7 Xavier
7
XAVIER
I HADN’T LAUGHED this hard in years . Maybe I never had.
We destroyed everyone in miniature golf. We moved on to laser tag and beat everyone there too.
We spent half an hour in the arcade, got shitty pizza, then went on the bumper cars with all of them.
Everyone loved Samantha. She slid into my circle like she’d known them as long as I had.
She was the kind of person who met strangers at a bar and was in somebody’s wedding by the end of the night. Extroverted and easy. It made it easy for me too.
I wasn’t social.
I wasn’t an introvert so much as people just irritated me. I didn’t like dealing with humans I didn’t know. I didn’t like parties unless they were intimate and I knew everyone there. I hated mingling, I hated networking even more.
When it came to meeting with my friends, I didn’t like group dates unless I’d been dating someone for long enough that bringing them around was the next step, and even then I didn’t love it because it meant I had to play the host and entertain them to make sure they were comfortable. I didn’t have to do that with Samantha. I would have, but I didn’t have to.
I couldn’t believe how much I liked her.
I kept waiting for the shoe to drop and it never did. For the conversation to fall flat or for her to seem annoyed when Jesse told one of his corny jokes or for Becca to give me that look that meant it was a no. But it didn’t happen.
By midnight everyone was going home. We were saying goodbye to them by the entrance.
I didn’t want the night to end. I was exhausted, but I’d never been more awake. I didn’t know how much longer I could reasonably drag it out though. Then when Jesse and Becca left and we were alone, Samantha turned to me. “Hey, what do you think about doing the escape room?” she asked.
My smile got bigger. It was like this night had turned the feature on and I couldn’t wipe it from my face now.
“We wouldn’t get out until one a.m.,” I said.
“I don’t care. I’m not tired. Are you?”
“No,” I said.
“So yes?”
“Let’s do it.”
The place was clearing out. There were only a handful of people still here and even fewer employees. We finally found one sitting behind the prize desk texting.
Samantha leaned over the counter. “Is the escape room still available?” she asked.
The kid looked up from his phone. “Uh… I don’t know? I don’t work that section.”
“Do you know who does?” she asked.
He rolled his eyes. “Yeah. I guess, like, give me a second.”
He dragged himself off his stool and wandered out from behind the desk at a snail’s pace. Samantha turned to me with her back against the counter and smiled. “Have you ever done one before?”
“Never. You?”
“No.”
She looked around the prize desk. “God, do you remember winning these things when you were a kid?”
I came up next to her and looked into the glass case that was the countertop. It was full of cheap prizes that cost way too many tickets from the games.
My parents never took me to places like this as a kid. Dad said it was a waste of money. The only time I got to go was if one of the guys was having a birthday party.
There were rubber bouncy balls and Ring Pops, fake tattoos and mood rings and noisemakers.
I forgot how much I loved this part. This place wasn’t my idea of a fun adult night on the town—until now. But I did really love it as a kid.
“I always wanted to get enough tickets to get the lava lamp,” she said, nodding at the big prizes on display on the wall.
“Me too. You could just buy it somewhere else,” I said. “Get it for a fraction of the cost.”
“It’s not the same if you get it somewhere else. It just hits different from the prize counter.”
She was right. It did.
“How many tickets do we have?” she asked.
I pulled them out of my pockets and set them on the counter. She did the same. We had a decent amount. “Let’s feed them into the counting machine and see how much it is,” I said.
When we got the paper with the total, we reconvened.
“What do you want to do?” I asked. We didn’t have enough for the lava lamp, but we could get a stuffed animal, or a board game if she wanted to go bigger.
“Let’s get a bunch of the smaller ones,” she said. “That way we can split them.”
The employee came back looking bored. “The guy who does the escape room went home already, but I can let you in I guess.”
“Great!” she said. “And we want to pick a few prizes.”
We loaded up on random trinkets and candy, and I put it all in my pockets. Then we followed the employee to the escape rooms.
“We’ve got three rooms,” he said. “There’s like a basement escape one and an office thing and an alien spaceship—”
“The spaceship!” she said.
The kid nodded to some lockers. “You have to lock up your stuff. You can’t take your phones or your smartwatches.”
We put our phones and her purse in a locker. Then he took us to the room and we stood outside the door.
