Beth burns her lip on the coffee as she sits there waiting for Stefan to return
“Fuck!” she puts the coffee cup down and from her Nepal bag, she takes out her compact. She inspects her lip for signs of damage then jumps when she hears him calling to her as he walks back
“So…. it looks like my flight is delayed….the person said he would call to let me know….” as he sits down, he shrugs, “has the coffee gone cold?”
“No, it just scalded off my upper lip, so, be warned,” Beth half laughs
“Let me see,” he says
“No, that’s ok….”
For a moment he studies her and then laughs,
“do I want you for a ménage á trois?”
She looks up at him now and he can clearly see that her face, which was before a paler shade, has now gone a bright shade of red
“—my unicorn?” he is laughing now, “I just looked that up on Urban Dictionary.”
“Oh….” she lets out a heavy sigh of relief and then in delayed reaction she laughs
Only now can she look him in the eye, which, up until this moment she could not,
“no, like—that evasive unicorn….”
Stefan watches her as she says this and shakes his head,
“what do you mean?”
“Like a mirage…. that thing you can never achieve so instead, you just keep it there on the illusionary shelf. Look at it. Dust it off. Put it back. But never open. Like those expensive books still in the wrapper —but ….maybe what is inside is totally this whole other entity entirely….so…. Unicorn.”
“‘Blood of a poet’, Cocteau?” he says with a straight face but his eyes, that seem different colors in different angles of light, now twinkle and give him away
If it were in messaging she would …. say….
So—
instead she does:
“Don’t mock me,” she tells him and it seems to break the ice between them
“Maybe we should be drinking tequila and not coffee because there was a third meaning in the urban dictionary,” he teases her, “so why Alaska?”
“Oh! Well—hey, I get to complete my research and the money is perfect,” she says this with a kind of casual tone of bravado not her own and shrugs, “it’s like solitary confinement at the work station. That’s what they jokingly call it. There’s no one for miles. Only the postal guy and that’s if you get mail —but ….I have kind of ….’had it’ with people. So….just animals and the wild from now on. So what are you doing in—where did you just come from?”
“Portugal. I was covering a story on an eco-system, agricultural developer—“ his phone interrupts, “oh, it’s the airline’s person—“ answers, “yes….oh, I see…. so, how long can this—or….ah….”
Beth watches him, sensing something is wrong
After he ends the call he sighs and looks at her but shrugs,
“the airlines crew all tested positive.”
“What? You mean…. so….?”
“They just told me they booked a hotel room for me somewhere, so—it looks like I’m stuck here.”
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