Rosario Ortiz (reluciente) wrote in nevermore_logs, @ 2021-11-16 20:12:00 |
|
|||
Not so long ago, it had been Rosario giving Archer the run-around. He’d been relentless, in his unshakeably, infuriatingly cheerful way. He never pushed, exactly, not even when she toed the line of straight-up rudeness. An uncharitable I’ll see if I can pencil you in would earn her a Great! Looking forward to it, Rosario Lucía!, as enthusiastic as if she’d already agreed to it. She’d blown him off twice in one week with what felt to her like real weak excuses and he hadn’t even been annoyed. He’d even texted her the day after she’d begged off to ‘take Abuela to a doctor’s appointment’, just to make sure her grandmother was okay, and the most annoying thing was, she couldn’t even tell if it was sarcasm. So no, he didn’t push or demand or bully. What he did, which managed to be even more maddening, was steer her back round to it, again and a-goddamn-gain, so smoothly she didn’t even realise he was doing it till she’d been talked right up to the edge of it, leaving her with no reasonable way of backing down. She’d find some (usually less organic than she imagined in her head) segue to start prodding Archer on his family and he’d answer with an obliging smile – usually exasperating half-answers and dodges, but Rosario’d had so little to work with so far that even half-answers felt like she was making headway, so invariably she’d wind up pushing him harder, too much to pass off as a casual interest. And that was when he’d fix her with an intrigued smile and remark that this article she was writing must be really comprehensive and, hey, why don’t they set up a time for a real interview so they can get into it properly? They could catch up about the lab he missed at the same time. Perfect, right? The interview had been all Archer’s idea to begin with. He was the one who kept bringing it up, not Rosario. He’d been driving her crazy over it. Now she actually wanted to talk to him, and all of a sudden it was Archer blowing her off with the weak excuses. Taking his girlfriend’s brother to music lessons? Bullshit he was, he was screwing with her! It was all the more aggravating because while Rosario was struggling to pin down her probably-bio-dad for more than a minute, Lyra was swapping emails with hers every other day. It’d taken a while to find a time when all three of them could meet up, too, but while Archer was making smarmy-ass comments about how he guessed they should’ve done this earlier, ha ha, Saint Patrick was sending Lyra photos and answering her questions and dropping quick messages just to make sure she was still feeling okay about meeting and was there anything he could do in the meantime? There was no possible way that Archer could be a saint, Rosario had decided. She’d crossed all of those possibilities firmly off her list of candidates a week ago… which had only left twenty or so to research furiously while she’d been waiting with rising impatience for Archer to stop screwing around. Her new binder was already fatter than the first one. Finally, two weeks after she’d messaged him – two weeks after her entire understanding of the world had been nuked as completely as the Chicxulub impactor had nuked the dinosaurs – Archer had found some time for his daughter (ugh) on his unaccountably busy schedule. He’d picked the time and left the place in her hands, and she’d gone for a Cuban place a few blocks from the university, grudgingly deciding that the benefit of familiar ground (and a proper, strong cafecito) outweighed the irritation she was courting by clueing Archer in to one of her regular study haunts. (Artemisa Bakery was the name of the place, christened for the city the husband-and-wife owners had emigrated from many years before. The irony, and the omen, were entirely lost on Rosario.) She wasn’t even surprised when she arrived, five minutes early, to find Archer already there waiting for her at one of the tables. She huffed a breath through her nose and strode past him to place her order at the counter before retracing her steps and dropping into the seat opposite. She wasn’t going to flinch. Not this time. All those other times, he’d snuck up or her, caught her off her game. Or she’d been forced to improvise, and improvising was so very not Rosario’s thing. Today, she’d come prepared. She knew what he was. She had some idea about the who. And she had a list. Rosario pulled her notebook from her bag and slapped it down decisively on the table, folding her hands on top of it. “So.” |