He seemed slightly surprised. “Oh, this? I’m just test-driving this for a friend. Going to take it back later tonight. I just thought you’d like to see it before I do.” He stepped back and invited her to occupy the passenger seat.
The Lamborghini Huracan was built principally for speed, but luxury was crafted into every aspect of the design. Megan seemed to slide into the seat, the wonderful sensation of fine leather very much present through her black cocktail dress. Rather than close it in the conventional manner, Jake effortlessly nudged the raised door downward and it slid into the fuselage like a well-engineered glove. There was something comforting in that precision, something even attractive in that attention to detail. He appreciates quality, Megan thought, like a surgeon who knows when a scalpel is truly sharp. She felt slightly giddy, a little selfconscious, but also pleasingly excited.
“It must feel pretty good,” Megan observed as they slid smoothly along the streets of her neighborhood, “to be driving around in something that looks like a billion dollars.”
Jake would have been lying if he’d claimed indifference to the turning heads, especially those of the town’s more than adequate number of attractive women. “I get a kick out of it,” he admitted with a grin. “I guess, at heart, I’m a showman.”
No kidding. Megan watched him negotiate the traffic and turns of central Boston, not a traffic environment for the faint hearted. “So, where are we going?” she asked.
Jake was pressing buttons, seemingly experimentally. “Do you know a bar called Circus?”
Megan shook her head, and couldn’t help noticing an odd sensation from beneath the seat. “Jake?”
“Hmm?”
She paused to check she wasn’t imagining things. “Are you warming my ass right now?”
His hand flew to the dashboard and clicked off a small button. “Sorry...” he said. “I’m like a boy on Christmas morning when they let me drive one of these cars.”
“If it were Christmas morning, I wouldn’t mind,” she said with a wry smile, “but it’s seventy degrees out. Come the next nor’easter, though, you can warm my ass as much as you want.”
She cringed inwardly. The Voice of Reason, so often ignored in her chaotic life, expressed its own eye-rolling distaste. Do you ever... and I do mean ever actually take the risk of thinking before you speak? ‘You can warm my ass...’ For heaven’s sake. You’re not even drunk!
Jake seemed either to remember her penchant for blurting out the least appropriate comment, or was content to be quietly amused, reacting with another indulging smile. Megan’s embarrassment eased only as they found a parking space in one of central Boston’s quiet back streets. Jake offered his arm and they walked together down to the street level and around the corner, dodging the early-evening dinner and theater crowds. The city was very alive at this hour, a pleasant late-spring air having brought out locals and students for food and a walk on the Common.
Circus wasn’t heaving quite yet, but it was nearly full. A trendy, blue-lit place with scatterings of grouped chairs around tall, circular tables, the place was dominated by an elongated, curved bar around which a growing throng was trying, with mixed success, to get the barman’s attention. Jake spoke quietly to the hostess, a blonde bombshell in an outrageously slinky green number who escorted the pair to their table, as quiet as one could hope for amid the early-evening din.
“Are you here a lot?” Megan asked, noting that Jake seemed familiar with the hostess. And immediately wondering if that was a personal, or merely a professional connection.
“A few times a month,” he replied. “One of my software partners introduced it to me as his favorite place for pre-dinner drinks.” Megan wondered how many flustered trainee nurses his ‘software partner’ had brought here. Looking around, she noticed that a lot of the clientele were wearing the value of her student debt. Jake though, seemed to be reading her mind. “You look terrific tonight,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you wearing something so...”
Megan let it hang in the air. “So...?”
Jake checked himself, laughed selfconsciously. “I was going to say, ‘so grown up’, but then we’ve known each other a long time, haven’t we?”
Megan glanced at the menu distractedly. “You’d have to say, ‘on and off’ for a long time. You do have a habit of disappearing.” Most of the drinks cost enough to buy a major nursing textbook.
“The curse of my profession,” he said, almost sadly. “Tom takes care of the technology. I’m in charge of the presentation,” he added with a flourish. “These days, it won’t sell unless it’s smarter than Einstein, smaller than the competition, or just plain old sexy.”
Megan picked her drink. “Which one of those three are you?” Will. You. Shut. Up.