There was a time when I would have done that naked, it being just us girls, but I put on my robe, not wanting to even be near any windows unless I was covered. Popping the bottle of Australian Merlot from the door of the fancy chrome fridge, I poured out an amount Meegan would never miss. I was careful to replace the bottle just so.
In the privacy of my room, I opened the robe, loving the feeling of the air against my skin. Getting sufficiently calm with the help of the wine, I logged onto my laptop to do some background research.
I only had his first name, but how many Leifs could there possibly be in Brooklyn?
Fifteen. There were fifteen Leifs in Brooklyn, not all of whom had pictures I could find. All the ones that I did fine were not the one I was looking for. Unless he looked very different indeed when he was clean-shaven.
I let out a sigh, both of disappointment and curiosity. I was really intrigued now, and also kind of liked the mystery.
I couldn’t imagine that there would be anything bad in his past. Like he was a murderer on the run or something like that. Surely, I would have sensed it. I had more than enough experience with bad guys to know the type when I saw it. Which only begged the question of who Leif would turn out to be. It was enough to drive me crazy.
Chapter Two - Leif
I had never believed in love at first sight. It was a nice idea in stories but completely unworkable in real life.
If the brain chemicals that caused the love reaction are so quickly or easily employed, what is there to stop someone from falling madly in love with a different person every other day?
At least, that was what I used to think, anyway. How radically things can change within an instant.
The bike certainly got some odd looks. Not as many as it would have in Los Angeles or another car-based city, but enough to make it uncomfortable.
Most of the car-less within the Five Boroughs, of whom there were many, preferred the city’s famous public transit system. But that system was something less of an option now that everyone had to stay at least six feet apart by government mandate.
There was also the environment to consider. While a modernist in many ways, there were still some areas in which I could be considered a traditionalist. To the point of naked anachronism, even. Fact was, I was descended, however distantly as it might have been, from a people who lived not so much off the land as with it, building shelters literally out of stones and earth. I had a vested interest in, and familial duty of, keeping things ecological.
The range was one of only a few of my regular haunts still open during the crisis, and that not without serious alterations to the business plan. Only one shooter was allowed at a time, and you had to book well in advance to make sure there were no unfortunate overlaps.
I hadn't spent long with Brigid and Polly, but it was enough that I nearly missed my start time. Not that it wouldn’t have been well worth it. It had been a long time since I had encountered a woman who had intrigued me as much as Brigid had.
Even our names were of a similar wild flavor. I had also meant most of what I had said about Polly, although the zoo-keeper line was very much a joke.
Most shooters at the range went for carbon compound bows. Huge, unwieldy things with more protrusions than a musket. One of the major areas in which I was a traditionalist was archery. Wood, leather, and string for me; and I damn well loaded from a back quiver. As Tolkien intended.
Hand-carved stone heads pounded straight and true into the targets with resounding punctuation. I was nearly at the farthest distance. My ultimate goal was to be able to split an apple in the tree that marked the end of the range with a no-look shot. The slices still weren’t quite even.
I possessed thirty arrows in all. All hand-crafted with the best materials I could find. It had taken weeks to fashion them all, and weeks longer to finally finish the bow to my liking.
I had seen a video, online ironically, demonstrating in great detail how to craft a Norse bow from scratch, starting with little more than a thick stick. That gathering run was a fun ride back from upstate.
The target looked like a porcupine. The arrows on the fringes had been intended to gauge the new distance or were the result of misguided, but fun, triple loads, which tended to go all over the place. Down to my last shot, I decided to have a bit of fun and split the previous bullseye Robin Hood-style.
I could always mend the shaft later, since a split going clean up the grain would leave the head, which was the real bugger to make, wholly intact. Then came the really fun part: pulling them all out and getting them back into the quiver. At least I was able to go right up to the target for this part, as being alone on the range meant the risk of getting shot in the back by another archer was reduced to nil.
“All done?” Lucy, the owner of the place, asked, her voice muffled slightly by the mask.
“Indeed, I am, Lucy,” I said, sliding the tag through the little slot in the protective window.
Both these precautions were in place even before the outbreak. Just in case someone snapped and decided to go all Hunger Games in the range.
“Any big plans coming up?” she inquired.
“Not tonight but soon; very, very soon.”
“What’s her name?”
“Brigid.”
“Bridget?”
“No, Brigid, with a ‘d’.”
“Oh, like the Irish goddess of fire.”
“Among other things.”
“Cool.”
“No argument here,” I said with a playful wink.
I’d known Lucy since we were kids. We had bonded over archery at camp one year and had kept in touch ever since. It was odd not to be able to see her smile due to the mask she was wearing, but it was just the way things had to be.
I got my ID back, turning in my bow and quiver in return. Even a place as open to quirkiness as the city of New York had some qualms with open-carry bowmen. Particularly with one as skilled as I was and after 9/11.
It is a little-known fact, at least among people who see archery as kind of a joke compared to firearms, if not to the cops, that a bolt fired straight and true from a longbow can punch straight through plate armor. Something that many a soldier found out the hard way on battlefields of the past.
Next on the agenda, written out plain and neat in the pre-yellowed pages of my trusty notebook, was a visit to the Crow’s Nest. Somewhat ironically named, the store was at the bottom of a nearly vertical set of fairly rickety stairs, several feet below street level.
Part of the reason it wasn’t shut during the lockdown was how few people actually knew it was there. Still, the owner, Ola Hallegrim, a recent émigré from Norway, wasn’t anyone’s fool, and had positioned boxes of masks and gloves on a table next to the door. God help the smartass who tried to enter the premises, more than big enough to keep six feet apart, without these protections.
“God dag, soster.”
“Od du, bror,” Ola replied, the two of us tapping elbows in lieu of our usual complex handshake.
Her Norwegian was a lot more native than mine, which really only stood to reason, though I did my best to help her feel comfortable.
I drifted through the rows of vinyls. Ola had hired a craftsman upstate to build her record racks from solid aged ash wood. The Crow’s Nest had the best selection of Black Metal in the tri-state area, much of it imported directly from Europe.