From the story, Chloe
As in:
Jared had quartz-blue eyes and sandy hair that long days of summer sunshine had bleached toward blonde.
When Chloe asked for a beer he smiled wider and batted his eyebrows with delight, before disappearing back into the kitchen.
Upon his return he held a bottle in each hand.
“We’ve got Fat Tire Amber and Black Butte Porter,” he announced.
“Give me the one with the bicycle on it,” she replied.
“Deal,” he said, and within the minute he returned with two frosted steins, golden red with beer.
“What is this?” she asked. “Octoberfest?”
“Naturally,” he replied. “Cheers.”
More so than the beer, the juxtaposition of her own emotions sent her mind reeling a bit. One minute she had been hoarding the serenity of a sanguine loneliness, preparing her mind for a landing in the afterlife. And a minute later she was involuntarily experiencing a very mortal and sexual response to this beautiful young man.
“God, this is like tug of war,” she said to herself.
“What?” Jared asked.
“Never mind,” she replied with a smile, before taking another sip of beer.
She didn’t quite know what to say next. Here she was in the midst of a charming and pleasant encounter with a man, and already her mind was turning to the reasons he shouldn’t be so happy with the world she was leaving to him and her niece.
Maybe Jared didn’t know what she had learned, in her years as an editor, about the inexorable decline of the economy, the end of oil and plentiful food, of global climate change, of anti-biotic resistant super-bugs, of epidemics of ignorance.
Didn’t Jared get that memo? If he had, he didn’t seem sufficiently discouraged.
“So,” Jared said, “Abbey tells me if I’m ever going to be a successful writer I’m going to need an editor like you.”
This landed in such a way with Chloe that she couldn’t immediately decide whether to spurn him for his hubris, or thank him for the compliment.
She exhaled, thought about it for a long moment, then fashioned and delivered a brief reply.
“You could do worse.”
