Chapter 7 Queer Sins
Chapter 7
Queer Sins
W e only waited a few minutes for a table at All Time, which felt like a miracle, even on a weeknight. Every even semidecent restaurant on the Eastside seemed an impossible mission without a reservation, but to me it was part of the fun. I loved snagging a table, I loved a shorter wait than usual, I loved choosing a restaurant just because we could get a table without waiting and discovering how delicious the food was. Sure, the group chat I’d been added to was perhaps a bit ridiculous in their attention to a brunch restaurant selection, but there was also a tiny voice whispering that these were my people.
All Time looked like a lot of other restaurants around here—a big, airy dining room and an outdoor patio, where Chloe and I were seated, packed with plant life and wooden tables and chairs, tucked away just enough it was easy to forget you were on a busy street in a busy neighborhood. I knew that people back home, my parents and brother included, hated the idea of the hustle and noise of LA proper. But once you lived here, you knew how to find patches of calm.
If this were a real date, it would be pretty perfect. As things stood, though, now that I had time to sit and the conversation had paused, I wondered again what exactly we were doing. Pet food in the car, a fairly romantic ambiance, and witnesses to our sham of a coupledom nowhere to be found.
“What are we doing?” I asked, right as Chloe said, “This feels like right after college.”
“What?” I asked her, and I realized I was relieved to have an excuse to not dive into whatever talk I was about to launch.
“You know, you and your roommates, running errands and getting food together after work,” she said, looking up from her menu. “Though back then it was more like a Big Gulp and a 7-Eleven hot dog. Before I blew half my weekly budget on drinks at the Good Luck Bar or wherever.”
“Oh, I miss that place,” I said. “I feel like being in your thirties is just this constant stream of RIPs to places you loved.”
“People you loved, too,” Chloe said, propping up her chin with her fist. “Wow, sorry, that was immediately darker than I meant to take us.”
“Accidentally dark also feels like just another side effect of being in your thirties,” I said, and Chloe laughed. The level at which I liked making Chloe laugh may have been far too high, but at least I was on to that fact. “I’m kind of jealous of that post-college experience. I moved back here with Will, so we were just …”
“Domesticating?”
“Yeah, something like that. Pretending to be upstanding grownups. Before we bought the condo just a few years ago, we loved going to open houses for expensive places we could never afford, just to see what they were like inside, acting like we belonged there with all the real grownups. I don’t know if I regret it, exactly—we had so much fun then, sometimes I think that was like the most in love we ever were.” It was actually something I realized as I said it, and it hit me like a rush of heartbreak and nostalgia, the way things were. “I went out with my friends, of course, happy hours were the biggest deal in the world to us back then. But errands and hot dogs and too much money spent on whatever I was drinking in my twenties—whiskey sours?—sounds really fun too.”
“Whiskey sours here too,” Chloe said, her grin stretching out even wider. If this were a real date, I was pretty sure I’d think it was going well. As things stood—actually, that reminded me. Even if I wasn’t sure I should tempt messing with the vibe right now.
“So—”
The waiter popped up to take our order, and I decided to ignore that it felt like the universe was telling me to let go of the question and the unsettled footing lurking beneath the entire evening.
“So,” I said again, after our order was in and yet before Chloe had a chance to say anything else distracting. “Can I ask what exactly we’re doing here?”
She shot me one of her ridiculously charming grins. “Having dinner, Clementine.”
“Don’t,” I said, though not smiling was truly impossible. “You know what I mean.”
Chloe shrugged. “I needed dog food. You needed cat food. And we both needed human food, as we’ve reviewed.”
“Well, sure, but—”
“Are you accusing me of something?” she asked.
“No,” I said quickly. “ No . But—”
Another server stopped by with my cocktail and Chloe’s mocktail, and I laughed and held up my glass so she’d clink it.
“I genuinely feel like the universe is like, please stop talking, Clementine, and yet I’m ignoring it.”
“I respect that,” Chloe said. “Shut up, universe. Clementine is speaking.”
“Anyway, yes, I am your fake date until the wedding is over and my parents’ fortieth has been celebrated,” I said. “But tonight?”
“I don’t think I’m guilty of any subterfuge,” Chloe said.
“No, but—actually, can I say something?”
