9. The Boyfriend Buffet
The Boyfriend Buffet
HENRY
“You are now Aidan Smith,” I said, handing Aidan his first-ever ID.
Well, fake ID.
A real fake ID for a real formerly fake man.
My mind was a steaming pot of confusion stew.
After our brainstorming session the night before, we decided he needed a generic, un-Googleable last name.
Any trace of a real person could be buried beneath entries for football players, consultants, and record producers.
I reached out to a friend of a friend from college who made fake IDs for all the freshmen who wanted to go clubbing, and he came through with a rush order for me, though I had to pay double for it.
How did parents afford children? How did sugar daddies afford their babies? I was burning money on Aidan.
“I feel official,” Aidan said, sliding the ID into the holder in the wallet I’d gotten him.
“Now change into your going-out clothes so we can close up,” I said. I passed him a garment bag with an outfit in it that I’d kept hanging in the back all day.
He dipped into the changing room and said from behind the curtain, “Oh…”
“What?”
“You picked out the blue sweater. I liked the purple one better,” he said.
“You look better in the blue one. It brings out your eyes,” I said.
“If you say so. Good sales day?”
“Not really. It seems we only have a good sales day when I unveil a new wind—”
Before I could finish my sentence, he emerged fully dressed, hair perfectly coiffed.
It was like there was an entire Broadway stage crew back there making sure he didn’t miss his cue for the big musical number.
“How on earth did you do that?” I poked my head inside the room and found that not only had he changed in nanoseconds, but he’d neatly hung up his mannequin outfit, too.
“Do what?” he asked.
“Change that quickly.”
He shrugged in response, which infuriated me. How did he come custom built with such skill, and I still couldn’t properly tie my shoelaces without them coming undone every hour at the ripe age of twenty-eight?
“How often do you unveil a new window?” Aidan asked as he put on the matching coat I picked out for him, and I turned off all the lights.
“Once a season.” I grabbed my car keys from the counter and escorted him out into the night. The temperature was in the high forties, but the wind and the drizzle made it feel much colder. We braced against the elements as we trudged toward my car.
“Why don’t you do more windows?” he asked.
“That’s like asking NASA why they don’t do more moon landings,” I said.
My car’s lights flared in the low-lying fog as I unlocked the doors.
“Money, resources, time, skill, ideas. It takes a lot to put together a display window, and I’m only one person.
When Great Aunt Isla was still around, it was easier. I had help.”
“I’m here. I can help,” he said, clicking his seat belt after sitting.
The heat poured out the old vents in puffs as the car warmed up. I tuned the radio to find a non-Christmas station, but when I was unsuccessful, I settled on one that was playing the Carpenters. “You’re motionless for most of the day,” I said as Karen crooned to her darling .
“I guess,” he said, folding his arms over his impressive chest.
I pulled out of the spot and sighed. The energy in the cabin changed considerably.
The more Aidan got used to shifting human emotions, the more he performed them with expert clarity that I couldn’t feign ignorance toward.
“Sorry. I’m not trying to offend you. It’s just… Yeah, I appreciate the offer, okay?”
We rode the rest of the way to the restaurant in silence. Ten minutes later, I parked beneath the blazing neon-pink PATSY’S GRILL & BUFFET sign that towered over the nearby busy road. Patsy’s was a squat tan building with a maroon roof and a sparsely filled parking lot.
As we crossed to the front door, Aidan stepped straight into a growing puddle and unselfconsciously laughed at the ensuing splash.
Even though he was ruining his brand-new canvas shoes, he kicked around with delight.
I let it happen—smiling at the admittedly adorable scene—until a chill raced down my spine and the rain started soaking my thick, wavy hair through to the scalp.
“Come on inside before you catch a cold.”
“Isn’t cold a temperature?” he asked as I pulled the hood on his coat up over his head.
“It’s also a common sickness that causes sneezing, coughing, and a runny nose. It sucks.” I opened the door for him, and he stepped inside. At the front mat, he shook like a dog. Droplets of rain smacked me in the face.
“Can you die from a cold?” he asked, unaware that he’d splashed me. He pulled out his phone.
“Maybe? Colds can turn into other sicknesses that you can definitely die from,” I said.
The more detailed questions Aidan asked me, the more I realized I knew very little about the world.
