Quicksilver Dragon

by Chant, Zoe

  She felt her whole body relax into that same warmth she’d felt before, just from looking at him. She smiled. “There you are. It’s good to finally be able to see you.”

  Very, very good.

  He had the nicest eyes she had ever seen. They were hazel and changed with the light, so she could see flecks of gold and green and brown, all muddled together. His hair was dark brown and just the tiniest bit curly. He had that great sun- and wind-burned look Lindsay had always loved, where you could see right away that he spent a lot of time outside.

  And he did have a cute nose. She’d been totally right.

  She didn’t think he looked disappointed with her, either. It could be hard to be sure sometimes, because of course everything she’d seen from Boone so far suggested he was a really nice guy and she could have had two heads or looked like the Wicked Witch of the West with that poncho off and he would have been careful to not even blink. But there was a difference between “not recoiling” and “looking appreciative,” and she thought he was doing the latter. He looked like he liked what he saw.

  Which was funny, because Lindsay more or less knew what he was seeing, and it couldn’t have been great. She hadn’t planned on going on a date today, after all. (It was rare to start a day with garbage pick-up and end it with a cute guy and coffee.) She’d dressed for comfort and hard work, which meant jeans and an old college long-sleeved tee, and her hair had to be frizzing out from all the humidity. He probably should have been thinking she looked like a mess.

  It didn’t look like he thought she was a mess, though. Not at all. There was a heat in his eyes when he looked at her that felt like it should have steamed her clothes dry.

  A pleasant shivery feeling prickled along Lindsay’s arms.

  Boone said, “It’s good to see you too.”

  Chapter Two

  The diner knew exactly what two people soaked to the skin needed, and in a matter of minutes, Boone and Lindsay had piping hot coffee and pumpkin pancakes in front of them.

  Lindsay cut out a perfect triangle of rich, orange-tinted pancake laced with a delicate sprinkling of powdered sugar and admired it before taking a bite. “Coming here was a great idea.”

  He was lucky she felt that way. He would have suggested anything that would have given him more time with her, whether it was a good idea or not.

  He’d been a better conversationalist when they’d been walking through the rain, though. Sitting opposite her in a dry, well-lit diner, with his sketchpad on the table next to him, the urge to draw her was hard to resist. He made himself grab his fork instead of his pencil.

  And while he was at it, he made himself grab a subject for small talk, too. “So—city planner’s office?”

  Lindsay nodded, sipping her coffee. “That’s what it’s called, but it’s such a small town that we do a little bit of everything, really.”

  “Except beach clean-up, which is left to thoughtful volunteers.”

  “I like that description. I think the last one I heard was ‘neat freak married to the job.’ I do have some actual hobbies, I promise. I can knit, and I like movies, and—stalling for time here—I used to be sort of good at archery, back in college? Okay, I have two hobbies.” Her expression had turned rueful. “Apparently I am married to my job.”

  As long as the job was all she was married to. He did a quick, hopefully inconspicuous check for a wedding ring and was relieved to not find one.

  He celebrated by taking a moment to savor his pancakes, which were exactly the right velvety combination of sweet and rich. “It’s good to like what you do. Not a lot of people get lucky enough to have a job they want to do even on the weekends.”

  “Well, I can’t say the trash pick-up is my favorite part.” But it was impossible to miss how she brightened at the chance to talk about her job. A beautiful rosy flush tinted her smooth brown skin, and her eyes sparkled with enthusiasm. “But I do really love it all, in general. If I’m married to the job, it’s a pretty happy marriage. Like I said, the city is small enough that my office has a hand in almost everything and we all have to pitch in, so it all stays interesting. You know, we handle park design and business permits and zoning regulations, all the technical city hall stuff, but we also plan community cookouts and figure out what kind of trees to plant on public land. It’s fun. I mean, it’s basically like one of those video games where you get to design a city, but in real life.”

  “And you probably can’t put three rollercoasters on one block,” Boone said.

  “That was a big disappointment to my inner twelve-year-old, believe me. So what about you? What do you do?”

  Boone felt the familiar flash of tension around his throat, like his vocal cords were tightening up to keep any sound from coming out. When would that go away?

  Luckily, he didn’t think that he sounded as strangled as he felt. “I’m an artist.”

  Lindsay gasped. “Seriously? Professionally? That’s so cool!”

  The hold on his throat relaxed. The odds were that she was thinking of something way more glamorous than his actual life, but he’d take any reaction that wasn’t disappointment.

  “Not the museum-worthy kind,” he clarified, “with art gallery shows.”

  “No one stands around eating cheese cubes and drinking bad white wine while talking about what your work really means?”

  “God, I hope not.” He was gratified by her laugh. “No, I’m what you’d call a commercial artist. I do labels and logos and some graphic design, usually for people who can’t afford the big New York and LA design firms. That’s mostly what pays the bills. And I do a lot of illustrations for children’s books. Sometimes for comics and fantasy novels, too. That’s my favorite thing to do, the illustrations.”

