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“Well, I do play a mean game of Spider Solitaire, so you never know.”
Sophy worked in silence for another twenty minutes, momentarily losing her awareness of Mick, the person, and any lingering self-consciousness with it. He was deconstructed in her mind as a series of shapes and shadows.
She was so deep in the sketch that she jumped slightly when he spoke again. His voice was expectedly deep but more striking in its precise elocution than in register. He had already joined Alan Rickman and Morgan Freeman on her mental list of people whose vocal rendition of the phonebook she would happily purchase.
“Would it completely blot my copybook if I suggested that a bar doesn’t seem quite your scene?”
He wasn’t the first person to express surprise at Sophy moonlighting as a bartender. Her mother had been astonished and Melissa had given it a week, less if Sophy was caught doodling on napkins. The bar was one of the busier nightspots right on the waterfront, saw a regular turnover of tourists every night and more than its fair share of drunken high spirits and poor decision-making. Honestly, there were evenings when there was nothing she felt less like doing than heading into the centre of town to mix suggestively-named spirits for frat boys on holiday. For the most part, though, it wasn’t too bad. The extra money was useful and she liked the music. She’d always preferred going dancing at a club, where it was loud enough that nobody had to make much conversation, to having to make small talk at dinner parties. Academic cocktail functions and gallery openings she placed somewhere in the third circle of hell.
She shrugged.
“The money’s decent,” she said simply. “And I can essentially take up residence behind the bar all night. I leave the circulating and wrangling to the waitresses and bouncers.”
The workroom was very quiet and she could hear the faint, even sound of Mick’s breathing. Usually the sounds of chisels, welding irons and rock music flooded the entire wing, but most of the students had disappeared off to lunch or were playing hooky at the summer festival. It was the waterskiing competition on Lake Wakatipu today; she knew that Melissa and Dale had the morning off to go and watch. She realised with a flash of guilt that Mick might have wanted to see it too. He was only in town for the month, while the exhibition was running, and he’d already admitted that he hadn’t visited Queenstown since a family skiing trip when he was six. She knew only that he was Auckland born-and-bred, but mostly worked out of London these days. The old icy wall had come down at the brief mention of his family, so that topic was clearly off-limits. She could take a hint. She felt similarly hostile when people questioned her about her love life. It was the main reason why she didn’t call her paternal grandmother as often as she ought. Her Grandma had actually introduced her in public as “my spinster granddaughter”.
“I’m sorry, Mick. I should have realised that you might prefer to spend your morning off having a look around the town,” she blurted, at the precise moment he asked abruptly, “Is there a reason why you aren’t seeing someone?”
They both paused.
“Where did that come from?” Mick sounded a bit bemused, like it was her question that was inappropriately personal.
“I don’t – what?” Sophy stammered. She looked up and met his frowning gaze, her fingernail scratching absently at the charcoal tip of her pencil. A tendril of unease unwound in her stomach. He wasn’t…making a pass, was he? She had no desire for their budding friendship to disintegrate into a smile-nod-and-flee acquaintance. It was already unlikely they would stay in touch after next month, since the man acted like Facebook was the social media equivalent of walking naked down the street waving your dirty laundry and Sophy had an aversion to awkward silences on the phone.
No. There was no personal or sexual interest in his face. She had several times caught him looking at her in the vaguely affectionate way that men viewed their younger sisters.
Something about that was not quite as satisfying as it should be.
“What do you mean, is there a reason I’m not seeing anybody?” Sophy asked, and winced. She had pitched for sharp and achieved witchy. One could infer that the question was unnecessary since her snottiness made it perfectly evident why she was single. Rapid affront followed. “How do you know I’m not seeing anyone?”
Mick took another swing at her self-esteem by looking taken aback.
“Are you?” he asked bluntly.
No, she wasn’t, by choice and because it made her happier. It was intensely irritating to suddenly feel defensive about her very full, very meaningful life.
“I don’t really do relationships,” she said eventually, managing to pull off an impressive blend of inanity and pretension.
It was probably a damning indictment on her character that she wanted to ask him about his parents just so they could both retreat into a safe, sulky silence.
“You don’t really do relationships,” Mick repeated.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Sophy had started up a nervous tic with her pencil against the parchment board. She forced herself to put it down and immediately started playing with her reading glasses instead.
“Look, I’m all for sex and romance in theory.”
Oh my God.
Mick rubbed his jaw.
“Right,” he said after a pause. “I tend to prefer the former in practice, myself.”
Was he laughing?
“I’m not saying I don’t enjoy sex.”
Oh my GOD, Sophy. Remember when you were too shy to speak to him? Maybe you should revisit that.
