Chapter Five
Five
“I’m an artiste!” I say with a twirl of my barstool. Raffi has met me for a drink the night after art class and I am still riding. a. high. “Seriously. Don’t let your fears get the best of you. Try something new, kids. Take life by the horns!”
“This is heady stuff,” he says to me, eyeing my general manic-ness.
“Maybe I really have been a heretofore untapped genius.”
“Draw a cat.” He’s slid a bar napkin and pen toward me.
I accidentally tear the napkin with the pen and then draw what looks like a potato with an oddly pirate-ish flair. “There.”
“Wow. I think I just found my next tattoo.”
“Okay, okay, so maybe I’m not an artiste.
Maybe it’s not the drawing part. It’s just the trying-something-I-was-scared-of part.
” As soon as I’ve said it, I feel a little deflated.
Because the drawing part was really cool.
Especially what Daniel had to say about it.
I’m about to try to explain the stick figure thing when I take my first really good look at Raff since I got here. “Hey, are you all right?”
As soon as I ask, he crumples forward onto the bar. “I’m terrible. I ran into Marine at Dirtbag.”
“Oh, Raff.” I put a hand between his shoulder blades. “Did you get the number 7 or the number 9?” Dirtbag is our favorite sandwich joint in the city and I can only hope it isn’t forever sullied for him by the unexpected appearance of his ex.
“I panicked and got the number 4!”
“The number 4 is good!”
“She seemed good.”
“I’m sorry.” I rub his back a little more.
Marine is the only nice person that Raffi has ever dated.
She never picked on him or manipulated him, she thought he was funny and hot, and she liked spending time with me and Vin.
But Raff got a little too obsessed with a personal trainer he met in a bar in Queens (as he’s known to do) and Marine just got fed up.
When she dumped him, she told him she didn’t want to be with someone who made her nervous all the time.
She wanted to be with someone who was happy with what he had.
This was two years ago and Raff’s missed her ever since.
“She looked cute, too,” he grumps, taking a big swig of beer. “She was wearing a sweater that made me want to go camping with her.”
I get a tingly feeling on the back of my neck and spin on my stool, only to find Lauro eyeing me from a booth in the corner.
I might have picked this bar because I happened to hear Lauro talking about it at class last night, so it’s not a total shocker to have run into him.
I wave and he grins. Then he lifts one of his feet out the side of the booth and gestures vigorously.
He’s mouthing words at me and I’m pretty sure it’s Where are your knee socks?
I give him a friendly thumbs-down and a smile and then spin back to Raff.
“Do you know that guy? Jesus Christ, he’s hot. Do you think I could pull off a mesh shirt?”
“Yes, and…actually, yes. I think chest hair and mesh would be a good look for you. He’s in my art class.”
He’s still looking over my shoulder toward Lauro. “Well, break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar.”
“I had my suspicions but now that I know you’re this attracted to him I’m positive he’s a fuckboy.”
“Who cares? Fuckboys are fun.”
“Raff.” I lay a hand on his arm. He’s lonely and we both know it.
His fuckboy proclivities are not helping.
He flips his hand up to give my hand a squeeze and when he does I get a clear view of the long, meaty scar down his left forearm.
There are pinpricks dotting along either side of the main scar from the stitches. “Hey, it’s looking good!”
He cocks his head to one side. “You think?”
“Oh, definitely,” Lauro says as he cozies up to the bar beside me. “Scars are hot. Fancy seeing you here, Roz. Tequila soda, please. Can I buy you two a drink?”
The bartender waits and I make eye contact with Raff and shrug.
“Pale ale for me,” he says.
“I’ll have what she’s having,” I say, with a point at Lauro, which makes him laugh.
“So. Pretty gnarly scar,” Lauro says, with the sort of conversational rudeness that extremely hot and charismatic people get to use at will. “How’d you get it?”
“Shattered my arm in an accident about a year ago,” Raff replies easily, like he didn’t almost lose the hand. Like he, Vin, and I didn’t almost die. He lifts the hand and does a few stiffly crooked extensions with his fingers. “She ain’t pretty, but she’ll do.”
“I think functional is pretty,” Lauro says, and it might be the first genuine thing I’ve heard him say. He leans into me. “Hey, did you tell him about your epic discovery in class yesterday?”
I laugh and lift my face toward the heavens, grateful for the round of drinks the bartender has just delivered. “I left that part out, actually.”
“Oh, come on.” Lauro is grinning like a tiger.