  “That’s awesome,” Lindsay said. She looked completely sincere. “I love graphic novels. And I was so depressed when my niece aged out of picture books and I couldn’t spend forever lurking around the bookstore with her looking at them.”

  She glanced at his sketchbook, and her eyes widened.

  “You said you were drawing earlier, right? Can I see?”

  Boone was amazed by how quickly his self-consciousness had dwindled around her. Usually he got nervous about showing anybody his work, but with Lindsay it was easy to just hand over the sketchbook so she could flip through it. He didn’t even have to think about it.

  Lindsay turned the pages slowly, letting each image sink in. Boone looked at his own drawings upside-down.

  “These were all just for fun, so they’re a little rough—”

  “Excuse me,” Lindsay said. “Please don’t insult my new favorite artwork.”

  She paused longest on the last page in the sketchbook. The rosiness of her cheeks deepened.

  Boone looked more closely at the drawing. It was another long beach panorama like the last several she had flipped through, but where he’d gotten silly with the last few and put in some of his fantasy illustrations, like mermaids lounging in the surf, this one was pure realism.

  Including the tiny figure in the poncho.

  Oh. Right. He’d forgotten about that.

  “Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “I know it’s probably weird to see a drawing of yourself—”

  “No,” Lindsay said at once. “No, trust me, ‘weird’ isn’t what I was thinking.” She let one finger hover above the little penciled-in version of herself, like she didn’t want to smudge it.

  In every way that counted, Boone knew it wasn’t a real drawing of her. Not at all. She hadn’t even been close enough for him to get a good look at her, not then. She’d just been a mysterious figure in a gaudy flowered poncho, struggling determinedly down the length of the beach. He’d only just gotten through adding the little cape-like corners of the poncho when he had come out of his artist’s haze enough to realize that he was watching some poor woman lug a bag through the rain and that helping her would probably be more useful than drawing her. He’d snapped the book shut then and started making his way down. Just
in time, it had turned out, for him not to get all his pages ruined by the downpour.

  So it was Lindsay on the page, but it wasn’t really Lindsay. Not like he would draw her now, which his fingers itched from wanting to do.

  “I could do a real portrait for you sometime, if you wanted,” Boone said. He felt awkward, like he was saying, “I could spend an hour staring at you sometime, if you wanted.” He basically was: that was probably what it would be like from her point of view.

  But Lindsay’s flush only deepened, adding a touch of cherry red in the middle of all the rose. It just made her eyes sparkle even more. “You probably have people ask you for those a lot, right? I don’t want to be a pain.”

  “You would in no way be a pain. I’d like to do it.” He hesitated and then added, “And it would be an excuse to spend more time with you, and I’d like that too.”

  Lindsay’s smile was incandescent. “Well, if it’s about that, you can use any kind of excuse you want.”

  “Then... it’s a date.”

  *

  Sometimes, in Boone’s experience, making plans caused chemistry to fizzle out then and there. Sometimes the fun of the flirtation was entirely in the suspense, and once all the feelings were out in the open, the thrill leveled out. It was just one of the hazards of dating.

  But with Lindsay it was the opposite. It was like knowing all this was mutual only heightened the pull between the two of them.

  Whatever magnetic field was drawing them together wasn’t about the game of figuring each other out. It was deeper than that.

  And relaxing didn’t make it fade away. It just let him give into it.

  He soaked in the little details of her, like the uneven way her wet hair was drying, with some strands still long and wet against her shoulders while the bits closest to her ears had started drying and frizzling up shorter, framing her face in a beautiful dark cloud. He got that itch in his fingers again, wanting to get all this down on paper.

  Wait, he scolded himself.

  They kept on talking right through getting and paying the check. At first they were waiting for the rain to slack off, but then Boone thought it was more that neither of them wanted to part ways.

  In that case, the rain was on their side, because it was pouring down harder than ever.

  Lindsay was telling him about her family.

  “Money was tight when I was a kid. My mom was in a bad car wreck when I was six, and I think all the medical bills just tanked their savings. And their checking account. And their credit cards. And everything else.”

  “That must have been rough.”

  She waved her hand. “I know that sounds bleak, but it’s a hundred percent better now. She’s doing great. Honestly, these days I think she has more energy than I do—she taught high school for thirty years and now she turns up at every city council meeting to argue for more school funding. After thirty years of sixteen-year-olds, I think I’d just want to sleep in.”

  “Says the woman who spends her weekends picking up litter on a public beach.”

  “I’m not retired yet,” Lindsay said primly. “I’m saving up all my laziness for the future. Anyway, it just took a long time for all the financial stuff to bounce back to normal, so we all did a lot of scrimping and saving. That was just a really long way of telling you why my sister decided that she was going to marry a rich guy. I’m not kidding—she read her way through a stack of Jane Austen novels when she was in college and decided it was the way to go.”

  Boone laughed. “And did she?”

  “She did. Ana never gives up on a dream. But she got rich first, so it almost doesn’t even count. It’s kind of adorable—she invented a productivity app and he invented a relaxation app. They’re actually really happy together.”

