golden lights of bars and businesses staining the path before him. He was gone, but the woman was not.