He pulled out a laminated piece of paper and read off it in a monotone voice. “‘You’re on a lonely country road and a beam of light encloses your car and you wake up in the belly of an alien vessel. The spaceship has crashed in the woods and the aliens are outside repairing it. They’ll get it fixed soon and take you to Mars and probe you. You have one hour to escape the ship before takeoff.’” He swung open the door and we peered in.
The room was decorated like the hull of a spaceship. I had to admit, it wasn’t half bad. There was a control panel full of knobs and levers. They had a wall of specimens behind plexiglass, a fake human head in a jar, small plastic rodent-sized alien creatures in leafy terrariums. The only thing not in theme was a large digital timer on the wall and a disco ball hanging from the ceiling.
“Good luck on your mission,” the kid said. Then he shut the door behind us, the lights turned off, a black light came on, and the wall timer started.
“Ready?” she asked.
We split up and started poking around. “Call out anything you find,” she said, opening drawers under the control panel. “A screwdriver!” She held it up.
“There’s a clipboard with hieroglyphics on it,” I said.
“Ooooh, I bet it’s a key.” She looked around the room. “Look! There’s one of the symbols on the wall.”
A little dog-shaped hieroglyphic was next to a box with the letter P on it.
“So that one means P ,” she said. “Let’s look for more.”
We scoured the room and deciphered the clipboard code. Then we moved on and solved a series of puzzles that opened a locked cabinet with a safe in it. Samantha found a riddle on the underside of the captain’s chair. A song with a famous phone number. “867-5309.” We tried it on the safe and got it open. It had a missing lever for the control panel that opened a secret door in the wall. We went through the door and found a trunk with more clues.
She was good at this. We both were. I think normally these rooms were done with a group, but we were killing it just the two of us.
We solved the room at fifty-six minutes. When we pulled the final lever up, the digital clock froze, and the disco ball kicked on from the ceiling, spinning and flashing us in prisms while “Come On Eileen” played at full blast.
She bounced into my arms, jumping up and down, and we both cracked up. This whole thing was so cheesy, but I loved it. I wanted to come back and do the other two rooms.
She looked up at me, her hands on my chest. “That was so fun! You are brilliant! The way you figured out how that air lock had to turn—”
“How did you know to look in the wires under the fuselage?”
“I just figured if the door wasn’t bolted shut…” She shrugged.
We beamed at each other while “Come On Eileen” went into the chorus.
This was the best date I’d ever been on. Period. I didn’t even care that my friends had crashed it. I was glad they’d met her because now I had someone to talk to about her.
I wanted to see her again. Tomorrow. Breakfast maybe before her flight. I didn’t even want to take her home. I was already planning the next date when she got back. I had free clinics all weekend, but I could make it work after that, anything and any time she wanted.
My hands were around her waist and she was pressed into me, disco lights flashing across her face.
I gazed at her lips. “Did you have a good time?” I asked, my voice low.
“I really did,” she said, looking at my lips too. Then she drew her brows down and peered around. “Shouldn’t the door have opened?”
“I don’t know. Maybe when you’re done you just leave?”
“It’s locked, though. I tried it when the kid left.”
My eyes came up to hers. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, look.” She leaned over and jiggled the handle. “Locked.”
“Huh. Maybe it opens at the one-hour mark?”
She scrunched up her face. “Maybe. So what do we do for four more minutes?” She bit her lip.
My heart rate picked up.
“Aren’t there cameras in here?” I asked.
We both looked up. There were.
“Damn,” she whispered. “But if anyone’s actually watching they’d know we were done and they’d let us out, right?”
“You really want me to kiss you in a spaceship, don’t you,” I said.
“I kind of do…”
I grinned and pulled her against my hips.
“I don’t want to kiss you on camera,” I said, slipping a hand over her cheek. “I like the way you smell…” I whispered.
“I like the way you smell,” she said in an out-of-breath way that made me reconsider not kissing her.
Her hands wrapped around my waist and she pulled me closer.
“Do you want to come over after this—” she breathed, rubbing her nose against mine.
“Yes,” I said.
“Immediately yes?”
“ Immediately yes.”
“Come On Eileen” came to a close. Then it started again. It was playing on a loop.
“What time does your flight leave tomorrow?” I asked. I wanted to know how long I had her.
“Seven thirty a.m. Will you drive me to the airport?”
