Chapter 3
Chapter 3: Last Call
The bar was called The Still, which Jamie pointed out was probably a sign.
"A sign of what," Nisha said.
"That we were supposed to find it." He held the door. The inside was exactly the kind of bar he'd meant: dark wood, low light, a long counter with actual bar stools, the kind of music that was present without being loud. A Thursday crowd that had the ease of people who had nowhere particular to be.
"That logic could justify anything," Nisha said, going in.
"I find it useful that way."
The bartender was a woman in her forties with the calm efficiency of someone who had been doing this for twenty years and was good at it. She looked at them with the brief assessing look of someone deciding how long they intended to stay and what they needed to get there.
"What are you drinking," she said. Not a question.
"Amaro," Jamie said. "Whatever's good."
The bartender looked at Nisha.
"Same," Nisha said. "Different one."
The bartender permitted herself a very small smile and turned to the back bar.
They found stools at the end of the counter, far enough from the nearest group to be their own territory. Nisha set her bag on the brass footrail and looked at the back wall, which was floor-to-ceiling bottles and a blackboard with three items on it, none of them spelled out fully.
"Good bar," she said.
"Good bar," Jamie agreed.
The amaro came. Nisha held hers up to the low light, the way you did with something unfamiliar, and thought about the evening with the specific quality of someone who had arrived somewhere unexpected and was still getting their bearings.
Three hours. She'd had dinner with this man for three hours and had not checked her phone once after she'd put it away, and had not noticed she wasn't checking it, and had not wanted the evening to end, which were three things that did not usually coexist for her on a first meeting with anyone.
She thought about calling it a coincidence and dismissed it. Coincidences didn't account for the way the conversation worked — the ease of it, the back-and-forth that didn't need to be managed. She was a person who usually had to manage conversations, or chose not to bother. With Jamie she'd just been in it.
"Okay," he said. "Your turn."
"My turn for what."
"We've been trading for three hours but I've been asking most of the questions. Your turn."
She looked at him. He was sitting sideways on the bar stool with the loose ease of someone comfortable in his body, his jacket over the stool back, his sleeves rolled up from something he'd done at the restaurant that she had specifically not registered at the time. He was, she thought, very good-looking in the unhurried way of people who hadn't made it their project.
"How long have you been in the games industry," she said.
"Since I was sixteen and convinced my parents that game design camp was an educational investment." He picked up his glass. "Properly? UBC, then studio work, then Bright Fault at twenty-four. So — five years?"
"Bright Fault Games. Why that name?"
Something moved in his expression — not self-consciousness, exactly. The expression of someone who had been asked this before and still found the real answer slightly vulnerable to give. "It's a geology term," he said. "A fault line where the break isn't clean. The pressure builds for a long time before anything moves, and when it does, the surface looks different than it did. It looked like the thing I was trying to make games about."
"The pressure before things break."
"The thing that happens after. The new landscape." He turned his glass in his fingers. "It's also partly a pun about game mechanics — a fault in a game is a glitch, an error in the code. Bright fault, like — there's something worth finding in the malfunction. That's a conversation for someone more patient than Connor."
Nisha looked at him. "That's a good name," she said, and meant it.
"What about Still Water?"
"Still water runs deep," she said. "And — the game I was going to make was about stillness. About all the things that don't move but change anyway. The name came first, actually. The game grew toward it."
"That's backwards from how most people do it."
"I do a lot of things backwards." She looked at the bar top. "I coded the ending of Watershed before I knew what the beginning was. I had the last image — the woman standing in the water at dawn, the town coming up through the surface — and I worked backward from there to find out how she got there."
"Does it show? In the game?"
"I've been asked that. I don't think so. But I'm not an objective reader of it."
"I haven't finished it," he said. "But from what I played — no. It doesn't show." He paused. "What I mean is, it feels inevitable. Like every piece had to be exactly where it is."
Nisha looked at her amaro. The thing about compliments from people who made the same thing as you were making was that they couldn't be managed with the usual deflections. He knew what it cost. He knew what inevitable meant as a structural achievement. Dismissing it would be the same as dismissing both of them.
"Thank you," she said.
"I mean it."
"I know you do." She looked up. "That's why I said thank you."