“Okay, fine. Raff—oh, Lauro, this is Raffi by the way—anyways, Raff, I may have inadvertently discovered that all noses bear a passing resemblance to penises.”
Raff stares at me blankly for a half second and then his jaw absolutely drops.
Lauro leans back and howls with laughter.
“Roz. Roz. Roz. Did you just make it so that I can never look another person in the face without accidentally thinking of penises? Did you just ruin faces for me forever?” Raffi demands.
“By that logic she just ruined penises for you, too,” Lauro says, still grinning.
“No.” Raffi is shaking his head aggressively. “Nothing could ever ruin penises for me.”
“A man after my own heart,” Lauro replies with his chronically flirtatious grin.
Lauro’s hand grazes my shoulder as he reaches for his drink and I straighten up. That prickly feeling is back, only this time I feel as if someone is staring at me with the fire of a thousand suns. I turn and quickly scan the room. No one is looking my way except for…oh.
I jolt when I realize that it’s Vin standing at the door of the bar, having just come in.
I’ve suddenly got cymbals where my heart just was.
I haven’t seen him since I bolted from our apartment last night.
I’m assuming he got out of the shower and turned into a human question mark when he saw that I was gone.
I’m aware that we live together and that at some point we would be seeing one another again.
But still, I did not expect him to be here.
“Did you invite Vin?” I ask Raff, hopefully nonchalantly.
But it’s not exactly easy to be nonchalant when a man is cutting through a crowd like a great white shark.
“He texted me earlier to see if we were hanging out and I invited him. You made it!” Raffi says as Vin reaches us. He’s leaning backwards into Vin’s arms and reaching up to pat his cheek.
Vin texted Raff to ask if he and I were hanging out? Is he checking up on my whereabouts?
“Meet our new friend, Lauro,” Raff says. “This is my brother, Vin.”
Vin shakes Lauro’s hand, then leans against me in order to ask the bartender for a Guinness.
“I only have it in the can,” she says, clearly, loudly, in the queen’s English.
“Hm?” Vin says, then uses his shoulder to get in between Lauro and me so that he can lean on the bar and talk to the bartender.
Lauro raises his eyebrows and moves around to Raff’s other side, happily squeezing in next to him.
Vin finishes ordering his drink and then straightens up.
If this were a year ago, he’d have put a hand on the back of my neck and sucked on my bottom lip to say hello.
If this were a year ago, he’d have put me on his lap on this barstool and whispered things in my ear while Raff entertained Lauro.
But it’s today. So he just stands behind me. “Hi,” he says next to my ear, not quite a whisper.
“Hi.”
He’s not touching me, but he’s not not touching me either.
He must be six or eight inches back but I can feel him.
He reaches past me, to my drink, and I catch the quick breeze of his familiar deodorant.
Even though we’re in shambles I could still, unfortunately, live in this man’s armpit.
I would really rather he stood behind Raff. I want him where I can see him.
Lauro’s gaze is bouncing between the three of us. I can practically read the ticker tape behind his eyes. Which one of these brothers is she fucking?
Neither, if we’re being honest, but I don’t care to satisfy his curiosity.
Vin puts my drink back and clears his throat.
Raff and Lauro have, for some reason, decided to swap drinks and are now arguing over whether the bartender looks like Tilda Swinton or Timothée Chalamet.
Vin leans against me again and I suck in a breath, but he’s just reaching over for a bar napkin. “Why’d you draw a cat?” he asks me, studying the napkin.
“How’d you know I drew that?” I ask, amazed. “And more importantly, how could you tell it was a cat?”
His face quirks. Or I think it does. Hard to tell behind the beard. “I know what your drawings look like, Roz.”
Now I turn to face him fully. My knees press his legs and he takes a step back. “What have you ever seen me draw?” I demand.
His chin drops. “Grandma Vittoria.”
“Ohhhhhh.” How could I have forgotten this?
This was the (almost) worst thing ever! Right after Vin and I eloped, Vin’s grandmother flew in from Italy, mostly to admonish us for not having a big Catholic wedding, from what I could tell.
But I was new to the family, desperate for brownie points, and took it upon myself to befriend bitter, bitter Vittoria.
Who doesn’t speak English. Also, I don’t speak Italian.
Thus…a week and a half of the most torturous game of charades ever played.
Complete with reems of shoddy drawings. Done by yours truly.
Truly genius stuff. Like it would be time for lunch so I’d draw a picture of a pickle with an arrow next to it.
Vin collected the drawings and (affectionately) laughed until he had tears in his eyes, poring over all of them every night in bed. I’d find those damn drawings under my pillow the next day.