Elizabeth Bevarly - Undercover with the Mob

She had expected him to leave after offering those few requisite niceties, but he began to wander around her living room, instead, looking at…Well, he seemed to be looking at everything, she thought. Evidently, he’d been telling the truth when he said he found the place interesting, because he shoved his hands into the back pockets of his black jeans and made his way to her overcrowded bookcase, scanning the titles he found there.

“Oh, yeah,” he said as he read over them. “I can tell you’re an English teacher. Hawthorne, Wharton, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Twain, James.” He turned around to look at her. “You like American literature, huh?”

She nodded. “Especially the nineteenth century. Though I like the early twentieth century, too.”

He turned back to the bookcases again. “I like the guys who came later,” he told her. “Faulkner. Fitzgerald. Kerouac. Hemingway. I think The Sun Also Rises is the greatest book ever written.”

Natalie silently chided herself for being surprised. How often had she herself been stereotyped as the conservative, prudish, easily overrun sort, simply because of the way she dressed and talked, and because of her job? How often had she been treated like a pushover? A doormat? A woman who was more likely to be abducted by a gang of leisure suit-wearing circus freaks than to find a husband after the age of thirty-five? Too many times for her to recall. So she shouldn’t think Jack Miller was a brainless thug, simply because of the way he dressed and talked. Of course, she didn’t think he was a brainless thug, she realized. She thought he was…

Well. She thought of him in ways she probably shouldn’t.

“I’d have to argue with you,” she told him as she folded up the paper sacks and stowed them under her kitchen sink. “I think The Scarlet Letter is the greatest book ever written.”

He turned again to look at her. “I can see that,” he said. “You don’t seem the type to suffer hypocrites.”

She wondered what other type she seemed—or didn’t seem—to him. And she wondered why she hoped so much that whatever he thought of her, it was good. Then she surprised herself by asking him, “Have you had dinner yet?”

He seemed surprised by the question, too, because he straightened and dropped his hands to his sides, suddenly looking kind of uncomfortable. “No, I was just on my way out to grab something when I…when you…when we…Uh…I was just gonna go out and grab something.”

She hoped she sounded nonchalant when she said, “You’re welcome to join me for dinner here. I wasn’t planning anything fancy. But if you’re not doing anything else…?”

For one brief, euphoric moment, she thought he was going to accept her offer. The look that came over his face just made her think he wanted very much to say yes. But he shook his head slowly instead.

“I can’t,” he told her. “I have to meet a guy.” And then, as if it were an afterthought, he added, “Maybe another time.”

Natalie nodded, but she didn’t believe him, mostly because of the afterthought thing. And she didn’t take his declining of her invitation personally. Well, not too personally. It was just as well, really. She didn’t need to be sharing her table with a hit man anyway. There wouldn’t be any room for his gun.

“Some other time,” she echoed in spite of that.

And later, after Jack was gone and she and Mojo were home alone, she tried not to think about how her apartment seemed quieter and emptier than it ever had before. And she tried not to hope that Jack’s some other time had been sincere.

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