Chapter Six #2
When the server turned to leave, Helen said, “Actually, I would like the olives on mine. But can you please hold the onions instead?”
Helen smiled at Tyler after the server left, and she said, “I’m not normally indecisive about olives.”
Tyler shrugged. “Olives can be perplexing.”
“They can. They come in both black and green.”
“And purple and brown.”
Helen laughed. “You really know your olives.”
His eyes glinted with quiet amusement. “I’m full of mundane trivia.”
Talking about olives shouldn’t have felt as fun as this did, and that’s when Helen thought, I’m in trouble.
Helen and Tyler didn’t just talk about olives that night. They talked about their childhoods and their favorite movies and
how they didn’t understand why the provided dumpsters at their respective apartments were always full, even on the day after
garbage pickup.
Helen was happy to find out Tyler’s mile pace wasn’t that much faster than hers and that he was sporty and liked the outdoors.
Growing up, she’d played many sports herself, admittedly sometimes changing interests too often as she switched from the field
to the gym and back into the dance studio, but she’d been a kid who always wanted to be doing something. And now she wanted to date someone who would go on a hike with her, not just play video games for hours on end like her
last boyfriend.
When they talked about jobs, Helen admitted that she was feeling unsure about hers. When she’d been hired at the marketing
firm, she’d held some kind of enchanted idea that it would be days of creative writing and exciting campaigns, promoting people
and things she would feel passionate about.
She’d graduated from college this past June with an ironclad plan: Be brave!
Be bold! Become someone special! But she’d spent the better part of the last year hitting snooze on her alarm two to three times each morning as she faced another day of copywriting and graphic design for clients’ products that half the time she secretly thought were garbage.
Tyler asked, “Are you plotting your escape?”
“My escape?” she repeated. “From my job?”
“Yeah. If you hate your job, you should find something you like better.”
Helen blinked. She’d never considered leaving. “Don’t you hate your job?”
“No. It’s pretty good. A lot of it’s programming. It’s like working on a puzzle, and my boss is cool too.”
“Well, that sounds very un-American of you,” she said, and they both laughed for the millionth time. And then she added, “But
I’m glad for you.”
By the time their plates were cleared and they were sipping chocolate martinis, her body was pulsing with how badly she wanted
to sleep with Tyler. She’d never slept with anyone after only one date, and she didn’t want to lose her mind over someone
she’d just met.
Except after talking to him for almost three hours straight, she felt like she’d been waiting to know this man her entire
life. Throughout dinner, she’d laughed so much that the corners of her mouth ached a little. It wasn’t his quick wit that
had destroyed all of her defenses though. It was the way he listened to her and asked her questions like she was the most
fascinating woman in the city. She thought, He is really good at this, and even as she recognized that it might be a well-honed seduction tactic—perhaps Tyler was an expert at unwrapping women—she
was still captivated by it.
When Tyler took a sip of his cocktail and asked Helen if she would rather be a lion or a housecat, she asked, “Am I a lion
in the wild or one in captivity?”
“Wild.”
“Hmm, okay.” The vodka tingled in her chest. “What kind of a life do I have as a housecat? Am I completely housebound or can I go out at night and get into mischief?”
“You’d find a way out.” He leaned forward, as if he were telling her a secret. “There’d be a hidden crawlspace in the attic
that would lead to the outside.”
She leaned forward too. “What’s the lifespan of a lion?”
“Not sure. Let’s say it’s similar to a cat.”
She took the final sip of her drink and said, “As the housecat, who’s my owner?”
“I’m your owner.”
Helen narrowed her eyes. “You’re my owner? Was this game just a ploy to tell me about your preferences?” The way she said “preferences” insinuated a lot.
Tyler sat back and his cheeks turned pink. He shook his head and looked down at the table as he laughed. This time, Helen
didn’t laugh with him. She just watched how cute and boyish he was in the moment.
When his laughter faded and he looked back up at her, she whispered, “Definitely the housecat.”
“Oh.” He smiled, but then the server arrived with the check and saved him from needing to come up with a better response.
