The Black Widow (4 page)

The bar is crowded tonight as he makes his way through, looking for his date. She said she’d be wearing a red dress, having read in his profile that it’s his favorite color.

It isn’t.

His favorite color is black, but when he wrote that in a past profile, he found it tended to attract artsy, depressing women.

Live and learn, right?

Shouldering through crowds of boisterous white-collar professionals who linger on, having taken advantage of the happy hour two-for-one drink specials and free bar food, he spots her at the far end. She’s standing beside a high-top table not far from the three-deep bar, holding a glass that’s half empty—or half full, depending on how you look at it.

Unlike the other women here who are noticeably alone, she’s not busy with her phone, or looking around wistfully. She just seems to be waiting; expectant, but comfortable.

She’s tall—taller than him, probably. She has long dark hair and attractive facial features. Attractive features below the face, too: plenty of curves, shown off by a crimson dress with a plunging neckline. Just like her profile promised, which is unusual. Too many times, self-professed “curvy” women turn out to be downright porcine, having posted old or doctored photos of themselves.

Skinny women turn him off. He likes curves. The healthy kind, like this. But you don’t dare advertise that it’s what you’re looking for, because you’ll be inundated with morbidly obese lonely hearts.

Again, live and learn.

Pleased with what he sees from a distance, he hurries over to her. “Sofia?”

She nods, extends her right hand. “Nick?”

“That’s me. Nick Santana.”
For tonight, anyway.

The bar is dimly lit. Up close he can see that she’s older than he thought. And her curves appear to be more toned and muscular than soft.

With a strong handshake, she says, “Nice to meet you.”

“You, too. I’m so sorry I’m late. I hope you didn’t think I was going to stand you up. There was track work on the downtown express.” Blame it on the MTA, as always.

She shrugs and says nothing, flicking her gaze over him from head to toe as though sizing him up. She’s probably comparing him to his profile photo, the red sweater one from several Christmases ago.

Uncomfortable, he points to his watch, a convincing Gucci knockoff. “We might as well go straight to the table.”

“Oh, not yet.”

“I have a seven-thirty reservation.”

“It’s all right. I already spoke to the maitre d’. They’ll hold the table so that we can have our drinks first.”

Caught off guard, he protests, “That’s okay, I don’t—”

“I got you a Bourbon and water.”

That stops him in his tracks.
She
bought
him
a drink?

She reaches for a glass filled with brownish-gold liquid and slides it along the high-top table toward him. “It’s Maker’s Mark—you said you like it, right?”

Pleasantly surprised, he nods. He probably did say that. He said a lot of things in the private messages they’ve been sending back and forth for a few weeks now, ever since she first reached out to him. It’s nice to know she was paying such close attention.

“Thank you. What are you drinking?” he asks her, and feels obliged to add, “Can I get you a refill?”

“Vodka tonic. And no, thank you, this is my second.”

Vodka tonic. A nice surprise. Most women go for the watered-down margaritas.

She lifts her own glass—half full, he decides—in a toast.

“Here’s to tonight,” she says simply.

He grins and clinks his drink against hers. “To tonight.”

Gaby is surprised—not pleasantly—to find that her blind date, Ryan Hunter, is even more handsome than he appeared to be in his profile photograph, and even more nice and normal than he came across in their correspondence.

On the way over to the bistro from the office—including a quick stop in the restroom at Grand Central Terminal, where she’d applied makeup to her other eye—she’d convinced herself that he was going to turn out to be a loser. In that case, she figured she could call it an early night, inform her cousin that this online dating stuff isn’t for her, and delete herself from the InTune Web site.

Tried it, hated it, case closed.

That would have been easy.

This—sitting across a small table from a man who’s not only handsome, but polite, witty, and utterly appealing—is complicated. Five minutes into the date she’s already wondering what she’ll do if he wants to see her again.

She should, of course,
want
him to want to see her again.

She should want to see him again.

But somehow Ben has worked his way into the back of her mind and refuses to budge. Probably because seeing Kasey in the ladies’ room back at the office reminded her of their loss.