She didn’t smile, but her dark eyes flashed with—well, with something . “Always.”
“So maybe this isn’t something I made explicitly clear, but my work/life boundaries are really important to me. Like I’m not friends with any of my coworkers on Instagram or whatever. And I get that you couldn’t have known all of that, but I really can’t believe you let me show up to brunch with my boss with no warning.” I took a deep breath, hoping my tone wasn’t harsh. I didn’t feel harsh, after all, just unmoored. “And like now. It feels like you have some whole plan you’re enacting, and I’m just at your mercy.
“And if this was just it, the brunch and it’s all over, the wedding this weekend, fine. But we’re in for more than two months of this, and I feel like—honestly, I don’t know what I feel like.” I didn’t want to say unmoored aloud; no one, even semi-normal, threw around unmoored . “We joked around about parameters, but maybe we need actual ones.”
“If you feel like there’s some big plan I’m enacting, I can promise you I am definitely not ,” she said, casual as always despite we were having a conversation in which I almost said unmoored in a shriekish tone. “I barely plan anything. Which, sure, is its own problem. But maybe not the one you think is happening. Clementine, I wish I was some grand mastermind.”
I laughed, and thanked a server as he dropped off the aforementioned salad for us to split.
“Also,” I continued, “you only mentioned that it was a wedding.”
Chloe shrugged. “What other information did you require?”
“No, seriously, come on,” I said. “It is a celebrity’s wedding. It involves my boss . And I have to assume, mastermind or no, you knew that if I knew all of this going in, I would never have agreed to do it in the first place—don’t shrug casually again.”
“Clementine,” she said, leaning in to dish the salad onto our small plates. “I don’t know how else to shrug.”
“Seriously, though.”
“I am serious!” She laughed, though, which hurt her case. “Come on. I need a date. You need someone to refer to as your ex-girlfriend so you don’t scare all your prospects off with your baby-gay status. This is a win-win.”
I decided to focus on eating instead of weighing whether or not this situation was actually win-win. Or my apparently terrifying baby-gay status.
“And tonight was really as simple as errands and food,” Chloe continued. “I don’t really miss my twenties, but I do miss that. Now everyone’s basically married with kids or pets and it’s harder to grab someone for a couple hours to do anything. Not that my friends aren’t all incredible people, but I guess sometimes I miss when they weren’t also so mature .”
“I know you probably think I’m full of shit, but I do know what you mean,” I said. “I know I was with Will for, like, my entire youth, but, yeah. When my best friends got married and one had a kid, it felt different. Not that I don’t want people to prioritize their partners and children, but … I don’t know. Even when things were great with Will, I could feel how my friends seemed to be getting less willing to put aside other things to meet up or whatever. Sometimes I worry I just refuse to grow up.”
“You’re very adult!” Chloe said. “You have a job I don’t even understand, you own a condo, you have a car from this century, you provide for Small Jesse Pinkman.”
“Oh, right, that adult checklist I forgot about, nailed it.” I ate a few bites of salad. “I do like that you and your friends seem to prioritize each other so much. Weekly brunches. An exhaustingly active group chat.”
“No, they’re good. There’s my disclaimer about my friends. They are wonderful people and I should probably feel worse about lying to them than I do.”
A server dropped off our strip steak and sauteed greens we’d decided to split, and Chloe got to work right away dividing everything.
“So I really understand why you don’t want to do the whole friends’ wedding thing dateless,” I said, and speared a piece of steak with my fork. “Oh my god, this is so good.”
“ So good ,” Chloe said, closing her eyes. “I know it’s practically a queer LA sin not to be a vegetarian, but, fuck , I love red meat.”
“Where are you from?” I asked, thinking about all the time we were about to spend together and the fact that I barely knew her at all. “Sorry, not in a racist way. Just, where did you grow up? Sorry, is that worse?”
Chloe laughed so hard she choked on her mocktail. “I’m from the Bay Area. And it didn’t sound racist until you started piling on all those disclaimers. My family is from Korea, by the way.”
“Not that I asked!”
She was still laughing. “Not that you asked. What about you?”
“The suburbs here. Valencia is what I tell people, since it sounds better than Saugus. My parents are still there, so are my brother and his wife and his kids.”
“Agreed, Saugus is a gross word,” she said. “Nina used to live up there, but you knew that already.”