  “Ms. Productivity and Mr. Relaxation. It’s good when couples balance each other out.”

  Lindsay had a warm, slightly husky laugh. The sound hit Boone like a shot of whiskey. “Isn’t it? Anyway, there you go: I come from a very driven, very eccentric family, and I still have hang-ups about wasting money. Your turn.”

  “My family?”

  “Mm-hm. Are they artistic too?”

  “Yes,” Boone said wryly, “but in a completely different direction. My parents met because they were both singing in the same opera.”

  Lindsay let out an actual squeal of delight. “No!”

  “Oh, yeah. I grew up hearing Carmen and The Marriage of Figaro pumped through the speakers 24/7. And my brother’s a classical violinist. Meanwhile, I’m practically tone-deaf.”

  “It couldn’t have been easy growing up surrounded by music people, then.”

  “Not always,” Boone admitted. “They all speak the same language, and I’m the only one who doesn’t—except my grandfather. He had to be my go-to guy for learning what people could even do if they weren’t good at music.” He smiled. “But even if we don’t all have much in common, we’re still a family. I go see my brother every time he’s playing anywhere near here, and my parents text me whenever they see some of my work around.”

  He took out his phone and showed her an example. His latest texts from his mom were 1) a picture of a bottle of wine he’d designed the label for, 2) a series of exclamation points, and 3) “a Boone sighting in the wild!”

  “Aww,” Lindsay said. She added in sing-song, “Boone’s family loves him.”

  He couldn’t stop himself from chuckling.

  And he couldn’t stop himself from thinking how different she was from Talia, who had always kept his family at arms-length, like she was worried she’d catch something from them. She thought they were weird.

  But Talia had been a long time ago, he reminded himself, and he had been a different person with her. This was who he was now, and Lindsay seemed to like who he was now, so everything was fine.

  There was no way he was bringing any of that up on a first date. You had to wait a little longer before unloading all the baggage of past relationships. For right now, he just wanted to enjoy being with someone who was attracted to this side of him.

  And the other side of him?

  Well, thinking of the other side of him, the alpha male side, reminded him of Eleanor. His smile faded. He’d wanted to protect her. It bothered him that he hadn’t been able to.

  “What?” Lindsay said.

  “I just hope that woman met up with whoever she said she was waiting for. And that they got her in out of the storm.”

  “Eleanor? Me too.” She leaned forward, her dark eyes serious. “I didn’t really know what to make of her, did you? Do you know what I mean?”

  He did. “Don’t laugh, but she felt like a time traveler.”

  “Yes! Exactly! Or an alien. Not someone you’d normally run into, anyway. It really would be nice to know that she’s okay.”

  “We could swing by the boardwalk again and check up on her,” Boone said.

  It was like the air pressure in the room suddenly changed, making his ears pop. It felt like what he’d said—even though it had been something completely ordinary—had moved them to some higher, more dangerous place. Some of the color had run out of Lindsay’s face, like she had felt it too.

  Boone said, “Did you just—”

  She nodded. “It must be the storm.” But there was an uncertain note to her voice.

  Almost as if she was thinking what he was thinking: Not like any storm I’ve ever been in.

  This is something new.

  Chapter Three

  Outside, the weather felt apocalyptic. The lightning was close, close enough for Lindsay to smell the faint hint of ozone it carried with it. The thunder crashed hard enough that she could feel it in her chest.

  Sane people would have gotten as far away from water as possible. But here she and Boone were, heading right back down to the beach and its high, thrashing tide. If lightning hit anywhere near them, they’d get fried.

  At least they weren’t going to be hanging out around a flagpole? There was no convenient lightning
rod near the beach...

  But she couldn’t fool herself into believing this was safe. The easy, comfortable feeling of being with Boone in the diner had evaporated. Right now everything seemed ominous, from the slapping sound the waves made against the shore to the gritty grind of her shoes on the sandy sidewalk.

  It was like there was a timer running in the back of her mind, counting down to... something. A thousand movies had primed her to think that any clock hitting zero meant an explosion.

  But if she thought that, why wasn’t she running away? Why wasn’t she taking the possible guy of her dreams and making herself scarce? Why was she walking closer and closer to trouble?

  Because those feelings were silly. Because she couldn’t get herself all worked up over the heebie-jeebies, not when Eleanor might need them.

  And because—

  She cast a glance at the man beside her, who was walking with the same kind of purpose she was.

  Because having Boone there made her feel like she could take on anything.

  She had to admit that was dumb. They barely knew each other. And he was an artist and she was a city planner: you could fill a book with all the things the two of them couldn’t take on, separately or together. She knew that.

  But it didn’t change how she felt.

  “Is there a word for the opposite of deja vu?” she said as they approached the boardwalk. She was noticing again how bleak and bare it looked without the usual assortment of fruit carts and taco trucks and old women selling baskets woven out of palm fronds. “Because we’ve done this before. The only real difference is we were coming from a different direction. But this feels—monumental. Epic. Which isn’t how you usually feel about something you did an hour ago.”

  She’d tried to get herself ready for him to scoff at her, but he didn’t.