The Next Time You See Me by Holly Goddard Jones Page A

glasses and beer bottles and shoulder-to-shoulder with people, but then the band’s leader announced a slow song, told the men to “grab the nearest looker,” and some of the tables cleared out then. Wyatt seated himself at one immediately.
    He’d been there for only a moment, peering through the bad lighting at the shift and spin of the dance floor, when he heard a soft “Oh” to his side, and he turned in time to see a woman backing away, a foamy pint of beer in each hand.
    Wyatt jumped up immediately. “Did I take your table?”
    She shook her head like a child would, making her hair, which was glossy blond and clipped unflatteringly in a bob that hit her cheekbones, whip back and forth. Some of the fine strands stuck to the sweat on her nose, and she tried awkwardly to push them to the side, lifting her right hand, beer and all, and backhanding them free. “I guess I just got confused,” she said. “I mean, I must have. Someone was supposed to be waiting for me.”
    “Think you just got turned around in here? Easy to do in this light.”
    “I thought . . .” She trailed off. “Oh,” she repeated then, tone of voice flatter than before, and Wyatt followed her gaze down to the edge of the dance floor, where a man and a woman were standing together, not even pretending to affect a twist or a sway. The man had the woman by her belt loops and was pulling her backward and forward, bumping her hips in a playful way against his. The woman, holding a cigarette next to her head as though she could lean a little to the right and puff through her ear, was laughing. As Wyatt and his new companion watched, the man reached out, grabbed the woman’s bottom with both hands, and kissed her sloppily. As a final flourish on this bit of grotesquery, he pulled the woman’s cigarette to his mouth, inhaled, and breathed a dirty cloud of smoke into her face, making her laugh again.
    Wyatt didn’t know what to say.
    “That,” the woman with the beers told him, “is my date.” She set the beers on Wyatt’s table with a thud—not a slam so much as a drop, as though her arms could no longer support the weight of them—and wiped the beer that had sloshed across her hands on the hips of her blue jeans.
    “You should sit,” Wyatt said, pulling out the chair next to his. She nodded absently, still watching the couple, and pushed the second beer to the space in front of Wyatt.
    “Please take that,” she said, and Wyatt nodded. So they both sat, and they both sipped, Wyatt dutifully, the woman forlornly, holding her glass steady with both hands and leaning down to slurp over the rim, again with a quality so childlike that Wyatt felt almost sick with pity for her. She might have been forty or forty-five, and she was, he supposed, categorically fat—big enough, at any rate, to do her shopping at the plus-size end of the clothes aisle, though not so big that her face seemed anything but full and, perhaps because of the fullness, youthful. It was a pleasant face, smooth and unblemished, her features proportioned much more elegantly than the rest of her: the attractive, normal face and slender neck sitting atop slumped, dimpled shoulders, heavy breasts, a swell of stomach that pushed past the breasts. She had on a sleeveless red top in a light, feminine material; the contours of her nipples and belly button were visible, and Wyatt could even, without trying, make out the lace pattern on her bra. He cleared his throat and sipped again, wondering if she could see his red cheeks. But her gaze was fixed on the sight of her date and his dance partner, and her fingers, strangely slender, tightened around her pint glass.
    “Do you know who she is?” Wyatt asked.
    The dimpled shoulders lifted and dropped. “I barely know who he is. But they seem awfully familiar with each other.” She looked back at Wyatt and smiled crookedly, her lips pressed together. “This was our first time out. We found each other in the Peddler .”
    “The