“I didn’t,” I said. “Remember? Work/life boundaries.”
Chloe wrinkled her nose. “There’s not wanting to see pictures of your coworkers in their swimsuits or whatever, but it seems weird you didn’t know Nina had basically just moved from the same place you grew up. Do you not talk to people?”
“Well, not about personal things, no.”
She gave me a look like I’d just announced I’d actually been born on Mars, so I went back to my steak which didn’t judge me at all.
“You should talk to people,” she said. “It’s weird if you don’t.”
“I don’t think it is,” I said. “I think there are just different ways of being a person, and I’m not the kind who …”
“The kind who talks to people ?” Chloe cracked up, and I had to admit that it didn’t sound great. “Maybe you should try to be, then.”
“Hmmm,” I said, which only made her laugh harder, even though I had not set out to be funny. “Anyway. I do understand why you’re doing this.”
“Encouraging you to act like a semi-normal person?” That charming smile was back, as if she was fully in charge of how it was deployed. I suspected that she was.
“Pretending to date me to get through your friends’ wedding,” I said. “Through the queer celebrity wedding of the fall or whatever. But … this isn’t like a weird movie from the eighties where you have to show up with a particular date to a particular event in order to get your weird aunt’s inheritance or whatever. So why don’t you just get a real date and take her?”
Chloe wrinkled her nose. “I don’t want a real date.”
“Oh,” I said. “Do you not—actually, I don’t know if this is any of my business. I’m not trying to overstep any boundaries and barge into your identity.”
“Oh, no, I’m not aromantic or anything, if that’s what you’re getting at,” she said. “You’re nice to check. I just am not great with relationships. I like my space, and I like not having to ask someone else what we’re doing that weekend, and I like coming home and having nothing but complete silence and Fernando greet me. And it sucks that people—including people I love dearly—act as if that’s not a valid adult life.”
“I know what you mean,” I said, even though it was only some of that, the white picket fence and two-point-five kids life, that I didn’t want, no big white dress or old-fashioned traditions. Finding a person to spend forever with was still highest on my list of life goals. Now that Will was out of the picture, it sounded with a new urgency.
That said, coming home to silence plus Small Jesse Pinkman had been nicer than I would have guessed.
“So, no, I don’t want to make some poor girl deal with me,” Chloe said. “Whereas you know exactly what you’re getting into.”
I laughed. “Besides my boss and the Oscar winner.”
“Exactly, besides that!” Chloe cracked up again. “Don’t bail on me now, Clementine. We need each other way too much for that.”
I hadn’t even thought about bailing, though, because the only thing more awkward than showing up to that brunch with Phoebe would be if I were to never show up again. I knew that if I quit this whole stupid shenanigan, my boss would clearly find out I’d been lying to her face and I’d then obviously have to also quit my job and start a new life with a new identity, somewhere no one had ever heard of me or Chloe Lee.
And I was fairly certain that awkward fake-dating scenarios did not actually qualify for the Witness Protection Program. Which meant there was no getting out of this.
The texts started the next morning, before I’d even left for the office.
Clementine, we’ve been discussing, and it is CRAZY that you have A GIRLFRIEND and WE HAVEN’T EVEN MET HER YET!
While I am, as always, startled by Hailey’s commitment to all-caps, I’m in firm agreement with her sentiment. Let’s plan drinks soon. Dinner?
What kind of food does she like? Should we pick somewhere FANCY? Do we need to impress her??
I assume she lives on the Eastside near you; I’ve never met a lesbian who doesn’t.
FIONA! I told you that you can’t just assume she’s a lesbian. She might be bi like Clementine! Or pansexual, a lot of people are pansexual these days.
“Oh my god,” I muttered aloud. Small Jesse Pinkman scrambled over because he assumed that if I was talking, I was talking to him. I admired how much he centered himself, honestly.
“This is going to sound very obvious,” I told him, scritching between his little ears, “but it turns out that this fake-dating situation with Chloe may create more stress than it solves.”
Small Jesse Pinkman purred, his eyes closed in bliss. It must have been nice.
“OK, little buddy, since you seem out of actionable advice, I should go to work.”
My phone dinged as I let myself out.
Trust me, the pansexuals all live on the Eastside too.