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“How about a drink?” he says tentatively. She raises her eyebrows. Oh, this’ll be good. She can tell, because they’re already off to a rough start. He got there eighteen minutes and eleven seconds late. (She knows because after she gets bored of staring at the other patrons, she starts counting seconds instead of minutes. The things she does for him.)
She sighs and shakes her head, as if he’s imposing on something delicate and important, and flags down the bartender for two shots of tequila.
“Those both for me?” He raises his eyebrows as the glasses come sliding down the mahogany of the bar.
“No.” She claims one of them, ignoring the martini (her second) that she already has. She figures she’ll need lots of alcohol for this - it’s essential, for these types of business meetings. In fact, she realizes, some hard liquor before a business meeting with Nate makes everything go a little smoother. There’s a fine line between enough and too much, but isn’t that the way everything goes when she’s around him? As with alcohol, there is an increased chance of her doing something she deeply regrets later.
Regrets, but not quite enough to take it back.
Now she leans back and downs her shot, expression placid. She knows he’s impressed, but as if he would ever tell her that. Instead he takes his shot too and sets the glass back down on the bar nonchalantly.
“So.”
She sips the martini and nods at him, ignoring the burning in her throat. Maybe the tequila wasn’t such a good idea. Nate coughs. She offers him the martini; he looks at her like she’s crazy.
“It…takes the edge off,” she says by way of explanation. She ordered the most expensive tequila on the list. Once they did shots of Alquimia, on a lonely night in Key West; the other stuff is crap anyways, once you’ve tasted this, he’d said.
He looks at her for a second, and then takes a sip of the martini. It seems to dull the burning a little, she thinks rather hazily. Of course now would be the time for her to enter the exhaustion stage of alcohol consumption. Just as he’s about to start his magnum opus of an explanation.
“So.” he says again, coughing. “About this job.”
“This job,” she prompts, rather unhelpfully.
“About a month ago,” he begins, taking another sip of her martini and handing it back to her, “I got a couple of letters. Some correspondence marked from the U.K., telling me that if I was in town, some guy named Talbot was interested in meeting with me to discuss the sale of an ‘antique ring’ - he says I’m a collector, so’s he, right?”
“Right.” Oh, no, she’s so tired.
“Turns out” – he looks so pleased with himself, though – “that – well, let me back up.” Oh no. “Before this I’d gotten my hands on a copy of one of the rarer books – Seven Pillars of Wisdom – you know. T.E. Lawrence, that kind of thing.” He smiles here, and she feels like she’s been jolted awake. More, she thinks, taking a good long sip of her drink. Take the edge off. “And I noticed these notes in the margins – mind you, this is an Oxford Copy, didn’t come easy, and might have included some…petty thievery – that are these funny letters. So, turns out they’re alchemic symbols. Put those together…”
She has stopped concentrating a while ago. Not that it matters. She’s going to say yes anyways. It’ll be that damn tequila, she can tell. She will blame it tomorrow. God, she’s tired.
“…mentioned in his book. ‘City of Brass’, Iram of the Pillars, Ubar, Wabar –“
“I get the picture,” she says wearily. “A rose by any other name…”
“ – no matter what you call it, it’s best identified as the Atlantis of the Sands. Sort of. Legend has it that the city was sunk underneath the dunes, smote by God as punishment for its arrogance, jealousy of its unlimited riches…I mean, you name it, Iram had it. Or Ubar. Or the City of Brass...”
“Nate?” she says, her voice extremely heavy. “Your attempt’s not working.” He smirks at her and pries the martini glass from her hand.
“Another one, please,” he says, signaling the bartender. She stares at him, horrified.
“What? No –"
“So, long story short” – “Right,” she says, a touch of asperity in her voice, and he frowns – “Talbot? He’s a front, working for Katherine Marlowe - I’ll tell you about her later - and we’re going to pull one over on her. Sell her a decoy. This ring” (he touches it almost subconsciously then) “unlocks a cipher, a disk that only she has. And if we can get the drop on her, figure out where she’s keeping the cipher disk - well, then, we’ve got our ticket to Iram. A city of immeasurable wealth.” He grins. “A city with riches far beyond your wildest dreams.”