Ben is the only other person in the world who knows what it was like to be Josh’s parent—and to lose him. At least when he was in her life, there was someone who shared her grief.

This man, this stranger, Ryan Hunter—he’ll never share that. He’ll never understand her. So why bother?

“Do you want red wine, or white?” he asks, studying the list the waiter left on the table in a skinny leather binder.

“Either is fine.”

“How about white? A sauvignon blanc?”

“Sure,” she says, though her favorite is red. Malbec. Ben would have known that without being told. She’s too shy to tell Ryan.

He motions the waiter over.

She watches him order the wine, admiring his dark good looks, the expensive cut of his suit, the easygoing banter as he and the waiter discuss his choice. He doesn’t pretend to be sophisticated, isn’t trying to impress her or the waiter with his knowledge of wine.

He’s a good guy. A nice, normal guy. He could have been a jerk, a loser—a serial killer, for that matter. She’d taken the precaution of telling Jaz exactly where she was going tonight, and with whom.

She’d read that advice this afternoon in an article about online dating. Nothing like being reminded, at the eleventh hour, that the Internet is crawling with dangerous predators.

Luckily, Ryan doesn’t seem to be one of them.

She feels herself relax, just a little bit, as the waiter leaves, and Ryan smiles at her. He has a nice smile.

“I love this place,” he tells her. “Great wine list, great food, great service.”

“You’ve been here before?”

“Many times.” He doesn’t elaborate, leaving her to wonder if he’s come with other women.

Probably.

Should she care?

Is Ben on a date right now with a woman who’s wondering or asking about his ex-wife?

“So you’re an editor?” Ryan props his elbows on the table, laces his fingers together and rests his chin on them as though he’s really interested in her work. “What kind of books? Fiction?”

“Yes.”

“Anything I’d enjoy?”

“That depends on what you like to read.”

“Novels. No particular genre. I like just about anything as long as the characters are strong and the plot isn’t convoluted,” he adds.

Well, naturally, she finds herself thinking. Who enjoys weak characters and convoluted plots?

Ryan claimed to be an avid reader in his online profile and listed an eclectic mix of favorite authors, but that doesn’t mean he’d actually read them.

For all they had in common, Ben was never much of a reader. Early in their relationship she tried to get him interested in whatever novel she was passionate about at the time. He would gamely read a few pages and then hand it back, saying he couldn’t get into it.

He balked when she was pregnant and longing to name the baby after one of her favorite literary characters. She suggested Heathcliff for a boy, or Hermione for a girl.

“Herman?” He lit up.

“Hermione,” she repeated. “For a girl.”

“What kind of name is that?”

“It’s from Harry Potter.”

He shook his head. “I like Herman a lot better.”

“For a
girl
?”

“If you want.”

“I
don’t
want! For a girl
or
for a boy.”

“It’s Babe Ruth’s middle name.”

“I don’t care. There’s no way we’re naming our son Herman.”

“Well, there’s no way we’re naming our son Heathcliff,” he countered. “The kids will tease him.”

“They won’t tease Herman? Anyway, we can call him Heath, or Cliff—”

“Or a regular name.”

“Like?”

“Like—I don’t know—Josh or something. Josh is a good name.”

It
was
a good name. A great name. Maybe even better than Heathcliff, although Ben almost,
almost
gave in to that during her grueling labor. As a compromise, he agreed to consider a literary name for their next child, and even promised to read Emily Brontë and J.K. Rowling for inspiration. Of course, he never did.

It might be nice, Gaby tells herself now, to be in a relationship with a fellow bibliophile.

Then again, Ryan might just be feigning interest.

Right. The way you did when he was talking about last night’s ball game?

It’s not that she doesn’t like baseball. She grew up watching the Yankees in the Bronx; she’s just not a fanatic like Ben.

Ryan roots for the Yankees’ archrivals, the Red Sox. He might live in New York, he told her, but he’s technically from New England—the Connecticut suburbs.

