A touch of red bloomed, if only very slightly, at the tops of her cheeks.
“No?” Rupert asked. He nodded to himself, shrugged and turned around. “Never mind. I’ll pick a few songs. You can tell me what you think afterward.”
Samantha stared. He was so determined. His interruption had been unexpected (and maybe even a touch pleasant), but now all she wanted was to be left in peace, to drink her drink (drinks?) and then wander home whenever she was permitted. Just because she was the only other person in the place didn’t mean she wanted his company. Even if his attention and clumsiness had been, in a way, sort of nice.
A new song started. This had a jazzy sort of twang, an American woman singing over the top. As Samantha listened to the intro, she took another sip of her cocktail. A third of it was gone now, and in addition to becoming ever colder it only served to remind her that her stomach was empty.
God, she was so hungry. Did this place do food? She didn’t suppose it did. Or if it did then it was the kind that was dispensed through a tube; certainly nothing hot.
She looked down at the screen, but it had dulled and changed to match the surrounding mahogany. So well did it match, in fact, that she had to run her fingers across to even locate the minute seam between device and surface.
“Having trouble?”
Samantha looked up. Rupert had returned and he peered at Samantha’s futile swiping. Still the screen remained, for all intents and purposes, dead.
“Um,” she started, feeling another hot rush in her cheeks out of embarrassment, “yeah.” She looked back down at it, rubbed her fingers across this way and that, jabbed in a few places, and then turned back to him. “Do you know how this thing works?”
Rupert leant forward and indicated a tiny red dot an inch or so beneath the screen’s bottom edge. “See this? Touch it and the display reactivates.”
He pressed it lightly, and the faux mahogany the screen had displayed faded and was replaced with the menu from before.
“Hello! Welcome to Thoroughfare! Please make your selection.”
Samantha glanced at Rupert. He grinned back at her, not condescendingly, and she averted her eyes and mumbled, “Easy when you know how.”
“Don’t get out much?” he asked.
“Err, no.”
He made an ‘mm’ kind of a noise and nodded, and then slipped back down into a seat – but not the seat he’d first had, but the one right beside her! Samantha tried not to shoot him a sidelong glance – or glare – and instead fixated on the menu in front of her, that twinge of redness still riding the very tops of her cheeks like the first hints of sunburn.
The first screen on the display was full with only drinks, but along the right-hand side were a number of sub-categories. Right at the bottom, stylised with a cartoon graphic of a crisp packet, was an icon underlined by the word FOOD. Samantha thumbed it.
Just as she’d thought. Nothing hot: only pub snacks. Crisps, nuts, crackers, pork scratchings … She cringed inwardly, touched the icon for salted peanuts – and was cut off by Rupert swiping his card before the electronic voice could even prompt.
Samantha stared at him as a mechanical arm flipped a white ceramic bowl onto the bar surface and a tube appeared to spew out a mound of nuts. Rupert grinned back.
“Think of it as that drink I couldn’t get you.”
Peanuts all coughed out into a neat heap, the tube removed itself from sight with a whir. A moment’s pause, and Samantha muttered a slow, “Right. Thanks for that,” before turning to her bowl and leaning forward on crossed arms. Cocky fucker.
These peanuts would have to do, Samantha mused. Something in her stomach was better than nothing – even if she wished the something was something more substantial. Like chips. Or a burger.
As she ate, Rupert hummed along to the song, tapping out the beat on the bar with his hands. The only pause came when he picked up his glass to drink again, and even then it gave only three to four seconds of respite.
Something quicker replaced the jazzy number, with electric guitar and a frenzied drumbeat. That made Samantha’s nose turn up.
Rupert caught it. “Not a fan?”
“No.”
“What about the last one?” he asked with genuine curiosity.
Samantha shrugged, swallowed a half-chewed peanut and said, “It was okay. Better than this.”
“I guess it’s kind of an acquired taste.”
He went