Steelhands - Jaida Jones [46]
Still, one had to be prepared for all eventualities, and loath though I was to consider the larger picture, I was forced to contemplate the odds given to me by our location. There were several men and women sequestered at tables, sipping at their hot drinks and twining their fingers together and generally behaving in a way that made me ill and jealous at the very same time.
How uncanny.
I began to steel myself against the possibility that he was meeting a young woman. She might well have been someone like Laure, with a pretty face and an upturned nose and exceptionally large attributes filling out the top of her dress. Laure herself referred to these last as a pain in the behind more than anything else, and told me I should try having them for a day to see how lovely they really were. But she didn’t know—or didn’t care—the effect they could have on a man.
If I had been gifted for a day with a chest like Laure’s, not to mention the body to go along with it, I’d most certainly not have been wasting my time crouched in the corner of a café that ’Versity students seemed to favor. I would have been out enjoying myself and trying on fine clothes.
The bell above the door jingled merrily once more, and this time when Hal looked up I saw the most attractive expression pass over his face. It was like the smile I’d seen him share with the class at least a half-dozen times over a scintillating part in the lecture, and yet different somehow, much more personal. Dare I say more intimate? I sought to memorize that look as surely as I had memorized the others, to sketch a living picture so I might always remember it, even on days less fine than this one.
It was nearly impossible to keep from craning my head around at once to see if I could get a better look at whoever had kept Hal waiting. My patience paid off, however, as a very well-dressed gentleman passed into my peripheral vision just moments later. I particularly admired the cut of his black coat and the embroidered vest beneath, and even allowed myself a second—quite scandalous—to note his handsomeness, despite the fact that he was evidently closer to my father in age than he was to me. He had dark hair and a well-trimmed goatee.
Hal rose to meet him, taking both gloved hands in his own.
Perhaps he was a professor, I thought. He did have that air about him, though without the chalk dust on his gloves. They could have been there to discuss research or a project or an essay.
But all my hopes of its being a ’Versity-related meeting were dashed when Hal leaned in to kiss this man full on the mouth.
I had to look away after that—not for the same reasons of propriety that anyone in the country would have turned away, but for how quickly my heart was beating and how hot my face felt. I wasn’t given to a pretty blushing—that was more Laure’s domain, though she blushed so rarely—but my face did see fit to turn mottled shades of tomato red whenever I was feeling any one emotion too strongly. Or perhaps when I was feeling everything at once and couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
When I dared to glance back at their table, the man had removed his coat and gloves, but Hal remained latched onto one of his hands as though it were an anchor. No one around them was commenting on it, and no one was even staring at them, save for me.
I’d heard stories of what it would be like in Thremedon, told in hushed whispers of disapproval over breakfast and before bedtime until the day I’d finally left for the city. I hadn’t taken them in the spirit they were intended—they seemed less a warning to me and more a promise—but neither had I let on to my family that all their cautionary tales were falling on deaf ears. They might have stopped telling them then, and I’d have had nothing to look forward to at all.
In Thremedon proper, a man could embrace another man as he might embrace a woman. He could even kiss another man right in public and no one would give it