Questions

Morning.

Tea.

Book.

Cal was curled into the corner of the sofa with the second of the three optimism-purchases. The first had been finished at speed and mild personal cost.

On page one hundred and twelve, one character asked another:

“What’s his favourite colour?”

Cal stopped.

Looked at the page.

“…I don’t know.”

Not the character in the book. The character in the book had an answer ready; that was the whole point of the scene.

Jax.

She didn’t know.

She sat with that for a moment, the book open in her lap, the tea forgetting itself on the table.

Because here was the thing. The absurd, upside-down, quietly mortifying thing.

She knew impossible things about him.

Ancient things.

Catastrophic things.

She knew what he was willing to die for.

She had no idea whether he liked marmalade.

She didn’t know his favourite colour, or his favourite book, or what music he’d put on in an empty room, or whether he could cook, or what he did on a Sunday, or whether he’d ever been to the sea and stood there like everyone else, deciding it was bigger than expected.

Cal stared at the wall for a while.

Then the thought arrived. It didn’t announce itself. It simply walked in and sat down, the way true things do.

I’ve been asking questions about his life.

I’ve never asked him about himself.

She put the book down.

And then, because it was that or something heavier, she laughed. Properly. Alone in her flat, at ten in the morning, at the sheer administrative absurdity of it. All that knowing. Whole archives of knowing. And somewhere in all of it she had failed to file the single most ordinary page.

“…Marmalade,” she said, out loud, to no one.

The word had never sounded so ridiculous.

She went that evening.

Past the canal. Past the bookshop, past the antique shop keeping its counsel. Past the shuttered café with its little metal table, where a version of her from a fortnight ago was still standing under the awning, rehearsing a sentence that wasn’t true.

This time her feet didn’t stop.

Because this time she had one.

Not I came to check on you. Not I was just passing. Not any of the small comfortable lies that let a person keep believing they were helping.

Just… I want to know.

It was, she reflected, pushing open the door into the bass and the cedar and the smoke, an alarmingly flimsy reason to go anywhere.

It was also the first completely honest one she’d had.

She smiled as she climbed the stairs.

Jax was at the end of the bar.

He looked up as she came in. No surprise. No welcome, either, in the ordinary sense, Jax didn’t do performances of pleasure. Just that registering look, unhurried, cover to cover, and then:

“Evening.”

“Evening.”

She had spent the entire walk here wanting to ask him something.

Now that she was here, every question she’d ever known appeared to have left by the back door.

“What’s your favourite book?”

Jax’s expression didn’t shift, but there was a momentary stillness in his eyes, the kind that suggested he was actually considering the question rather than dismissing it.

He looked away, toward the back of the club where the shadows pooled near the office door.

“I don’t have one,” he said.

He looked back at her.

“I have shelves.”

A pause.

“Books that stayed.”

“Books that didn’t stay.”

Cal frowned.

“…You’re going to make this difficult, aren’t you?”

The corner of his mouth moved.

Not quite a smile.

“I’m being accurate.”

Silence settled comfortably between them.

Eventually she sighed.

“Fine.”

“Give me one from the shelves.”

This time he didn’t hesitate.

“Meditations.”

“Marcus Aurelius?”

He nodded once.

“Why?”

He thought about it.

“It doesn’t pretend life is fair.”

A pause.

“Or easy.”

Another.

“It just asks what you’re going to do about it.”

Cal was quiet for a moment.

Then she smiled.

“See?”

Jax looked at her.

“What?”

“I came here to find out what your favourite book was.”

She laughed softly.

“Instead, I found out how you choose books.”

Silence settled between them again.

Jax considered that.

Then he nodded once.

“Those are different things.”

“They are.”

She found herself smiling again.

“I’m beginning to think asking you questions is going to be a very inefficient way of collecting facts.”

The corner of Jax’s mouth moved.

“Probably.”

“Good.”

That caught him, just for a fraction.

“Good?”

She thought about it.

“Facts are easy.”

She looked around the quiet club for a moment before her eyes found him again.

“People are more interesting.”

Jax watched her for a second.

Then he nodded once.

“Usually.”

The tea went round again.

They talked, after that, about nothing that would survive being summarised, which, Cal was beginning to understand, was the best kind of talking. At some point she heard herself telling him about the three optimism-purchases, how she’d bought them months ago in a single reckless act of hope, how the first had recently been finished at speed and mild personal cost, how the second was going well and the third was still sitting there, patient as furniture.

Jax listened.

He didn’t ask anything. He just listened the way he did everything, completely, without hurrying it along, without waiting for his turn.

She’d never once seen him wait for his turn.

Eventually the room began its slow tilt toward closing, and Cal stood, and gathered herself, and said something about letting him get back to it.

Jax looked at the room rather than at her.

“There’s a twenty-four-hour café on Mare Street.”

Cal paused, one arm in her coat.

“The karaoke is terrible.”

A beat.

“The coffee’s passable.”

He said it the way other people commented on the weather. Then he picked up his glass, as though the matter were concluded.

Cal waited for the rest of the sentence.

There wasn’t any.

“…Are you inviting me for coffee?”

Jax considered the question. Properly. The way he considered everything, as though it deserved it.

“Yes.”

A very slight frown crossed his face, a man confirming a detail in a ledger.

“I thought I had.”

“That wasn’t an invitation.” Cal pulled her coat the rest of the way on, delighted. “That was a review. Two stars. ‘Terrible karaoke, passable coffee.'”

“Accurate,” said Jax.

“An invitation traditionally has a question mark in it somewhere.”

“I didn’t lie,” he said quietly. “I told you the coffee’s passable. I told you the karaoke’s terrible. I told you where I was going.”

A pause.

“You inferred the invitation.”

Cal folded her arms.

“Was I wrong?”

Jax thought about it.

Cal became intensely interested in the buttons on her coat.

“No.”

He stood from the barstool, the movement fluid and unhurried. He adjusted his jacket, the one with the inside pocket where a fountain pen had quietly made itself at home, and turned towards the office.

At the door he paused.

“Twenty minutes.”

Then he disappeared inside, and the office door closed behind him with a soft click.

Cal stood alone at the end of the bar.

Around her, Nocturne went on with its evening, the bass, the low voices, the shadows minding their corners, entirely unaware that anything had happened.

She did the arithmetic.

Twenty minutes was long enough to go home and change. It was also long enough to talk herself out of it.

She did neither.

She sat back down, ordered another tea she had every intention of forgetting, and glanced at the clock above the bar.

Nineteen minutes.