The Eight Thirty The New World of SwapTech chapter 5 by witeja9199

The date with Marcus ended the way most disasters in Jack's life did: efficiently, and with a bill. He had deployed "good boy" at the critical moment, and Marcus had gone limp with gratitude and floated into the night, trailing wing sauce and devotion. Jack paid, tipped like a man bribing the universe, and walked two blocks on Del's legs, which moved as if they had never once been asked to apologize.

The Velvet Pencil was a bookshop with a wine bar in the back, staffed by cardigans who radiated quiet judgment. Priya sat at a corner table, one boot swinging, her tote bag clinking at her feet like a small, well-armed choir.

"Eight-thirty exactly," she said, rising. "Delphine Vasquez is punctual. Somebody call the papers."

"Personal growth," said Jack.

"Mm." She slid a hand along his jaw and kissed him.

Jack had prepared for this the way people prepare for dental work: by assuming it would be unpleasant and thinking about something else. It was not unpleasant. Her mouth tasted of cardamom and bad decisions, and Del's body responded with the unanimous enthusiasm of a parliament that had waited all session to vote. Jack's brain, which had not been consulted, filed a formal complaint and then, to its own horror, withdrew it.

"Hello," Priya murmured.

"Hello," said Jack, an octave lower than the situation required. "Is it hot in here?"

"It's October."

"Then it's me."

"It's definitely you." She pulled him down beside her and, before he could organize his hands, bit his earlobe.

The sound Jack made would later be described by a nearby cardigan as "a kettle being introduced to a viola."

"Huh," said Priya. "You never yelp."

"New biting policy."

"I like it. Do it again."

"The yelp? Absolutely not."

She laughed, low and delighted, and Jack discovered that a man could believe himself straight for twenty-two years with the serene confidence of someone never presented with evidence, and that this belief was about as load-bearing as a chocolate teapot.*

*Sociologists call this "embodied cognition." Everyone else calls it "being dragged around by your pants."

"Two reds," Priya told a cardigan. "Then we're going to talk."

"Talk," Jack repeated. "With words?"

"You hate that."

"I'm trying new things."

The wine arrived. Priya turned her glass by the stem three times and said nothing, which, Jack was learning, was how intelligent women prepared to detonate things.

"I know about the seven o'clock," she said.

Jack's wine went somewhere it wasn't supposed to. "The what?"

"I don't know his name. I don't want to. You smell like lacrosse and mild guilt every second Tuesday." Her voice stayed level. "I'm not angry. I'm not nineteen. But I'm asking you to pick. Tonight. Me, or the seven o'clock, or the whole rotating roster."

"There's a roster?" said Jack, before he could stop himself.

Her eyebrows rose.

"There isn't a roster," he said. "Obviously. I'd never. I'm a one-person... a one-roster..." Del probably had a roster. Del probably had it laminated.

"Say yes," said Priya, setting the fuzzy handcuffs between the wine glasses like a ring, "and I take you home and do things to you that make the word regret feel like a distant cousin. Say no, and I never bite you again, and I go back to the cleanest, loneliest Tuesdays in the county."

"That's a lot of pressure."

"It's a question."

"It's a hostage situation with cardamom."

She smiled, but the smile cracked at one corner, and Jack saw what was underneath. It wasn't hunger. It was the small, brave fear of someone holding a hand out into the dark. Jack, who had never asked a woman for anything and had an alphabetized sock drawer to prove it, felt something lurch in his chest that had nothing to do with Del's hormones.

"Priya," he said carefully. "What if I said I needed to think?"

"I'd say you've been thinking for eight months."

"Eight months of Del thinking."

"Is there another kind?" She frowned. "You're being strange."

"Strange is the new normal."

"Don't you dare make a joke and close a door on me."

"I'm not," said Jack, and meant it, which alarmed him. "I just... what if the person who answers tonight isn't the person who should?"

Priya went very still. "Is that a no?"

"It's not a no."

"Is it a yes?"

"It's a... pending."

"Pending." She said it like a diagnosis. "You've never once said pending."

"I'm evolving."

"Evolve faster."

Jack drained half his glass. The clock above the bar read 8:51. Next to him sat a woman who had just offered Del the most honest ultimatum he'd ever heard, and he had no idea what Del wanted, or what he wanted, or why his pulse was doing a cheerful little waltz every time Priya's knee brushed his.

Whatever he said tonight would bind Del for three weeks. Whatever Del did tonight would bind Jack for the rest of his life.

"Well?" said Priya, softly. "Pending runs out at the bottom of the glass."