Composite Creatures by Caroline Hardaker (best story books to read .TXT) 📗

I was there. I spotted Art straight away, sitting at a table in the far corner of the restaurant, a leather portfolio resting between the cutlery in front of him as if he was ready to eat it. The bronze ankh and “E.G.” stamped on the cover shone in the candlelight.

I weaved my way between tables crushed with friends and lovers all leaning towards each other, all baring their teeth and spilling wine, and finally reached our table. Art stood when he saw me coming, the fingers of his right hand twitching a little, his right arm pinned down by his left.

“I’m so sorry, Arthur–”

He stopped me short by pulling me into an embrace.

“Don’t worry about it, you look beautiful.”

My arms wrapped around his shoulders, bending on wooden hinges and dangling on strings. I was conscious that I stood a little taller than him, and my elbows awkwardly sought out the place they would have sat before, which now was empty space. I finally let my arms rest on his shoulder blades, acutely aware of how the expanse of my hands fanned across his back.

We sat, and I saw there was already a glass of red wine waiting for me. I picked up the glass by the stem and took a sip, my tongue shrinking away from its dry and mossy texture. Art picked up his glass and took a long, romantic draft, his eyes on my eyes on his eyes. His hair was cropped much shorter than when I’d watched him in the waiting room. Then, he’d had an early hint of a beard too, but now his skin was shaved so close that his cheeks and chin looked like porcelain. I wondered whether he would break if I touched him. Would everything break? As soon as I sat down, he grabbed my hand and gave it a squeeze. His palm was dry and rubbery, not like china at all.

No, it wouldn’t break. I’d make sure of it.

But then the worst happened. Within minutes of me getting there, I didn’t have anything to say. My tongue rolled in my empty mouth searching for something, anything to fill in this enormous chasm before it got even wider. I’d stalled, utterly and completely. Art’s eyes were huge and exposing, and all I could think about was how his skin was even paler than mine, how his hair might feel between my fingers. Bristly, maybe. Not soft. It could’ve been seconds, it could’ve been minutes – but it felt like years were spinning by and I couldn’t get off the carousel.

Art smiled, showing rows of straight, white teeth with a little gap between the front two around the size of a penny’s cross-section. “I thought this might happen.” He reached below his chair and on sitting up swung his arm in a flamboyant arc to the ceiling before bringing down on his head a miniature yellow party hat shaped like an ice cream cone, peaked with a cloud of fluorescent pom-poms. “Happy first date day!” he sang, his arms stretching wide in celebration. I laughed, spitting puce across the table and then covering my face with my hands, as if denying I had a mouth at all. He pulled a second hat from beneath his seat, this time shaped like a canoe with long strings dangling from the front and back like a horse’s tail. He thrust it towards me. “I thought it might break the tension. Join me?”

Terrified, I took it by the tassel and didn’t know what to do. Wasn’t everyone in the restaurant already looking?

“I–”

“Come on, put it on!”

In the end, I did it not because I wanted to, but because I thought it might showcase us as a real couple, celebrating a birthday, or anniversary. The other diners would whisper, “Well, they must know each other already. Why else would they dare to be so ostentatious?” I grinned back at Art as if it was all for him, only letting a hint of self-consciousness shine though. And you know what? As soon as I pulled the hat over my eyes, something changed. I couldn’t even see if anyone was looking anymore, and that slight act of outrageousness overshadowed mine and Art’s feeble history. Now, we were set apart from everyone else in a positive way. We were the loud ones, the ones everyone deliberately tried to ignore. It was genius. We had our first funny story. Remember the hats, darling? Tell them about the hats!

Art moved his portfolio aside to the edge of the table, leaving it closed, and I didn’t even take mine out of my bag. The whole thing felt surprisingly organic, and we moved through the night at the same pace, holding hands through time. He told me a little about his family in Wisconsin, how he’d moved to New York in his early twenties to get away from the crowd he left behind. He was vague about the details, and when I asked him about it he just shook his head and took a drink. It wasn’t that he avoided it, but I picked up that he saw his life in the US as a chapter which had very much ended. At this point he’d only been living in the UK for a few months, but it sounded like he was determined to cut ties with everyone back home. He said it was “simpler”. So, I was going to be taking on Arthur alone, no extra baggage, which pleased me. Nice and clean.

I watched him all the time. While he talked, he had an odd little tic of pulling on the fleshy bit of his ear as he tied off sentences, and he often looked at me sideways when I talked for more than a couple of minutes. When he ate, he never touched the cutlery with his lips or teeth, and simply dropped the food into his mouth. He opened his eyes particularly widely when listening, as if he heard more