Chapter 3

Six o’clock crept in like it always did. Brandon’s eyes were fixed on the clock as it clicked over and began its awful chirping. His stomach turned as had become a morning tradition: the aching of old organs trying to keep up with new poisons. He rolled onto his back and let the alarm ring. It wasn’t the alarm, or even the hangover that had his attention. It was her. Brandon didn’t look at eyes. It wasn’t that he didn’t care or didn’t see an appeal, it was just natural to him to look at faces as a whole. He knew his ex-wife’s eyes were brown, but only because he could recall thinking to himself, her eyes are brown when they had first started dating. It seemed important that he take note, in case it ever came up in conversation or he wanted to describe her to someone. Why then, if recalling the woman he married’s eyes had been a chore, could he distinctly recall that the girl across the bar from him last night had blue eyes? Why could he remember that she was wearing a scarf, not a thick one to keep warm, but a thin, silk fashionable piece? He wasn’t even sure he could remember what he had been wearing. Somehow, in the short time he spent looking over his computer screen at what could easily have just been another pretty girl, she’d made an impression. She got inside his head and Brandon didn’t know what to do with something like that. It had been a long time since anyone had been inside his head. Pushups, kettle bells, and a bit of vomit saw him dressed and ready for his walk to Ramon’s. The hangover was present, as it usually was in the morning, but was well within manageable parameters. Today was promising to be a day just like all the others, with one glaring exception: Brandon wasn’t himself… or more precisely, he was exactly himself for the first time in longer than he could recall. Somewhere, deep within the portions of the brain reserved for wishful thinking and flights of fancy, Brandon knew she could still be on the island somewhere. Sure, the man she was with said he had a flight to catch, but he’d said exactly that… he had a flight to catch. That meant she most likely didn’t. Of course, it was all theoretical. Brandon had never had trouble talking to girls particularly, and in a different world complete with a different life, he might have approached her if he saw her again; but this wasn’t a different world and he was still Brandon Webb, freelance cruise line liaison, covert operative, social hermit. He shuddered away the painful realism as he approached the open door of the coffee shop. It was time to get to work. Brandon took up residence in his usual spot. It would be a few weeks before he’d come across another book he wanted to read or maybe just began rereading Casino Royale again, which left him a good amount of time after completing his daily newspaper readings. Time alone in his head was never something Brandon savored. He opted to forgo friendly conversation and slink back into his apartment to get to work on this week’s report. He had to do it sometime and before noon was probably the only way he’d get to it sober. He thanked Ramon, left a few bills on the table for a tip, and walked back to his apartment slowly, still hoping he might catch a glimpse of his new found infatuation. He didn’t. Once inside, he set the computer down on the counter that was arguably a part of his kitchen or bedroom and pulled up a chair. He used to write these reports from bed, but somehow sitting upright as he wrote helped him concentrate, and more importantly, made it easier to drink. A bottle of fifteen year old scotch sat just within reach as he waited for the covert operating system on his laptop to boot up and connect. He eyed his watch, nine-thirty, it seemed too early for a drink. Hemingway would do it. He justified as he reached for the bottle. There was very little creativity to his reports, in fact it resembled a technical manual more than anything Hemingway would have written, but Brandon had always found it easier to get started with a drink in his hand. The computer dinged its readiness as he poured two fingers of eighty proof muse into his glass. Ice would have made it smoother, but he didn’t have a freezer and he didn’t care much anyway. Twenty minutes and another glass in, he had made no progress. The screen lit up the small room with naked urgency but every time Brandon began to type his mind wandered elsewhere. Blue eyes. He realized his mind was wandering again and chastised himself, though somewhere within him, he was a little pleased. Feeling this way was so human of him, it was refreshing. He’d grown so accustomed to loneliness, to determination, to attention to detail, to the job that feelings like these had all been forgotten. The more you make yourself one thing, the less you can still be another, he thought… but he was wrong. He wasn’t even sure if he’d seen her smile last night, but somehow he could picture it. He may have made himself one thing, but he was still undeniably another. He closed the laptop and disconnected the Ethernet cable. He had three days before he had to submit his report and a week before he’d need to do his off season rounds again at the local bars and clubs. Time was a luxury Brandon had, he considered, so why waste it in here? Backpack repacked, Brandon was back on the street in minutes. His stomach murmured its discontent, not entirely due to hunger, but mostly due to the mix of bad coffee and good scotch. Hungry or not, food was still the solution, and Brandon knew just where he’d get it. Jose McIntires was open and although the chances of his brunette mystery woman being there again were slim, they were a hell of a lot higher than finding her in his dingy apartment. He still knew he wouldn’t approach her, even if he ran into her at the door, but just to see her again seemed a worthy use of his time. And then there she was. Brandon