Stuff I probably learned in school seeped from my brain somewhere between twenty-one and twenty-eight.
I blamed vodka and overcrowding show tune lyrics.
Aidan stopped to write “colds and other sicknesses” down on his growing list of Things That Can Kill Me.
“How does this look so far?” He passed me his phone, and for a split second, our hands brushed.
His skin was warmer than I expected. The only times we’d ever touched were when he was in mannequin mode, and I was positioning him.
At those times, he was slick, cold. Here he was hot, supple. Almost enticing.
“Aidan, this is just the tip of the iceberg,” I said, focusing on his phone and not the slight tingle that sprang up from our contact. “Oh, and let’s add icebergs to this list. You never know when you might be aboard a cruise liner.”
The purple-haired hostess waved Aidan over to her decorated stand while I was still typing on his phone. “How many?” she asked him.
“How many what?” he asked with a big showman’s smile. “I like your hair.”
“Thank you?” the woman said, self-consciously ruffling her short, messy locks. “How many are eating with us this evening?”
Aidan turned toward the dining room and counted the heads of the visible guests aloud.
“In your party,” she said, evidently uninterested in his shenanigans.
I jostled him playfully. “Table for two, please.”
“You doing the all-you-can-eat buffet?” she asked, giving me the stinkiest stink eye ever.
“We are,” I said.
“We are?” Aidan asked.
“We are.”
She brought us to a booth on the far side near the long buffet stations.
No matter how many times Great Aunt Isla brought me here to eat, I never could parse out the design decisions.
Everything from the subdued lighting to the painted mural of a sky on the ceiling and the fish tank columns separating the sections gave me low-budget Las Vegas casino vibes.
Plus, the myriad colorful fish staring at you throughout your meal made it impossible to enjoy the sushi bar.
The hostess practically walked backward as she left, never taking her eyes off us.
“She was weird,” said Aidan. Which meant a lot coming from someone whose definition of weird was still forming.
“Maybe she thinks you’re an alien or a robot or that I forced you to come here,” I said.
“I am here of my own free will,” he said, unfolding a napkin in his lap.
I wondered where he’d heard that phrase.
I almost told him that free will was a myth and, in his case, completely contingent on me flipping a sign , but philosophical debate was not the reason I’d brought him to Patsy’s.
“This is our first practice date. Christmas at Alexa’s will be a serve yourself–style meal.
This is a good warm-up for the big show. ”
We left our coats in the booths and ventured over to the cold station. Aidan was practically dancing with excitement over the rows and rows of food spread out before him.
“This is food from all styles, cultures, and flavors. Some you have to be more careful with than others because of the spice combinations and some less-than-perfect sanitation codes around here, but this will help you get a taste for what you like and don’t like,” I told him.
He practically sprinted away before I yanked him back by the sleeve of his royal blue sweater.
“One more thing, remember how you felt after you ate the butter and all the other stuff from the fridge on your first night?” He nodded at me with a cutely furrowed brow.
His perfect skin didn’t even crease, like he came prepackaged with daily Botox injections.
“This is also an exercise in restraint. There are going to be a lot of delicious-looking foods. Just remember, your eyes are bigger than your stomach.”
“My stomach must be really small,” he said, patting his abdomen.
“It’s an expression. It means you’re going to think you’re hungrier than you are. You don’t want to overeat or you’ll be sick,” I said.
“And sickness can kill me! Got it!”
I led Aidan to the starting line. That’s literally what Patsy’s called it. It was a yellow line on the floor where a checkered flag waved proudly as if we were race car drivers about to hit the gas. Admittedly, gas was what everyone eating there was going to leave with, so it sort of made sense.
I grabbed a plate after Aidan at the salad station. “This will be the first course,” I said, ushering him on.
“Got it,” Aidan said. At the end of the row, several colorful, viscous salad dressings sat in bowls. Each one had a card next to it with its name printed on it. Some had little circles in the bottom right-hand corner that said GF or DF or SOY or PEANUTS . “What are those?”
“Allergy designations. Some people can’t have certain foods. If they eat them, they get rashes or hives or their throat closes up,” I said, spooning out some balsamic vinaigrette for myself.
“ Food can kill you, too?!” Aidan shouted. “But it’s so delicious!”
I tugged him away from the group behind us. “Shh. Let’s calm down. Only some food can kill some people.”