Time of My Life_ A Novel - Allison Winn Scotch [15]
HENRY
I met Henry at a bar in the East Village called The Tetons, which was both asinine (there was no hint of mountainous decor) and fortuitous, as it served as excellent small-talk conversation fodder upon meeting.
I scurried into the dive and glanced around for Ainsley, who was training it in from Westchester at my behest. Jack and I were coming more than a little undone, and I needed a literal shoulder. Now, in retrospect, it’s hard to remember all the reasons we were unraveling, but I do remember the initial panic that nearly choked me upon the thought of walking away from him.
Ainsley was late, so I slid onto a bar stool, ordered a cosmo, and wove my fingers through my hair, untangling knots brought on by the early-October wind and rain. The ends of my hair shook, and tiny droplets belly flopped to the floor, where they sank into beer-stained tiles. From the look of it, they were doing the floor a favor, really.
Beside me, a man with a slim nose and a smooth complexion was cracking peanuts with elegant fingers and piling up the shells into a neat, concise tower. I surveyed him as inconspicuously as I could and decided he must be an architect. A snap judgment, and I had no plan to investigate further, until he turned to me and said, “Have you ever been to the Tetons? I mean, besides this bar, which, obviously, isn’t much like the real Tetons.”
He laughed with no self-consciousness at all, fully aware, yet entirely unembarrassed, at the forwardness of his pickup line. I hadn’t even noticed that he’d noticed me.
“No.” I shook my head and smiled back, bigger, grander, than I’d meant to, but something about him made me not stop myself. “Camping isn’t really my thing.”
“Me neither.” He shrugged. “Camping, that is. I did go to the Tetons in eleventh grade, though. Part of a wilderness trip. The mountains are beautiful. But that’s pretty much when I learned that camping wasn’t my thing.”
We grinned at each other like this was some sort of secret, like some sort of inside joke that only the two of us got, even though, really, looking back on it seven years later, it seems almost insignificant, silly even.
They say that you can tell everything you need to know about a person in the first few minutes that you meet them. In retrospect, I suppose that this is true. Henry was in control and meticulous even then, but warm, too, welcoming in his way. And we easily fell into each other.
Ainsley called to say that her train had broken down, and a few minutes later, his friend also buzzed to say that he was stuck at work. But neither Henry nor I budged from our bar stools; instead, I ordered another cosmo, and he another beer, and we sat and sat and talked and talked, feeling like the luckiest people in the world, or at least, in The Tetons and the near vicinity.
Chapter Five
Nice work,” my boss, Josie, says on my first morning back in my old office, after our meeting with Coke management, and after I’d debuted my “It’s the zizz in the fizz that makes Coke what it is” tagline, complete with storyboards of regular folk rapping to their made-up tunes with bubbles floating above them. Just like I knew Josie would say when she’d swing by my desk fifteen minutes after huddling in the conference room, in which the Coke team would agree to hire our agency for their monster marketing push.
“It was nothing,” I say, slugging back my second coffee of the day.
My workstation, not unlike my closet, is in various degrees of disassembly and disarray. Post-it notes frame my computer screen, and tumbling stacks of paper cascade over one another and on top of pens, pencils, and stock photography, all of which neck their way close to my keyboard, which sits atop the only free space on my desk. Josie delicately displaces two tote bags that are clogged with freebies from potential clients from the chair opposite my desk and sits.
She looks as I remember her to look: sallow, worn, like someone who was once striking and who still had the potential for pure beauty but who lacked both the adequate sleep and necessary time to transform