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She braced for that one. I add it to the list of things I’m keeping about her which I don’t yet have system for.
“That’s the list,” she says, and caps the pen with a click, and the formality of it breaks like a faceoff being won, and suddenly we’re just two people in a closed bookshop with the work done and nothing left to be businesslike about.
“We need to seal it,” I say.
“It’s not a treaty.”
“It’s an arrangement with terms, you said so. Terms get sealed.” I hold out a hand across the counter. “Handshake.”
She looks at my hand. “A handshake is so —”
“Businesslike. I know. That’s the point. You’ve spent an hour making this businesslike. Lean in.”
She takes my hand.
And it’s a handshake — it’s a normal handshake, her hand smaller than mine and cooler, a firm professional shake of the kind you’d give anyone — except that neither of us lets go on the beat where you let go, and then we’re a half-second past the beat, and then a full second, and her eyes come up to mine and mine are already on hers and the bookshop is very quiet and very gold-going-blue and there is absolutely no one here to perform for, which means whatever this is, it isn’t the performance.
She lets go first.
“That’s sealed,” she says, and her voice isn’t quite level, and she knows it isn’t, and she hates that she knows it.
“We should practice,” I say.
“Practice?”
“Being convincing. You said it has to read as real. We’ve never actually — it’s always been in front of people, reacting. We’ve never just tried it, cold, to see if it holds.” I’m aware, somewhere a beat behind my own mouth, that this is a terrible idea dressed as a good one, which is the most dangerous kind. “Look at me like you mean it. See if I can hold it.”
She sets the pen down. She looks at me.
And she’s good — of course she’s good, she’s the best one on the stage, I watched the clips — she drops something into her face, some warmth, some private attention, the look of a person who’s chosen you out of a room, and it lands like a check you didn’t see coming, takes the air right out of me, and I forget for a second that it’s a drill. I actually forget. My whole life is performance and I’m sitting here getting out-performed by a theater major in my grandmother’s bookshop and the worst part is I don’t even mind.
Then she breaks it — laughs, the real one, the one she keeps trying to strangle in the cradle, and it gets all the way out this time, surprised out of her, and the sound of it does more damage than the look did.
“You blinked,” she says, recovering, pointing at me. “First. You broke first. You’re terrible at this.”
“I did not blink.”
“You absolutely blinked, you went —” she does an impression of a man short-circuiting that is genuinely, infuriatingly accurate “— you panicked.”
“That was strategic blinking.”
“That’s not a thing.”
“It’s a thing. It’s like strategic blinking is to staring contests what—” I’m laughing now too, which I didn’t decide to do, “—I had a whole plan—”
“You had no plan. You came here with no notes and no plan and one coffee you didn’t even bring—”
“You poured the coffee—”
“—and you’ve been out-negotiated, out-stared, and now you’re inventing strategic blinking, which is the saddest retreat I’ve ever witnessed, and I’ve watched the Whitmore football team play.”
And I laugh, the real one, the one that surprises me, and she’s laughing, and for a second the whole arrangement — the rules, the tiers, the capital letters, the careful borders of the furniture — falls away completely, and it’s just us, in a warm shop, laughing at nothing, and I notice, late, the way I notice everything:
this stopped being a negotiation a while ago and I didn’t catch the moment it happened.
I don’t say that.
I never do.
