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an excerpt

All the posh little cocktail bars looked the same from the outside – a moodily-lit sign with the clever name spelled out in cursive, pretty girls and older men standing with varying degrees of success and waiting for cabs to take them away – so I didn’t recognize the one where I’d met Piper when I walked past it three weeks later.

I barely recognized her when she caught my arm.

“Why haven’t you called me?” she asked, falling awkwardly into step while I tried very hard to match her face up with a memory.

“Diane?” I asked finally.

Piper wrinkled her nose, which only made her freckles more obvious. “Diane?” she asked. “I have no idea who that is.”

“Mother of two, child star…?” The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Diane probably did not exist at all.

“Oh!” Piper laughed, holding onto my arm for support. “You believed that?”

I avoided looking at her.

“You’re kind of cute.” She was staggering a bit in black stilettos, or I would have removed her from my arm. It made walking difficult. I wasn’t sure how other men did it.

When I didn’t reply, she spoke again. “My name’s Piper.” She jogged a few paces to keep up with me. “You know, it’s rude not to call a girl when she gives you her number.”

“I didn’t know that that was your name.”

“How many other numbers do you get from girls?” She smiled at me for the first time; it was a perceptive smile, one that suggested she was far more aware of what you weren’t telling her than she would like you to believe. “I wrote it down for you, but maybe you don’t remember that. You were rather beside yourself.”

“I know.” She was growing rather heavy, and she carried with her the scent I remembered from the night I met her. Whether that scent belonged to her or the cocktail bar, I had no idea. “How much have you been drinking?”

“Enough to hail a cab.” She swung her red bag from her arm. “You don’t wear leather shoes.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your shoes are fake leather.” She looked up at me. “You don’t like wearing dead animals on your feet?”

“When you put it that way, does anyone?”

“I like the concept of leather.” She looked elsewhere. “I trust it. It worked well enough for the animal, after all.”

We walked in silence for a while. I considered asking her where she was going, but I doubted that would get rid of her as effectively as boredom. It turned out that I was correct; when the next cab passed, she waved her arm.

“You’d better call me,” she called as she hoisted herself into the back seat.

“I might,” I replied. In reality, I sincerely doubted at that moment that I would ever see Piper again.

“You’d better,” she mouthed through the window, holding up something small and black in her hand as the cab rolled away.

It wasn’t until I got home that I realized my wallet was missing.