Chapter 35
Chapter Thirty-Five
RILEY
I like you too.
Four words.
Easy enough to say.
And I’m about to let them loose when Nat backs off and produces a bouquet of red roses from behind his back.
Shock ricochets through me and I stare at the flowers and then at Nat. “Are these… for me?”
“Yes.” He clears his throat. “I wasn’t sure if you’d prefer a more practical gift, but I wanted to get you flowers at least once.”
My heart melts, seeps through the cracks of my ribs and forms back into a whole at his feet. “Nat, they’re beautiful. Thank you.”
“Do you like them? Really?” He rubs the back of his neck, studying me.
“Yes, I do,” I say sincerely. “No one’s ever bought me flowers before.”
“Never?”
“Guys tend to assume that, because I’m a mechanic, I won’t like flowers, but I love them. Especially roses.” I lean my nose into the flowers and inhale. It smells amazing.
A relieved grins spreads on his face. That smile makes him even more gorgeous.
“I’m glad you like them.”
“I do,” I say, staring intently into his green eyes. “I like them a lot.”
His expression sobers and he looks at me with a question in his gaze, but before I can tell him that yes, I’m talking about him and not the flowers, the door bursts open.
“Is everyone decent in here?” Carlos asks, covering his eyes.
Jimmy smacks him on the back. “Don’t be disgusting. What on earth would a brother and sister be doing?”
“Exchanging flowers, obviously,” Blade says.
“Gentlemen.” I clear my throat and put some distance between me and Nat. “I haven’t plated the tamales yet, so you get to choose them yourselves. Blade, since you’re the youngest, you go first.”
“I’m nineteen,” Blade grumbles, as if the fact that he is barely an adult should mean something to me. He selects his tamales first, grabs a paper plate and plunks into a chair, managing to dismantle his claimed ‘adulthood’ by sulking.
“My ma makes the best tamales,” Carlos boasts as he goes to the plastic bag to select his tamales next. “Prepare to have your minds blown.”
“I’m ready,” Jimmy declares, walking to the plastic bag with his plate in hand. He’s grinning so hard that I can see his gold canine.
I reach for a plate next, but Nat scoops it from me. “I’ll do it.”
“It’s okay, you don’t have to.”
“I want to,” he says with a wink.
Butterflies take off in my stomach and I bite down on my bottom lip to keep from grinning like a hyena.
Carlos snickers and whispers, “Brother and sister, my backside.”
Jimmy whispers back. “I can see now that I was lied to.”
I pretend not to hear them as my ears burn.
“Which side of these is breast and which is leg and thigh?” Nat asks, pointing at the bag of tamales wrapped in banana leaves.
“Left side is leg and thigh.”
“Great.” Nat drags out two tamales from the left side and hands one of the plates over to me with a big smile. “You like drumsticks, right, Riles?”
I do not.
I hate drumsticks with a passion and I have been known to refuse to eat a meal if a chicken leg is anywhere near me.
“I remember you stealing both drumsticks from Chris when we ordered fried chicken.”
“Thanks.” I force a smile and accept the plate, making my way to my desk.
It’s fine. I like tamales on its own without the meat anyway. I’ll just pick around it.
Nat beams as he pulls out a chair right next to the desk and sets his tamales and fork down beside it. Then he suddenly launches up. “Oh, drinks. Where are they?”
“There’s soda in the fridge.” Jimmy points to the mini-fridge with his fork while looking at Nat as if he’s sprung two heads.
“You want soda, Riles?” Nat asks me.
Everyone stares at us.
Covering my face slightly, I mumble, “I’ll drink water.”
“I’ll grab you a cup.”
“It’s okay. I still have in my tumbler.”
“Oh, that reminds me. Did you drink the ginger-honey tea?”
I freeze. I’d honestly forgotten about that until now. “I didn’t have time to make it.”
“It’s my fault. I should have brewed it myself before you left the apartment this morning.”
“This morning?” Jimmy mouths to Carlos.
Blade shoots a sharp look Nat’s way.
“Do you still have a headache?” Nat asks, seemingly oblivious to my mechanics’ increasing discomfort.
“Just a little, but it’s manageable.”
“I’ll buy you some Tylenol.”
“You don’t have that long for lunch, Nat.”
“I don’t care if I have to starve. I don’t like the thought of you in pain, Riles.”
“It’s really not that bad,” I assure him.
Carlos drops his fork into his tamales. “Are you two going to keep being like this? You’re ruining my mother’s tamales.”
Jimmy shushes him half-heartedly, but I can tell that he agrees.
Nat and I exchange looks.