“Ahh, is that why you want me to come over?” I said, my lips a fraction of an inch from hers.
“That and I want you to give Pooter her sedative. She’s wiggly.”
I chuckled.
“How long is this song?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Three, four minutes maybe,” I said distractedly.
Then I felt her body change. She paused and made space between us and turned to the digital clock. “I feel like it’s been more than four minutes.” She looked back at me. “Why would they let the song repeat?”
I snapped out of the daze I’d been in. I let go of her and went to the door and knocked on it. “Hello?”
Nothing.
I knocked louder. Still no answer. I got a sinking feeling in my stomach.
“Did they forget us?” she asked.
“They probably do a check of the building before they close,” I said. “And there’s a camera in here. There has to be a surveillance screen where they’ll see people are still inside.”
She went to the camera mounted in the corner of the room and waved her arms. “Hello? We’re still in here!”
I pounded on the door while she paced behind me, chewing on her thumb. After ten minutes of this we gave up.
“They close at one, right?” she asked, looking worried.
“Yeah.” I dragged a hand down my mouth.
“They’ll see your SUV outside,” she said. “They’ll know we didn’t leave.”
“There’s a bar. People probably leave their cars in the parking lot all the time and take Ubers home.”
“ Crap. ”
When “Come On Eileen” ended for the fourth time, she put her ear to the door. “I can’t hear anyone out there.”
She listened for the five seconds of silence before the song started again, then she looked at me, the reality of this situation setting in. “We’re stuck here. I have a flight to catch in six hours. Our phones are in the locker, my sister’s gonna think you murdered me!”
I laughed dryly at this even though it wasn’t funny.
“I’ll try kicking it in,” I said.
It was useless.
The door was like a bank vault. Maybe it was a bank vault. The building was old, it was definitely possible this place used to be something else.
Two hours later we were still trapped.
We’d moved to sitting on the floor about an hour and a half ago. I had my back against the wall and she was curled up against me, tucked under my arm. We both had Ring Pops.
“Come On Eileen” was still playing.
“I can’t tell if this is the best story ever, or if we’re being tortured,” she said.
“Torture,” I muttered. I pinched the bridge of my nose. “I think this is my fault,” I said.
She tilted her head to peer up at me. “Why?”
“I didn’t want the night to end. I think I willed this into existence.”
“Did you will the song to never end too? Because that’s the fucked-up part.”
“If I never hear a fiddle again…”
She was cracking up. I hugged her and put my nose to her hair. I was infinitely glad I’d given her the hoodie. The room was cold and we were huddled on the ground.
“Come On Eileen” stopped. We sat there in the five precious seconds of silence that we got every four minutes. Then it came on again.
She groaned. “This song is going to be my villain origin story.”
“You know what? I’m turning it off.”
She sat up and I got to my feet.
I had to climb the control panel to reach the speaker in the ceiling. I yanked the wires out of it and held them up victoriously while she cheered.
I peered around and my eyes settled on the camera. I felt instantly pissed off.
They didn’t bother to check it before leaving and then they’d get to replay our night in their little spaceship prison later and laugh about it—and they would replay it. They’d probably think this was hilarious.
She must have known what I was thinking.
“Cameras are expensive… they’re not speakers,” she said.
“They can sue me.”
I reached over and pulled the wires from the back of the camera and watched the little red light turn off.
She was grinning when I turned around. “My hero.”
I jumped down and sat against the wall again. She scooted up next to me and put her head on my shoulder. I wrapped my arms around her and when she breathed out, I went tighter.
“Are you cold?” I whispered. “Do you want my shirt for your legs?”
“Always trying to take off your shirt,” she said tiredly, snuggling into me. “What time do you think it is?”
“It feels like four a.m.”
“I want to lie down. Do you think they’ve ever cleaned this floor?” she asked.
“Never.”
“Ugh. Gross. Never mind.”
I tucked her under my chin and I wished we were in a bed. Not to do anything, just so I could make her warm and comfortable. Let her sleep.
I had the strongest, most pervasive feeling of protectiveness over her.
I didn’t like her on the ground. I didn’t like that she might need something that I couldn’t get for her here. She was calm and taking this well so it made me less agitated, but I had a feeling if she was panicking I’d be trying to rip through the walls.
“This is so unacceptable,” I grumbled. “I will be writing a very strongly worded letter.”