He was watching her with the expression he kept coming back to — the full-attention one, the one with something in it she was only now beginning to properly read. It wasn't the assessing look of someone deciding. It was the look of someone who had already decided and was paying attention to what came next.
She turned back to her glass.
They ordered a second round. The bar settled into its late-night rhythm around them — the Thursday crowd thinning slowly, the music dropping half a register, the bartender moving with the measured ease of someone pacing herself for last call.
At some point — Nisha couldn't have said exactly when — they stopped sitting with the careful distance of people at a bar and started sitting like people who had been talking for four hours and had run out of the space that was supposed to mean something. His elbow was on the bar, closer than it had been. She had turned on her stool to face him more directly, which she hadn't decided to do.
"Can I ask you something," he said.
"You've asked me things all evening."
"This one is different." He paused, in the way that meant he was going to say it anyway. "Why did you say yes? The blind date. You said it to someone who'd already made his decision, but you seem like a person who — who chose to be here tonight in a particular way. Not just here at the bar. The date."
Nisha thought about this. She thought about Priya at her door with wine and the specific authority of someone who had already decided, and about the three days she'd spent not-dreading it.
"My best friend thinks I've been lonely without knowing it," she said. "She's usually right about things." She turned her glass once, slowly. "I said yes because it felt easier than having the argument about why I was saying no. And then I showed up, and Arjun was very late, and you sat down at my table."
"And?"
"And nothing. The evening happened."
"You say the evening happened like it was weather," he said. Not accusatory. Observational.
"I'm a very practical person."
"I've noticed." He looked at her. "Is that a defence?"
Nisha considered this with the seriousness it probably deserved. Jamie waited — the patient kind, the kind that wasn't performing waiting, that was just actually okay with the silence.
"Maybe," she said.
"For the record," he said, "I've been having the best evening I've had in — it's been a while. Since I can remember clearly." He said it straightforwardly, without the performance of vulnerability that would have made it easier to dismiss. "I wanted to say that."
Nisha looked at him. She could feel the particular stillness of a moment before something, and she was aware of it with the specific awareness of someone who recognised the shape of a decision.
"I've been having a good evening too," she said. It sounded, even to her, like more than its surface meaning.
His hand was on the bar between them. Not reaching. Just — present, close, in the way that things were present when both people were aware of them.
"I'm flying back to Vancouver tomorrow morning," he said. "Six forty-five. Which is — in approximately eight hours." He paused. "I'm telling you that. Not as a caveat. Just as a fact."
"I know," she said. "You mentioned the conference."
"Right." He was quiet for a moment. "I don't know what you want from this. I'm not assuming."
"I know you're not." She did know. That was the specific thing about him — the not-assuming. The asking. The straightforward quality of a man who said what he meant and waited to hear what she meant back.
She looked at the bar top. She thought about the empty apartment, and the build, and Priya who was probably still waiting for a text, and the specific mathematics of an evening that had started as someone else's dinner and had become something she hadn't expected to want.
She thought about Jamie across a restaurant table saying the looking, and the way he'd listened when she told him about her mother, and the fact that she'd said I will and meant it.
She turned to look at him. He was watching her without pressure, with the same full attention he'd been paying all evening, and she thought: this is a person who shows up. You can tell.
"Last call's in twenty minutes," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"And you're staying somewhere nearby."
"Two blocks. The Broadview. I was there for the conference."
Nisha picked up her glass, drank the last of it, and set it down on the bar with the clean sound of a decision made.
"Then we should probably not waste the twenty minutes," she said.
Something shifted in his expression — the warmth already there deepening into something more specific, more intent, though still with the same steadiness underneath it, the same quality of a person who didn't rush toward things he wasn't sure of.
"Nisha," he said.
"Yes," she said. "That's what I'm saying."
He smiled then, full and clear, the kind that changed the whole register of his face, and she thought — for the second time that evening, as she had the first time, looking at her water glass — that she was in some trouble here. The comfortable kind. The kind that was only trouble because she hadn't been expecting it.
She picked up her jacket.
"Come on," she said. "You're buying the Ubers."
"Done," he said, standing, reaching for his jacket, and he was already laughing — that ease again, that genuine warmth — and she found, to her own mild exasperation, that she was too.