The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,67
disliked social situations so much he’d once sent Laurel alone to represent him at his office’s mandatory Christmas party. But here he was at a lunch, happy and lathered up, his mouth going a mile a minute and his brain switched to the on position. His bony hands waved around and then grabbed his head and crunched up his dark hair, then let go to wave some more.
The woman—girl, really, she couldn’t have been over twenty-five—leaned toward him, her elbows shameless on the table like a frame for her Neptune salad. She didn’t seem go to with either the ladies or the businesspeople. She was wearing a filmy blouse, a hippie-girl-looking thing with bandanna sleeves, and her long hair was smoothed back by a headband. She looked breathless and glossy, like he was saying the smartest thing. It was David, so he probably was, and she was pretty, lipstick or no.
“She’s a colleague,” Laurel said, but even to her own ears, her voice sounded thready.
“Really?” Thalia drawled, drawing the E out long in that hateful way she had. “Then we should go meet her.”
She set off across the restaurant, and part of Laurel felt like she should walk out now, go sit in the car and let the scene play out without her. It had nothing to do with her, she was almost certain. But Thalia was bearing down on David, intent on mayhem, so Laurel followed her sister down the stairs, weaving through tables of women.
Going back up the three steps on the other side, she felt like she was crossing a border, bringing her tulip-covered dress out of Ladies’ Lunch Land to the wall, where the conversation was low and the colors were serious. Laurel could hear the conversation now. The girl was talking, and she knew the voice. It was the woman from California, the one who had called him Dave over TeamSpeak.
“—actuality always precedes potentiality, and an egg is merely a potential chicken,” she was saying.
David’s arms were moving again, holding an imaginary oval over his soup plate. He shook it at her. “No, an egg is an actual egg. The chicken has the potential to make eggs, just as eggs have the potential to make chickens.”
“Fine. Chicken first.” The girl flipped her long hair off one shoulder, chuckling. “Quantum me no more physics, please. Let’s talk about dessert, like sensible people.”
It didn’t sound like business, and as Laurel and Thalia reached the table, neither David nor the girl looked up, even though Laurel felt like she was looming over her husband, and Thalia was practically on top of the girl.
“Hi,” Laurel said.
David started, and immediately, his hands came together and folded themselves into a single still object that he set down on the table. He looked surprised to see her, but not too surprised. He gave Thalia a brief nod, and then he said to Laurel, “Hi back. What are you doing here?”
Thalia’s smile was out, the big wolf smile that took up half her face and made her odd brand of beauty look feral. She spoke before Laurel could. “Better question. What are you doing here?”
The soup plate held the dregs of what looked like gumbo. He glanced at it, puzzled, as if the bowl should have answered the question for him. “Eating,” he said.
He didn’t sound like David, Laurel’s personal mad genius. He sounded clipped and very formal. Laurel raised her eyebrows at him, tilting her head in a short nod toward the girl, who was waiting to be introduced with a polite, bored smile on her face. David either missed the cue or ignored it, and the pause stretched itself and grew into a gap.
Thalia filled it. She ran her pink tongue around her lips and spoke to the girl in a tone of faint, lascivious surprise. “You’re beautiful. Across the room, I was thinking you were pretty, but when I come right up on you like this”—Thalia leaned down—“and get really close, wham! Gorgeous.”
“Oh. Um, thank you?” the girl said. She turned toward David, which proved she didn’t know him very well. Looking to David for social rescue was like asking the Sahara for a cocktail.
Still, Thalia was right. The girl had gotten prettier as they’d come closer. Even with no makeup, her skin had a creamy glow, and her dark eyes were wide-spaced and liquid over molded cheekbones and a lush mouth.
A waiter zoomed smoothly over to them. He was a young man with a single eyebrow that was shaped