Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales by Diane Duane Read Free Book Online

graduated…and saw where the good jobs were, back then. Moved back here five years ago.” She shrugged. “What about you?”
    “It’s a long story,” he said.
    “Ten million of them in the Naked City, I hear,” Caroline said. She sighed, leaned back from the computer. “And I’m done with this one for today.”
    “I’ll see you later, then,” Matiyas said. And suddenly he was turning to go.
    There was something about the suddenness that surprised her. What surprised her even more was her voice saying, “Matiyas?”
    He paused, looked over his shoulder.
    “I didn’t mean you should sod off or anything!” Caroline said. “Gonna clock out in a few minutes, sure. But if you’re not busy, and you’re done for the day, some of us go out on Fridays about now: come on out with us! Mich, you sure you can’t wriggle free?”
    “Not a chance. Thanks, though…”
    “But there’s still Tessa and Tad—they’re always up for a drink on the way home. Come on out with us.”
    Matiyas looked surprised. “Uh,” he said. “Okay.”
    He wandered off across the wilderness of cubicles toward where his was. Caroline didn’t know him all that well: she didn’t normally visit the north-side people, the rollout crowd. Mostly she socialized with the other debuggers and the software implementation jockeys. But listen to me! We get as insular in here as we do in our neighborhoods. God forbid someone from the Upper East Side should shop west of Fifth Avenue: the heavens would fall if someone who lived in SoHo went north of Twelfth for their groceries! And obviously the world will end if a code wrangler has a beer with some rollout guy…
    But it didn’t quite wind up that way, for Tessa had gone home early, and when Caroline went looking for Tad, it turned out that Tad hadn’t come in today at all, but had called in sick. And there was Matiyas, standing there by the door to the elevator lobby with his coat over his arm, looking like someone who suspected he was about to be ditched after all.
    Oh, jeez, just look at the poor guy, Caroline thought, as she headed in that direction. One beer with him won’t hurt, no matter how much of a bore he turns out to be.
    “So where are we going exactly?” he said, as they went through the glass buzzer-door. He actually held it for her: old-fashioned manners, how nice…
    “There’s a place down at the corner of Central Park West,” she said. “Their happy hour just started, and the prices aren’t too bad…”
    “Sounds excellent,” Matiyas said.
    They made idle elevator chatter on the way down, headed across the sterile polished black stone downstairs lobby, and came out into the wet dullness of a Manhattan autumn afternoon. All the traffic in 65th Street was at a cacophonous standstill, stuck behind some huge delivery truck further up the way: the two of them dodged across the wet street between cars, heading up toward the corner of 65th and Central Park West. There yet another plan came undone as they discovered that the front and sides of the bar were covered with scaffolding, and the windows boarded over with CLOSED FOR RENOVATION signs.
    “Well, that is annoying,” Matiyas said. Briefly, that accent Caroline couldn’t quite pin down came out fairly strongly. European, yeah, but not German or anything like that… She was tempted to ask about it, but decided to let it be: she’d had more than enough of that kind of thing from various of her co-workers when she first took this job. And after they’d made up their minds that she wasn’t a terrorist or a bigot or someone who might go postal on them, it seemed like everybody wanted to know everything about her—which wasn’t something she was used to. So many people just don’t seem to have any sense of privacy any more. Just leave him his…
    “Yeah,” Caroline said, “it is.” She looked at the crammed blue and white M72 bus that was presently turning past them into CPW, its windows almost opaque with