was still a half mile from Jose’s, walking along one of the three roads that made up as much of a downtown as you could attribute to Roatan. Along both sides of the street were small shops selling knock off Mayan artifacts or overpriced bottles of water. There she was, perusing a collection of Mayan calendars that were painstakingly made to look as though they had come directly from one of the pyramids, but that Brandon knew were made in a local factory (or, in some cases, China). He stopped, startled in a way to find that she was a real person. Worse, she noticed him too. Brandon found himself caught for the second time by the same woman, gawking from afar. He looked away quickly, pretending to find something of interest in the shop to his right. It wasn’t until he was invested in looking that he came to realize that he was nervously eyeballing a sizable collection of hair extensions. It was too late to back out now; he’d have to wait until she was gone to sneak out and go about his day. He waited for a few more moments, looked at the various lengths and colors of hair, smiled and nodded at the confused young woman behind the counter, and stepped out cautiously, looking to his left and right as though there were some kind of monster waiting for him around the corner. All clear to the left, good to the right, time to move, time to get back to Ramon’s to have a cup of coffee and forget about the stupid girl that had distracted him from his work. It had been foolish to go looking for her, what had he been thinking? He wouldn’t make that mistake again. He’d get back on track. He was standing face to face with her. “There you are!” She said with a smile as though she knew him. “Um… I’m sorry?” Brandon stammered, what kind of secret agent stammers? “Listen, I saw you at the bar last night and then I saw you looking at me on the street… here’s the thing, that means you either want to talk to me or are a total creep and since you and I may be the only two people on the island that speak English as a first language, I figured I’d skip finding out the hard way and just ask you. So which is it?” Her eyes were blue… and her smile was exactly as he’d remembered... or maybe imagined it. “So I either want to talk to you... or I’m a creep?” He countered. “You made that decision with your eyeballs, not me mister.” She played with a long black weave hanging from a display as she spoke. “Well, then I guess I want to talk to you. I’m Brandon.” He put his hand out to shake hers with the practiced demeanor of a cruise ship liaison, though he felt it may have been too formal a gesture. She looked at his hand, then his eyes, God, those eyes, and returned the shake. “I’m Eve. Nice to meet you Brandon,” she spoke politely, as though mocking his gesture, and then returned her hands to the bits of hair hanging all around them, “so do you take all the girls out for hair extensions on the first date?” “I… uh… first what?” Stammering again. She laughed, clearly pleased that she could make him stumble over his words. “Relax Brandon, this is new for me too. I don’t usually approach strangers to see if they’re out to get me. We’re both treading in unfamiliar waters.” “Well, why not let me buy you a cup of coffee then. Make things a bit more casual and a bit less… hairy.” Why was he asking her out? He had no idea, his brain was moving too fast to keep up. Hair extension jokes? Jesus. “Hmm, make it a beer and you have yourself a deal.” Never had he been so disarmed so quickly. Brandon had once been a sergeant of Marines, he’d fought in cages, jumped out of airplanes and started a new life in a third world country… but a hundred pounds of brown hair, soft skin and loose fitting denim had him reeling. He’d hoped to take her to Ramon’s but any bar would do, he knew them all and what he needed more than anything right now was familiar territory. “Deal. How’s Jose’s sound?” “Perfect.” She smiled again. “Then Jose’s it is.” He presented his bent arm for her to take, hoping it would seem sophisticated instead of corny. “Good, because I am dying for a burger,” she replied as he slid her arm into his. Her bare forearm pressed into his and for a split second, Brandon was once more taken aback. Feeling another person’s skin was so unfamiliar to him. It had been a long time. “Thank God, I’m starving.” He lied. Secret agents always lie to girls. As they walked toward the bar, making the kind of light chit chat two people make when they’ve only just met, Brandon began to feel at ease. Conversation was flowing freely, not awkward or forced, and there was a sense of excitement in the air. More than simply listening and responding, she seemed like she genuinely appreciated the conversation. Seemed, of course, didn’t really mean a thing and somewhere in the back of Brandon’s mind he assumed he was wrong. More so, he still hadn’t come to terms with exactly what it was that he was doing talking to this girl – what was his intent? There were no established rules against sleeping with anyone, but there were stern regulations about relationships. If he had just wanted to get laid, he could have done so without all of this unnecessary pining. “So you’re not one of those guys that insists on paying for a girl’s meal, are you?” She slid her hand away to gesture with it. Brandon’s heart ached a bit at the loss. “I guess I never really thought about it. It’s been a while since I shared a lunch. I take it you’d prefer I wasn’t?” “God no, the only thing better than a burger is a free one,” she giggled and bounded the last few steps to the bar’s entrance, “I get the door, you get the tab?” “An interesting proposition… but what if you don’t have anything good to talk about, or worse, you talk with your mouth full?” Brandon stopped a few paces from the still closed door. “I always have something to talk about and when I talk with my mouth full, it’s adorable.” She