“I have a question,” Jimmy says, staring at us.
“You can have all the questions you want. We can choose whether or not we want to answer,” I warn him.
Jimmy waves away my words. “When you said you two were ‘like brother and sister’, did you really mean that you’re childhood sweethearts? Is this some kind of ‘arranged marriage at birth’ deal?”
“We weren’t childhood sweethearts,” I say.
“Riley was twelve when I was eighteen,” Nat frowns. “So that wouldn’t be right either.”
“I had a childhood sweetheart,” Carlos says, taking a big bite of his tamales. “Gloria.” He says her name reverently. “She had the longest, black hair and the shiniest eyes. They say your first love is special and they were right. I still think about her from time to time.”
“I had a crush on this girl at summer camp,” Jimmy confesses. “But I never told her how I felt. I went back to the camp the next year determined to tell her, but she never came back. I went there four years in a row looking for her before I eventually gave up.”
“That’s so sweet,” I say and then I wipe the corner of my mouth with a napkin.
Normally, I’d tear into a meal like this, but Nat is here and I can’t bring myself to be as messy as usual.
“If Riley wasn’t your first love, who was?” Blade asks, staring darkly at Nat. He hasn’t touched his food yet.
Nat lifts one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. “Probably someone from school.”
“You don’t remember?” Blade scoffs. “I don’t believe that.”
“First loves aren’t something I romanticize.”
The fork, that was about halfway to my mouth, freezes.
“How can you call someone your ‘first love’ when you’re that young?
” Nat argues, glancing at me and nodding as if he’s making a point that he’s sure I’ll agree with.
“You don’t know who you are at that age and the other person doesn’t know who they are either.
It’s like falling in love with a half-finished painting.
Can you say that’s love when you don’t even see the full picture? ”
I swallow hard.
“Maybe it’s not love in that sense, but it’s strong, man. First loves are special,” Carlos argues.
“I respect that opinion but, I’ll be honest, I personally believe that adults should move on from someone they had a crush on at ten or twelve.
I’m not talking specifically about you or Jimmy.
” Nat lifts his hand as if to prove that he’s not trying to fight.
“But, for example, I once found this journal filled with poems that someone wrote about their crush. It was obsessive. Every page, every line, everything was about this guy on my hockey team.”
The fork plops into the tamales.
My stomach drops into the void that has suddenly opened beneath my feet.
“Based on how bad the poems were,” Nat says with a little laugh, “I’m guessing the poet was maybe seven or eight…”
I was TWELVE.
“… And while that poetry book was cringy, it’s something to look back and laugh at…”
I don’t think that’s funny at all. I poured my soul into that journal.
“… but imagine if that poet was still obsessed with the guy after all these years?”
“Maybe it’s fate, man,” Jimmy argues. “Like, what if she caught the vibe before he did?”
“I guess you could call it fate, but I’ve heard too many frightening stories. Professional athletes and celebrities get it real bad. These fans build an entire relationship in their heads based on what they see of someone on screen. It gets dangerous and creepy.”
“C-creepy?” I hasten to defend myself. “It’s not like whoever wrote that poem wrote it without ever meeting the person. I mean, that’s what it sounds like to me.”
“But the truth is that she probably never had a relationship with this guy, so why is she still feeding the obsession? And what if she’s still hanging around him, never moving on, never looking at other options and seeing if there’s better out there?
What if she’s been putting this guy on a pedestal for decades? ”
“That is kind of weird,” Jimmy agrees.
Carlos nods. “I’d be uncomfortable if it were me.”
Even Blade mutters, “Psycho alert.”
I can’t swallow.
There is no oxygen hitting my lungs.
Soon, I’m going to turn blue.
Then I’ll go unconscious.
Then my head will fall straight into the tamales and the ambulance will have to be called and Nat will hold the hand of the girl who wrote those ‘obsessive poems’ about him while they try to bring me and my tamales-splotched body back to life.
“That kind of devotion is stalker-level,” Nat explains, looking at me with a wry grin as if he expects me to laugh. “I’d be kind of scared for my life.”
A sick, twisted pain slithers through my chest. I do my best to laugh, but it sounds like an old man suffering with tuberculosis.
Nat’s smile transforms into a worried frown. “Are you okay?”
I shake my head because, at this point, I truly feel like I’m going to be sick.
Nat slides my tumbler over and I take a big swig. It doesn’t dissolve the knot in my throat.
“It’s the headache, isn’t it?” He deduces. “I’ll get you something from the store.”
Nat rises resolutely, a determined expression on his face.
And I’ll be honest, I’m kind of glad to see him go.