“You need to write a strongly worded Google review. It hurts more.”
I bet her Google review would be hilarious.
I tilted my head to look down at her. “Is it hard to make mustard interesting?”
“It is very hard to make mustard interesting. The sriracha and queso guys have it easy. Team Mustard’s in the trenches—I’m fighting for my life daily.”
“Do you like it though?”
“I do. I love it.” She looked up at me, her mouth a fraction of an inch from mine. “What about you? Do you like your job?”
“I like the animals.”
She laughed. “What does that mean? You hate the people?”
“Sometimes.”
Most of the time.
“I don’t like most people,” I said.
“Well, most people don’t like themselves. So the feeling is mutual,” she said. “Is that why you became an animal doctor instead of a human one?”
I let out a breath. I didn’t want to tell her the story of why I chose my profession. Not the real one anyway. So I told her the reason, not the canon event that led to it.
“I wanted to help animals. I wanted to lessen their suffering.”
“Ehhhh, no,” she said.
I cocked an eyebrow at her. “No?”
“No. I don’t buy it. I mean, I do? I’m sure that’s a part of it. But there had to be something you saw that led to that. Was it street dogs in Mexico? A visit to the shelter? A dog that died in your arms? What was your veterinarian moment of inception?”
“You don’t want that story.”
“Uh, yes I do.”
“That’s not a first-date conversation.”
“And are we currently experiencing a first-date activity, Xavier? ’Cause last I checked we were locked in a room with jars full of human heads.”
I laughed dryly. I stared at the digital clock, frozen on fifty-six minutes, debating how much to say.
“My dog growing up,” I said. “Winnie.”
“What happened to her?” she asked.
I didn’t answer.
“I haven’t unlocked this challenge yet?” she asked.
“No. Not yet.”
I looked back down at her. “Who was your first pet?”
“Are you changing the subject?”
“Maybe. But I do like this question.”
“Ha.”
She sat back and crossed her legs. Her hair was messy from laying against me and her eyes were red from lack of sleep but she was breathtaking anyway.
“My first pet was an orange Persian cat named Ginger,” she said. “We found her in a trash can. This cat was so gross, Xavier. She looked soggy, like one of those koalas that has chlamydia—”
I choked.
“I think she was like fourteen or something when we found her? She lived to be nineteen.”
I was smiling. “Then what? What else did you have?”
She scrunched up her face. “I had hamsters.” She glanced at me. “Don’t be mad at me, but they all died premature deaths.”
“Yes, they tend to do that,” I said.
“Is that just a universal experience? Because everyone I know had a hamster who died in some tragic accident.”
“They’re escape artists and they’re prone to cardiac arrest. Most need enclosures much bigger than they’re given. Also, they hibernate. People don’t know that and they bury them thinking they’re dead.”
She stared at me. “Are you telling me that I might have buried Hambert alive?”
I sucked air through my teeth.
“Xavier! I’m going to cry!” She laughed.
“I’m sure Hambert was dead. Or that he died peacefully in his sleep. In his shallow grave.”
She did a laugh-gasp. “Please tell me that you’re taking on the hamster education crusade, because I did not know any of this.”
I held up my hand. “I will make it my life’s work.”
She shook her head at me with a smile. “What about you? What animals did you have growing up?”
“Only Winnie.”
She pulled her face back. “Just one dog?”
“That’s all. I’ve fostered a lot, but with school and work it wasn’t really feasible for me to have one.”
“So is Jake your first dog? Since Winnie?”
“Pretty much.”
“Wow. Is he okay by himself right now?” she asked. “I didn’t even think about that. Pooter has the litter box and her food and water and stuff.”
“He’s fine. He has pee pads and water. He’s just lonely.”
She put out her bottom lip. Then she yawned into the back of her hand.
“Come here,” I said, pulling her back in. She nestled up against me and we sat there in a long sleepy pause.
“We never made it out of the spaceship,” she said, tiredly. “We got probed.”
I snorted. “Did you see the wooden wands on the wall with the hieroglyphics over them?” I asked.
“Yeah…”
“It says probes.”
She burst into weary laughter. I smiled until it died down and she slipped into silence.
“I willed tonight not to end too,” she said softly.
My heart leaped.
“I like you,” I said.