“Oh, my dreams are pretty wild,” she says lightly. “But come on.” She speaks as if she can convince herself it’s a bad idea, and that she won’t go with him. Like that’s ever worked before, she thinks instantly. It’s a bad idea and it isn’t logically sound and it’s with Nate, have any of those things ever stopped you? “Iram of the Pillars? Seriously? The chances of that actually existing are – they’re not much, Nate. I’m not sticking my neck out and telling some secret society to have at me - assuming we can pull off the con. And - really, let’s say we do it, we get to this city, and all we find is some ancient campfires and maybe a piece of pottery? What then?” Then I wasted two months of my life, but not really, and damn it, it’s going to be like last time, isn’t it?
Nate does not look put out by her reasons at all. In fact, he looks more excited than before – if, of course, that was possible.
“Come on, Chloe.” He takes the martini offered by the bartender, sips it, and passes it back to her. She considers asking him why he didn’t just get two, but thinks better of it. “You know you want to go. It would be – think of how much we could find.”
“You were going to say it would be fun,” she says dryly, more disturbed at the fact that it does sound a little fun, she does want to go. Kind of. Just a little.
He shrugs. “Yeah. So? It would be.”
She sighs. “Just me? I’m assuming Victor’s in on this too?”
Nate clears his throat. “Of course,” he says.
“And Elena?” It’s been a couple of years since their beachy wedding, where she was one of three guests. (She’s still finding sand in the only pair of heels she owns.) Chloe hasn’t really gone out of her way to contact Nate and Elena - the three of them are on more of an “if it happens” basis nowadays. Until that email from Nate, of course. Business proposition!
Nate presses his lips together and turns a little to the bar. “Nah. She’s - not in on this one.”
“Oh.” She considers him for a little bit, and she realizes his face is a little more lined, his eyes a little dulled. It wouldn’t have been a big deal if only she hadn’t looked closely, but now it’s jarring and she can’t ignore it. She had always assumed that Nate would look like himself forever, that he would never change, because he was Nate. But now he looks precisely thirty-two years and eight months old, and suddenly she wonders if she does, too.
“I – yes, of course – sure. Fine.” Agreement to elation to indifference to grudging acceptance; how worrying. She wonders just how much he deduces, as he sips her martini and looks at her over the rim of the glass and smiles.
“See? Knew you’d say yes.” Of course you knew, she thinks, and he can’t resist needling her about it either. Sometimes it’s strange, knowing that he can predict what she’s going to do before she does it. When he put his arm out in front of her on that ledge in Tibet, for example, because he knew she was going to try and look over it, and when it collapsed ten seconds later she knew why. And that time when he told her not to shoot before she’d even taken out her gun. And that one time, which seems to be millions and millions of years in the past, when he shut the stove burners off because (and she might be paraphrasing, but she’s almost sure it’s what he said) “your hair’s down today, you never do that; if you lean over the stove you’re gonna start on fire”.
She shakes her head in mild chagrin. She really didn’t need any convincing in the first place. She probably would have said yes, she realizes, either way. He could have, she thinks, rather disturbed, told her that they were going to die and she still would’ve gone. Well, maybe not then. She would have given him a little lecture for that one. But she might still even have gone after that.
“You know,” he says as they walk out of the bar; she momentarily forgets that they’re taking separate cars. “I’m glad you agreed. I think you’ll enjoy it. And, hey, you might get rich.”
“How many times have I heard that before?” she asks. “Maybe, Nate. We’ll see.”
“By the way,” he continues as she reaches for the handle of the driver’s side door. “Thanks…for meeting me, I mean. I know we didn’t really need to, but sometimes it’s nice to be the one doing the convincing.” He smiles at her, and she leans against her car and stares at him.
“Didn’t really need to?” she scoffs. “You think I would’ve agreed without you having to say anything because that’s what I always do, because I never learn, and neither do you.” She knows she’s gotten too specific for there to be any doubt. Crap. Well, she’s certainly regretting that tequila shot now. Nate just shrugs mysteriously.
“I’ll call you.”
“Yeah…” She’s still leaning against the door.
All that effort, when he knew that she was going to say yes.
She shakes her head. He’s exasperating, confusing; so contradictory.
But then, so is she.