A nice nose and mouth and jaw, the hair long enough to be thick but not an unruly mane. Eyes that wanted to be more direct than that mouth, and a hawk-like inquiry there that should’ve gone with narrow features. A sharpness. I had a glimpse, in that gaze, of sudden acceleration, of a plunge from on high. A velocity bearing down on an uncanny valley. The cry of some creature caught unawares. I don’t know how else to describe it. I knew that he, like me, was playing a role. That Jack wasn’t here for the drywall conference.

Fine by me. I liked that. Hawks, even in disguise, are so unlike bears.

Our drinks arrived.

“To extreme weather, experienced from the inside,” Jack said, and we clinked glasses.

How much nicer, Jack continued, to watch the raindrops run down the windowpane. I can’t remember how he said it, but so skillful, or the way he said it, conjuring a picture of the two of us already in aftermath, in bed, looking out a gray window. The undertow of his voice. A way you could get drawn into it, or caught in it. A rich, layered voice, and the more I imagined him beneath the suit, it was athletic, in shape. At odds with how fast Jack drank the first Rusty Nail. But he didn’t order another right away, or put any pressure on me to finish mine.

“Do you like magic?” he asked.

That made me laugh, it was so unexpected.

“Depends on the magician,” I said.

The kind of upturn to his mouth that said, Fair, but I have some new tricks.

“Do you have hobbies?” he asked.

“I wanted to be a homicide detective,” I confessed.

“Really?” Eyebrow raised, faux surprise. Like this was part of me coming on to him.

I nodded. “Oh, yes. Studied psychology, sociology, criminology. But then I discovered statistics.”

He considered that a moment, with clear disbelief.

But it was true: I’d found criminology duller than I’d thought and the required statistics classes more interesting than I’d imagined possible. This aggregate data. The ways in which eccentricities of human behavior persisted through software and how you could, with your own bias, skew surveys and studies to suit your interpretation. Maybe I liked the illusion of constraint. The restraint.

“But … even if I believe you … ‘homicide detective’ isn’t a hobby,” he said, with that smile I liked too much. “Not really. You can’t come home from work and say, ‘Now for my hobby.’”

Laughed outright at that one.

“True,” I said. “Real hobbies?” I pretended to think, then said, recklessly, “Taxidermy.”

“Is that right, Jill?” he said, and the way he drew himself up put a tiny bit of distance between us physically, made me think I’d made a mistake.

“What about your hobbies?” I asked.

Jack shrugged. “I get bored easily. Move on to the next thing.”

Message received.

“What do you sell?” I asked.

“How do you know I sell anything?”