“I like you too,” she said, her cheek pressed to my chest. “I like that your friends love you so much. I like that Becca said good things about you in the bathroom. I like that the dogs on the boat liked you, even the one who didn’t like men,” she said. “I think you can tell a lot about someone by how animals react to them.”
“You can tell a lot about someone by how they treat their pets,” I said.
“Is that why you asked me out?” she asked. “You like how I treat my cat?”
“That and other things.”
“What other things?” she asked.
I paused.
“I think you’re beautiful,” I said. “I like how you smell. Pooter smelled like you. I like that you rescued her and didn’t give up on her. I liked that you did what you said you were going to do and tried to save her. And I like that you told me I’m an asshole.”
She barked out a laugh. “Why would you like that ?”
“Because most people don’t say what they think. Animals do. They’re transparent. Their body language doesn’t lie. They always tell you the truth if you pay attention. People lie all the time.”
“Huh.” She nodded against my heart. “I liked that you apologized, even though you thought you’d never see me again. I also liked that you advocated for Pooter. I get why you were upset with me at first. I also think you’re very handsome. I told my sister that when I got home. And again when you took your shirt off earlier.”
I made my expression flat the way I always did when someone was paying me a compliment, but my heart picked up again. She had to feel it.
“I’m sorry you had to call me an asshole the day you met me,” I said quietly.
“Is that really what you’re thinking about?” she said, looking up at me.
I held her gaze. “I was embarrassed that you pointed out my bedside manner that first day,” I said. “It bothered me for weeks that I acted that way.”
“Why?”
“Because I care what you think. I didn’t like that you thought I was rude, even though I was. I was having a bad day and I let my emotions get away from me.”
We peered at each other.
“I wasn’t really myself that day either,” she said.
“Why?”
She went quiet and I thought she wasn’t going to answer.
“My mom has dementia,” she said. “She’s fading away and I haven’t been home in seven months. Everyone is taking care of her but me and she doesn’t know my name anymore and I feel like that’s my fault because I could have come sooner but I didn’t because I wanted to forget it was happening. And then it happened without me and now I can’t get it back.” There was pain in her voice.
I didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry…”
Then I told her something I didn’t tell anyone. “I don’t talk to my parents because they were abusive,” I said.
She sat up and looked at me. “Abusive how?” she asked.
I let a breath out through my nose. “Physically. Verbally. Mentally. Emotionally. I left when I was seventeen. I moved in with Jesse’s family and I never spoke to mine again.”
She looked stricken.
“I think…” I had to stop and start again. “I think that’s why my emotions don’t get away from me.”
“Why?”
“Because when I showed how I felt, that’s how they knew how to hurt me.”
I watched this move across her face. Understanding, empathy, sorrow. But for some reason it didn’t make me feel overexposed like I think it would with anyone else.
I didn’t talk about my childhood. To anyone. Ever. Only the guys knew what it was like, and they only knew because they’d been there.
There was something cathartic about admitting that it had shaped me in ways that weren’t always for the better.
For the most part I liked to think my upbringing had made me a stronger person. It taught me independence and self-reliance. I was someone who would never raise a hand to my own children, someone who knew the power of encouragement and compliments—even if it was too late for me to be the kind of man who could accept them myself.
My dad’s insults and barbs drove me. I heard them in the back of my mind, every day of my life, telling me I was lazy and pathetic and I would never amount to anything. Proving him wrong was the fuel behind every single thing I did.
I put myself through college and veterinary school working two jobs. I built my own practice from the ground up. I tried every day to be the kind of man who could look in the mirror and know that I was good and smart and accomplished no matter what he’d said.
And I was also the kind of man who didn’t open up easily. I didn’t trust people. Even Maggie and Tina, who obviously cared about me and would never hurt me, had to gather information about me from the glimpses they got by accident. I was too afraid to let anyone in and say the kinds of things that I’d just told Samantha after less than twelve hours in her presence.
And I don’t know why she did this to me. I just knew that she did.
She peered at me gently and I gazed back at her. Her mouth was red from the Ring Pop. Mine was probably blue. The disco ball shimmered and threw prisms over us and not a single part of any of this felt believable. I didn’t know how or in what way, I just knew something important was happening and that knowing it in real time was a gift.
The moment was shattered by the sound of a lock being turned.
The door to the room flung open.