Chapter Fourteen #2
“Must be why he’s with you.” Doug is slurring, giving Julian what appears to be an attempt at a conspiratorial wink.
“I always preferred an older woman myself. More established. Cuts you a little more slack about the time you’re spending building yourself.
And they’re so much more grateful, if you know what I mean.
” In case we didn’t, he adds, “Absolutely crazy in the sack too. I’ve got some stories from when I was younger—”
“So sorry, Doug, but I just realized that my date is empty-handed,” Julian interrupts, attempting to soothe my ire with a gentle press to the small of my back.
Doug laughs, the drink in his hand—far from his first, I’m sure—tilting precariously. He doesn’t seem to notice, or take offense to, Julian’s clear dismissal or my mounting indignation.
“Can’t have that!” he says good-naturedly, waving us away.
Julian trails behind me as I stomp toward the bar, his pace leisurely.
“I’m sorry about that,” I tell him, still fuming. “Unfortunately folks in my field aren’t known for their tact.”
Julian tilts his head to regard me as if he might find something new to observe from this angle.
“I’ve noticed,” he admits. “But it’s fine. I’m having a good time.”
“Really?” I ask, incredulous. “You enjoy getting increasingly more invasive questions about our sex life?”
“I enjoy learning about your work,” Julian counters.
“Seeing you in your element. Watching other young women approach you to express the ways that you’ve inspired them.
I’ve gotten to know you some, but this was one piece of your life that I hadn’t yet seen.
” He winds an arm around my waist and draws me close. “Also, I get to dance with you again.”
In my fury, I haven’t noticed that we’ve wandered onto the small, crowded dance floor.
The live band is playing Luther Vandross’s “Never Too Much,” and while half of the guests are standing and milling around, a few are rocking to the music.
Julian draws my arms around his neck and guides me into a sway, and my worries melt like day-old snow under a noontime sun.
“We have to keep it PG, Jules,” I warn him, my cheeks warming as I recall what happened the last time we shared a dance floor.
In response, Julian spins me away, then pulls me in so that my back is to his front.
“What, are you worried I might teach your colleagues a little thing or two?” he says into my ear before spinning me, giggling, back around.
We dance chastely but with abandon, without regard for skill or thought about the audience, laughing, working up a sweat.
The band has chosen a repertoire of mostly eighties jams, and we sing along out loud and intentionally out of tune, barely a drop of alcohol between us to drive our energy.
It spreads, infectious, until soon the whole floor is full of interventional cardiologists and industry professionals ripping off their blazers and loosening their ties to make merry.
Across the floor, I spot an ecstatic Shiv fist-pumping into the air; he flashes me a thumbs-up.
Five songs later, I’m sweaty, parched, and desperate to pee. I bounce to my tiptoes to give Julian a quick kiss.
“I’ve got to go to the ladies’,” I tell him.
“I’ll get us water,” he says. “Don’t get lost out there.”
The bathroom is tucked away behind the stage, and I twist between dancing couples and high tables laden with forgotten plates and stacked glasses until I reach it.
I catch my reflection in the mirror above the sink.
I’ve always conceived of myself as looking younger than I am: my brown skin, shining with sweat, only wrinkles when I smile, and the fine lines at the corners of my eyes are barely perceivable up close.
My grays are the biggest giveaway; they course halfway down my locs, denser at the root than at my black tips.
Julian is undeniably a young man, but I wonder if dyeing my hair would lessen the visible age gap.
Maybe a little Botox could help too, some filler under the hollows of my eyes…
Someone behind me giggles. I look over my shoulder to find a pretty woman standing against the wall behind me, looking down at her phone. Our eyes meet in the mirror; she gives me a grin that feels like it’s at my expense.
I dry off my hands, perturbed. I’m being paranoid, probably. Definitely imagining things. Because for a second, I could almost swear that she’d just taken a picture.
I’m wandering the floor looking for Julian again when I hear it again; the unmistakable sound of a camera shutter, a flash of light, followed by a torrent of giggles.
“I can’t believe that’s his type,” a woman’s voice says.
I pivot. Three women stand behind me, crowding around a phone.
I recognize the one in the middle: she’s the auburn-haired woman who approached Julian earlier.
I read her immediately: she’s pretty and knows it, the kind of woman who believes that the combination of her slender build, youth, and white race should make her every man’s Helen of Troy.
I wonder what company she works for; either way, she must have missed the “don’t alienate your clientele” lesson during orientation.
“Did you just take a picture of me?” I ask coolly.
The women titter among themselves.
“Why would we take a picture of you?” the ringleader says. “Have you never taken a selfie with your friends before?” To demonstrate, she gets into position with her girls and throws up a peace sign.
“The flash was toward me,” I say. “Please delete it.”
She lowers her camera, and though the smile doesn’t leave her face, her eyes are now cutting.
“I said we didn’t take a picture of you,” she says. Then to her girls, “I’m telling you, these Gen Xers are so delusional these days—”
Even understanding what’s happening—that this girl is reacting out of envy and nothing else, that she’s dealing with rejection the only way she knows how, by taking it out on the other woman like the villainous cheerleader in a teen rom-com—the words cut.
It’s like she heard all the insecurities I recited to myself in the mirror minutes earlier and is repeating them to me out loud, and instead of a sharp retort, all I find is helplessness.