(~(~)~)
Toby is fairly certain that, when he sat down, he ordered bourbon. But now he’s got this drink facing him, this drink that is decidedly un-bourbon, and looks, frankly, un-potable. He likes this word, potable, and would like it even more after several bourbons. If he could get some bourbon.
“Miss? Excuse me, miss?” He flags down the waitress and holds his drink up to her. “I ordered bourbon, and this is – I couldn’t say what this is, but it is not bourbon.”
“Love for Toby,” says a voice behind the waitress. “I cancelled your bourbon.”
Pretending he doesn’t hear the voice, Toby continues holding his drink up. “I, ah, I don’t know what this is, but it needs not to be here anymore.”
“What, my drink’s not good enough for you?” Bruno slides into the seat across from him and smiles. The glass in his hand, Toby notes, looks like it contains vodka. Or gin. Or something that someone might actually drink. “I try to bring you a little love, and you throw it back in my face.”
“You’re really the last person I’d, ah, be wanting any amount of love from.” Toby brings his arm down and looks into his glass. “But I think that throwing this drink into your face is, yes, a much better option for it than actually, you know, putting it into my body.”
“You wouldn’t throw it in my face,” Bruno counters. “You’d have to look at me to do that.”
When Toby looks around, the waitress has gone. “What the hell is it?”
“It is an ounce and a half light rum, half an ounce of brandy, half an ounce of cherry brandy, and a teaspoon of lime juice.” Bruno has his legs crossed and looks more than normally smug.
Toby thunks the glass onto the table and pushes it away so hard it almost lands in Bruno’s lap. “And you expected me to drink it?”
Bruno shrugs. “It has your name in it, Toby. How can you not be excited by that?”
“Very easily.” He narrows his eyes. “But you didn’t order it for me to drink it. I see now that you ordered it as part of some – some ploy to make me hate you even more than I already do.”
“You don’t hate me, Toby.” Bruno picks up the glass, sniffs it, blanches, puts it back down.
“I hate you, Bruno. Everybody hates you, and I saw no reason, in this instance, to be a loner.”
“’Everybody’ doesn’t hate me.” Bruno smirks. That is most decidedly a smirk. “In fact, I would go so far as to guess that nobody hates me.”
Toby rubs his hands together. “Sam hates you. I mean, I think he hates you a lot.”
“Sam,” says Bruno, very deliberately, “is sleeping with Ainsley Hayes.”
“How the hell did you know that?” Because this is indeed true, but it is in no way something Bruno should be knowing. Toby’s only known for a week himself, and it worries him, thinking about what else Bruno knows that he shouldn’t, what Bruno knows that Toby doesn’t.
He shakes his head. “Never mind how I know. What I’m saying here is, any man who will sleep with Ainsley Hayes is clearly a rotten evaluator of character and has no right to be passing judgment on me.”
“He’s not passing judgment on you. He just, he hates you, you know? In a very...nonjudgmental fashion.”
Bruno messes with his lapels for a second, and when he’s done they look exactly the same as when he started. “Sam thinks I’m stupid.” He’s trying too hard to convince himself that he isn’t even a little bit hurt by this.
“He thinks you’re...” For a second Toby searches for the delicate word. Then he remembers that he doesn’t care about Bruno’s feelings. “Amoral. Unscrupulous.”
But Bruno’s shaking his head again, and his drink is almost empty, and his eyes are looking a little dangerous. “For fuck’s sake, Toby, this is Washington D.C., not ‘Captain fucking Kangaroo.’ Everyone who’s getting anywhere is amoral and unscrupulous. Maybe I’m just not subtle enough about it for Sam’s tastes. I could never win an election while hiding a—“
“You’re a good campaigner,” Toby interrupts, harshly, because what’s Bruno going to say that they haven’t heard a million times before? “But you’re fuck for a human being.” Toby dips his index finger in his drink and holds it in front of his face, enthralled by the way a single golden drop of it, dangling from his fingertip and gleaming in the bar’s dim light, still looks like he’d do better to clean his drain with it than drink it. “It’s almost a shame, you know. Because you’ve got, I imagine, other sides. The capacity, at least, to be...not a schmuck.”
Bruno leans forward, drums his fingers on the table. “I hate to spoil this yarn you’re spinning, but I don’t come in other colors.”
Toby flicks his finger, and the drop of alcohol splashes back down into the undrinkable sea. “I heard about the necklace.” Bruno looks blank, and Toby can’t decide if it’s an act. “For Margaret.”
