Loki

 

 

“WHAT’S YOUR real name? Because I don’t believe it’s Loki,” Micky says, pulling out the chair opposite and sitting down.

He looks different without all his makeup on. His eyes are as blue and bright as the winter sky, his hair more gold than white blond. It shines in the light.

My heart beats faster and faster.

I look away.

The clock on the café wall says noon exactly. If a bell were to chime the hour, it would be chiming now. He could not be more punctual. I’m still shocked he managed to sneak up on me.

The café is always busy and big enough that if I sit tucked away in a corner, no one usually bothers me, however many hours I spend pretending I’m drinking an endless cup of tea. But today I came in early and even waited for a woman and her kid to leave so I could sit in the window and see Micky before he saw me. But somehow he snuck in under my radar anyway.

“Loki’s okay.” I shrug. I’m not sure why I don’t want to tell him my real name.

Maybe I do it because I think the mystery might intrigue him. God, I’m pathetic.

“Only if you’re an evil supervillain,” he says.

“Loki’s not evil.”

“Just misunderstood?” Micky smiles, eyebrow raised.

My brain is scrambled eggs. I take a deep breath.

“Don’t have the right screen, need to get another. Be tomorrow.”

I don’t look at him. He’d probably see right through me if I did.

Inside I’m at war. I shouldn’t be doing this. I’m not usually so completely dishonest, but I want to find some photos where he doesn’t have all the eye makeup on. Where he looks like he does now.

I feel so weak.

“Oh,” Micky says. He’s disappointed, but he quickly brightens. “That’s okay. I’m working tonight, but I’m sure one of the others will lend me their phone if a punter wants to go somewhere.” He rolls his shoulders back as though he’s shrugging off any problems.

Damn it. I didn’t think of that. I chew my lip.

Micky lays his hand on the table. His fingers are long and bony, his hands bigger than his thin frame suggests they should be. He bites his nails. The wrist he grazed last night has a bandage on it, but the bandage doesn’t look very clean. It looks like it’s a piece of fabric he found and wrapped around his wrist only because he couldn’t find anything else. I wonder why he fainted and hurt it in the first place. I wonder if he fainted at all. Maybe someone hurt him. A shark? Or just a punter who got overexcited?

“You can have my phone,” I say.

Micky shakes his head. “You don’t know me. What about if your friends call you?”

“It’s fine.” I take my phone out of my pocket and hand it to him. I don’t tell him there is no one who would call me anymore. That Dashiel was the only one who ever did and he can’t call me now from wherever he is. Even though I’ve kinda hoped more than once for it to ring and his name be the one on the screen. Even though I know that’s completely crazy.

“Wow,” Micky says. He smiles as he turns the phone in his hands.

My phone is a Frankenstein. But it works fine—better than fine, actually—and I like that it’s made from the parts of about five other phones soldered together. Someone traded me a soldering set once for fixing a broken DS screen. I played around with the set constantly until it broke.

Micky’s whole attention is focused on my phone so I risk letting myself look at him a bit more closely. His mouth is wide and his smile big. I like how his teeth are very white. His incisors are quite long—making him look a little bit more masculine than he did last night, and also slightly feral. Like a fox. My heart has been beating too fast the whole time he’s been sitting down, but now warmth pools in my gut, swirling tendrils of desire, and I feel like the most pathetic person on the planet.

People like me don’t get lucky with guys like him. People like me don’t get lucky, full stop.

He catches my eye and I blush like there is a fire inside me and lower my head.

“This phone is like a piece of art,” he says. “Are you sure about me borrowing it?”

I nod. It’s the least I can do after lying to him about his own phone. I am such a lowlife.

“So tomorrow, here, noon?”

I nod again. I expect him to go now. But he doesn’t.

“What’s a shark hunter?” he asks.

His question makes me panic. I have to look up, and when I do I realise I’ve left my stupid notepad on the table. I grab it with shaking hands and shove it in my pocket, next to Micky’s phone.

“I’m a shark hunter,” I mumble.

I say it so he doesn’t think I’m weird, carrying a pad around with “Shark Hunter” written on it in big blocky letters and a few badly drawn sharks circling the page, like I’m a kid writing a story. Then I realise it makes me sound even weirder.

Micky leans forwards, smiling like we’re playing some sort of game, and asks conspiratorially, “What sort of sharks are you hunting?”

I don’t know what to say.

He sits back and folds his arms across his chest. “Like, uh, loan sharks or something?”

I snort out a laugh. I can’t help it. The loan shark hunter—here to save helpless old ladies from burly men with clipboards.

But the laughter inside me fades as quickly as it comes, because I’ve no idea if the truth is any less ridiculous.

Outside, the snow is melting into dirty great puddles. I touch my fingers against the pad in my pocket. So far, what difference have I made with my pad and my notes?

I’m not much of a shark hunter. I’m not much of anything.

I stare at the checkered tablecloth and wait for Micky to leave. But again, he doesn’t.

This is not how these exchanges usually go. People usually can’t wait to leave.

“Do you want a cup of tea or coffee?” he asks.

I keep my head down and shake it. “I should go now.”

I get up. My chair scrapes noisily across the floor as I try to shove it back up against the table. I sense people turning to stare, and my skin heats even more.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, then.” Micky sticks his arm out so I can’t pass, and he waggles my phone under my nose until I look at him. “I don’t bite, just so you know. Well, not unless you ask me to.”

He smiles at me, incisors glinting, and I notice one corner of his mouth turns up slightly more than the other, making him about a thousand times more perfect for having this single sparkling flaw. My heart thumps wildly. I can’t meet his eyes. I nod tightly and march quickly out of the café.

Two streets later I stop in the doorway of a long-empty shop. I crouch down and pull out my pad to write out the whole conversation I had with Micky, needing to remember it as well as I can, not wanting to forget a single word. Then I think about all the conversations I had with Dashiel and how I never wrote any of them down so I could remember them, and I scribble over the page I’ve written so hard that the paper rips.