Greenwich, he mentioned—but only when she asked where. He wasn’t trying to brag.

Still, “Greenwich” speaks volumes. Ben’s friend Peter had been married to a woman who’d grown up there. Gaby attended her wedding shower at a bridesmaid’s stately mansion set behind brick walls, the couple’s engagement party at a bigger, better stately mansion set behind brick walls
and
a guard house, and of course the wedding itself at a fancy country club.

To his credit, Ryan doesn’t mention whether his family is part of the polo-playing, yachting set, but it’s safe to assume they’re at least fairly well off. Not that it matters to Gaby.

“What are you working on now?” he asks, and she tells him briefly about the manuscript she’s editing, a cold war spy thriller set in the United States.

At least, she intended to be brief. But he has questions. Intelligent ones.

He in turn tells her about the book he just finished reading, a historical mystery that’s currently sitting atop the vast to-be-read pile on her nightstand.

Convinced he wasn’t just showing polite interest in her literary world, she relaxes a little bit more and asks him what else he’s read recently.

Talking about books, sipping cold white wine, nibbling a piece of nutty whole grain bread from the basket on the table, Gaby finds herself firmly pushing Ben to the back of her mind every time he tries to intrude.

Tonight is about forgetting, not remembering. It’s about the future, not the past.

It’s about her, and about Ryan; about giving him a chance; about daring to believe that if she found happiness once, she might actually find it again.

It’s no accident that the woman seated across the table from Ben Duran looks nothing like Gabriela.

He’d chosen the petite blonde for that very reason.

When he first joined InTune, he’d found himself gravitating toward tall, shapely brunettes, preferably those who, like him—and like Gabriela—had at least a splash of Hispanic blood running through their veins.

Women like that turned out to be plentiful on the dating Web site. Online, they seemed exactly right for Ben. In person, they were all wrong.

Either they were too outgoing or not outgoing enough, too affectionate or not affectionate enough, too intellectual or not intellectual enough . . .

In short, they weren’t Gabriela.

But of course he didn’t realize that was the problem until his friend Peter—long-divorced and an online dating veteran—pointed it out to him.

“You’re supposed to be trying to meet someone new and move on, son.” Peter always called him—called everyone—son. “You’re not supposed to be recapturing what you had with Gaby. That’s not possible.”

Yeah. No kidding.

He’d tried. He really had. Tried hard to reach her during the last year of their marriage. He was convinced the real Gaby, the woman he loved, was still there, hidden away behind the emotional barrier she’d constructed after they lost their son.

But he couldn’t permeate those walls. Finally, he concluded that the only way to lure her out was to leave, hoping she’d be shaken enough to come after him.

She didn’t.

Ben wasn’t accustomed to failure.

He’d done everything within his power to avoid it. He’d excelled in high school, both in sports—he ran track and was captain of the swim team—and academically. He’d won acceptance, with partial scholarships, to M.I.T. He worked his way through, emerged with an engineering degree, and left Co-op City behind for good, landing a structural engineering job and his own apartment a few miles—and a world—away in Manhattan.

He fell in love with and married the woman of his dreams, moved to a bigger, better home where they could raise a family, had a son . . .

Lost it all. Everything that mattered.

Gradually, he’s rebuilt his life. But it hasn’t been easy—and he sure as hell doesn’t want to spend the duration on a self-imposed exile. Not after watching his widowed father make that mistake, consumed by grief and misery.

Ben found that the dating scene had changed drastically since he was last single in the city. Back then you counted on meeting other eligible singles at parties and in bars. Now everyone seems to be making those connections online, and Peter convinced him to give it a try.

After dating several women whose profiles reminded him of his ex-wife, Ben took Peter’s advice and shifted gears. Essentially, that’s meant looking for women who aren’t his type.

Women like Camilla, who’s sitting across the table from him tonight. She’s sipping a cosmopolitan—served, as is tradition, in a martini glass—through a straw.

“I don’t like to drink out of a glass when I’m wearing lipstick,” she explained to the waiter and to Ben when she asked for the straw.