As Helen and Tyler exited the restaurant, they were talking and laughing about something as they turned toward each other.
She could feel the happy flush in her face, and she loved the way his eyes sparkled when they met hers. They both went still,
and there was a breath suspended in time before their lips found each other. It was impossible to say who moved first. It
was a magnetic pull more than a choice or action. It was just the truth of what was always going to happen between them, and
she thought, Here comes the fall.
There on the sidewalk, with strangers passing by, Helen and Tyler kissed for the first time.
Their lips started soft and sweet and then set into an entrancing rhythm, and she felt herself fill up with a million glowing stars.
And then she was laughing again, because they were making out on the city sidewalk.
When they stepped apart, she reached for his hand and softly asked, “Do you want to come to my apartment?”
Tyler didn’t say anything, just nodded and looked at her a little like he was in awe, and she thought, Please let that look on his face be real.
Four blocks later, Helen unlocked the front door to her building, and they started kissing halfway up the stairwell. One of
the ceiling lights was burned out—the management was never on top of things—and the dark haze made it feel that much more
electrifying, forbidden even. Helen pushed Tyler against the wall, and his hands moved inside her wool coat and gripped her
waist through the thin cotton of her dress. She pressed the length of her body against his and then stepped back.
“We’re not actually in my apartment yet,” Helen said.
“Oh?” Tyler said, feigning confusion.
“This is just the stairwell.”
“Ohhh, okay. I was thinking, wow, her apartment is huge.”
Helen burst out laughing, and so did he, and then she heard someone’s door open on the second floor. She took Tyler’s hand
in hers, leading him up the stairs, and past her second-floor neighbor, a middle-aged man who always seemed to be coming and
going with a beat-up brown briefcase. She nodded hello as they passed by the neighbor, and she felt as though a sign were
hanging around her neck that announced her sexual intentions.
Once Helen and Tyler were inside her studio apartment, he took off his jacket and draped it over a chair. That was the chair
she ate breakfast on every morning, grumpy while she waited for her coffee to kick in. Now that they were no longer in the
dark stairwell, broken lights coaxing her to be bold, things felt very real. She wanted the frenzied passion back, but he
was staring at the leatherbound collection on the bookshelves in the entry.
“You have an entire collection of encyclopedias.”
“I do.”
“How very nineties of you.”
“They are from the nineties,” she said. “My mom wanted to donate them because, you know, the internet…”
Tyler smiled.
“But I couldn’t let her do that. I used to spend hours reading them as a kid.”
“You spent hours reading encyclopedias as a kid?”
“Yeah.”
Helen thought he was going to make a joke, but instead he said, “That’s really cool.”
Then he moved farther into the studio and said, “I like that,” as he took in the piece of art hanging above her couch, an
eerie painting of a woman with multicolored smoke swirling around her face. Helen’s walls were covered in weird art, inexpensive
pieces she’d found in vintage stores and junk shops around the city. She removed her coat and put it on the chair next to
his, then stepped up beside him and crossed her arms, as if they were taking it in, side by side at the Seattle Art Museum.
“Yes, yes,” she said in her most pretentious voice. “The artist really captured the many shades and nuances of life with her
use of color.”
As Helen continued to stare at the piece with an expression that she hoped appeared pensive, Tyler stole a sideways look at
her. She squinted at the art to show him this playfulness was serious business.
But then she couldn’t help herself. She inhaled deeply, followed by an exhalation that sounded so much louder than she intended.
That breath held all her desire and her nervousness and her want, and Tyler heard it loud and clear.
One moment they were standing there as pretend patrons of the art community, and the next he was grabbing her so fast that
she was squealing as she wrapped her arms around his neck, swept into how natural it felt to touch him, to be held by him.
In between kisses, Helen asked, “Is this too cliché?”
“What?”
“Sex on the first date.”
Tyler raised his eyebrows. “We’re going to have sex?”
She smacked him on the arm.
He laughed. “No, sex on the third date would be way more cliché.”
“So we’re really just being rebels.”
“Right,” he agreed and bit her bottom lip softly. “We’re rebels.”