“Mm.” Bruno nods, sips his drink. “In a rare moment of lucidity, I remembered her name, and thought I’d better have it put on something metal so she could wear it, like a nametag, and I wouldn’t have to exert any more energy trying to remember it all the time. Because she gets sort of pissy when you call her by the wrong name.”
One of Toby’s eyebrows goes up. “Most women do.”
“It was self-preservation.”
“People would like you a lot more if you didn’t spend so much time trying to convince them that you’re not human.” This is so familiar to Toby, and it shouldn’t be, because he’s never been this guy, the one who can sit with someone over drinks and be almost flirting.
Bruno’s laugh is low and not entirely unpleasant. Not as mean as it usually sounds. “Once again, Toby, people like me. You like me.”
This could go in any number of directions. Most of them are so entirely out of the question Toby feels like he should be lopping off whatever parts of his brain suggested them. “I think you’re an idiot.”
“I’m devilishly clever,” Bruno protests.
They met, many years ago, during Andi’s first bid for Congress. Bruno was working for the other guy. The other guy won. And Toby had been disappointed, of course, and he had felt bad for Andi, who had wanted it so badly. But back then he’d thought, “Bruno’s all right. Bruno’s not so bad a guy.” He couldn’t tell which one of them had changed so irreversibly since then.
Toby nods. “You know, I almost used to think that. Before. And then this time, I thought, ‘I don’t know how he does it, but there’s, a thing he does that can make people, make them vote for who he tells them to. So there’s got to be...something to him.’ But then you, I don’t know.”
“What?“
“There was that thing you did with Connie and Doug.”
Bruno’s forehead crinkles. It makes him look like a young Father Christmas. On a very bad day. “Which thing would that be?”
“Hiring them.”
“Doug and Connie are my people, Toby, as surely as Sam and Bonnie and Jasmine—“
“Ginger.”
“Yeah, her, too. You have your people; these are mine.”
“Too bad yours are—“
“I’ve heard more people talk more shit about Connie and Doug than I ever need to.” He puts both hands on the table, and it seems a little menacing, somehow. “You tell your people: they’ve got a problem with me, they come to me.”
Toby shrugs, because none of this has anything to do with either of their “people.” “I don’t have a problem with you.”
Like he’s in the slow-motion scene of some really bad teen movie, Bruno leans forward, picks up the Love for Toby, and sips it. Barely grimacing, he sets it back down and just...stares at Toby. “That is awful. I mean, it’s – I’m sorry. It’s like – it’s like something you’d give a kid with croup. A kid you don’t like.”
“Then why did you order it?”
Bruno leans back in his seat and readjusts his damned lapels again. “To piss you off.”
Once, once many decades ago when Toby was young – though Toby was never young, exactly – he dated a girl who was mad about amber. Bracelets, earrings, necklaces – there was never any hole Toby was in so deeply that he couldn’t get out of by buying her a piece of jewelry made of million-year-old petrified tree snot.
Her favorite piece was a pendant, an enormous tear-drop shaped affair nearly two inches long and an inch across, which Toby had not bought for her. Encased within it was a perfectly preserved mosquito. It fascinated Toby, and he would hold it for up to fifteen minutes at a time, staring at this poor bastard bug. It had been sitting on a tree, minding its mosquito business, doing its mosquito thing, and then this sap had rolled over it; trapped it; snuffed it out mid-drone. And now, after a million years of this indignity, it was a bauble around the neck of some acid-tripping flower child.
Toby thinks of this now. He thinks he’s trapped in some cosmic equivalent of amber, and a million years from now they’re going to find him like this, sitting here, gazing at Bruno Giannelli.
He couldn’t say what this is, but he needs not to be here anymore.
Toby pushes his glass across to Bruno’s side of the table and gets to his feet. Bruno half stands, like you do when a proper lady rises, and the glare Toby gives him would have anyone else jumping out the nearest window. Bruno just pauses, inclines his head in an almost-acknowledgement, almost-apology, and sits again. “I’ll be seeing you, Toby.”
“Not if I see you first – which will give me time to hide from you. Or dump your body in the Delaware.” He smiles to show that nothing has changed, that they can go back to being their normal type of enemies on Monday, and heads out of the bar.
On the way, he passes the waitress he terrorized earlier and puts a hand on her arm. “Excuse me. The gentleman over there? In the camel hair trench coat?” She gestures towards Bruno, and Toby gives her what he hopes is his non-menacing smile. “Yes, that’s the one.” He slips a small handful of bills into her palm. “He ordered a drink called a Love for Toby. He says it’s one of the best things he’s ever tried. Make sure he gets several more.”
A million years from now, they’re going to find Bruno Giannelli surrounded by half-empty glasses.
END