crossed her arms to demonstrate her willingness to play hardball. “And what if I talk with my mouth full?” “Well then at least I got a free burger out of it,” her smile returned. She opened the door and gestured grandly with her free hand to let him know he should enter first. “Then I guess we have a deal.” He bowed in response to her gesture and stepped through the door into the dimly lit bar. It was about as empty as last night, only a handful of patrons picking at nachos or sipping beers and watching the basketball game on TV. Out of habit, Brandon counted them, checked the exits and chose which of the portly locals seemed like he could be the most trouble if any were to arise. A middle aged man at the bar, pants caked in dust and gruff voice barely audible over the ambient noise, was his winner. Brandon didn’t look for trouble, of course, but he had been trained to plan for it. “How about a seat by the window?” She asked rhetorically as she floated toward a table with a view of the street they came from. Floated was really the only word one could use to describe the way she moved; graceful but with a childlike glee: not as a result of something making her happy, but happy in general. She contrasted how Brandon felt so perfectly, old and life-worn versus young and eager. He wondered if he’d ever felt like she did. “Well, we’d hate to miss the view,” Brandon replied with a hint of sarcasm. From their vantage point they could see the rundown building across the street and a few hundred yards of dirt road in each direction. There were a number of locals wandering around, making their way from home to work or vice versa. It looked more like a shot from an alien planet in Star Wars than an island Paradise. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” She spoke of the view but made eye contact with Brandon on the delivery. Unlike before, this time he looked back, straight at her. It lasted only a split second, but it was like electricity coursing through him. “You’re um, right.” He struggled to get out as her gaze once again settled on the street outside. “So what do you do, Brandon Webb? Why are you here on this island?” Although he’d given her his name outside, it still felt strange to hear her say it out loud. “I work for the cruise companies, testing water, checking out restaurants and the like. What brings you here?” “School. Well, grad school. I’m here conducting interviews with the local population about the influence American businesses have on their lives. Trying to put a quantitative measurement to the shift in how these people feel since tourism became the basis of their economy.” “Sounds like quite the thesis paper. No one has mentioned the white devil living in their midst yet?” Brandon suddenly worried that he was on the wrong end of the fight she may want to pick with the world. “No mentions of any white devils, no, but I did hear about a gringo that could drink a bottle of Jack Daniels in one sitting without breaking a sweat. If that’s you, we may need to compare notes.” She smiled at him again, seemingly unconcerned with his role in the commercialization of Honduras. “It could be me, but a guy’s gotta keep some mystery about him,” he responded and was immediately pleased with how suave he felt he sounded. “Something tells me there are a couple mysteries about you,” she answered quickly. Brandon panicked. What did that mean? What does she know? Does she know anything? “I don’t think there’s such a thing as a short story that leads a guy to living in a place like this with a job like that. They probably don’t pay you a fortune to be here, so that’s not it… must have been a girl,” she was speaking as much to herself as to him now. Brandon laughed, “you clearly haven’t heard much about me then,” his relief was thorough. “So it was a girl! Fell in love with a Honduran woman, followed her to the ends of the earth only to end up here alone buying a stranger lunch,” she postulated like she was scripting a movie. “What makes you so sure I followed a girl here?” “Latin chicks have great butts.” She shrugged as the waitress approached. “Senior Webb and a lady! I was beginning to think you didn’t have any friends,” she announced as she reached the table. “He doesn’t? That’s a check in the creep column.” Eve spoke first to the waitress and then to Brandon. “Oh no, Senior Webb is no creep, he’s the most eligible bachelor on the island!” She exclaimed and put a hand on Brandon’s shoulder, “one day he’s going to marry me and take me away from here!” The three of them chuckled, two of them glanced at one another awkwardly. “Well, in the mean time I’d like a burger and a Bud light, how about you?” Eve asked him. “The same. And see if you can rustle up anybody to pretend to be my friend to ease the lady’s mind, will ya?” Brandon closed his menu and slid it back into the placeholder next to the napkins. “Resorting to trickery already, Senior Webb?” Eve tried to replicate the waitress’s accent, a bold move, he thought, seeing as she was still possibly within earshot. “Just don’t want to scare you off before I can pay for your lunch. So why Roatan Island? There’s got to be a hundred places you could do your research.” “There are. This place was the perfect combination of cheap housing, cheap airfare, and cheap interviews.” She answered. “And thus we come to why I’m paying for lunch…” Brandon leaned back in his chair contented to have discovered the secret of her motivations. “I did say I was a student, didn’t I? Besides, from the sound of things you could use a few friends.” She looked toward the bar, hoping the beers would be en route. “Maybe I could.” Brandon spoke sincerely, but without a hint of sadness. The sadness was only there in spirit. “Well you’re in luck, because I think I like you, Brandon. Maybe I’m in luck too, because chances had seemed pretty high that you were a creep.”