Chapter Fourteen
In the dark of the movie theater the following weekend, she can feel Evan next to her. She doesn’t need light to know he’s there. The warmth coming off him being so close, the smell of his cologne, it’s all so uniquely him, she wishes they weren’t in a packed movie theater, just so she could have more of him to herself. They’ve only just started officially dating, and she wants to take things slow, but her body betrays her sometimes, a tightness below her gut that coils with lust and makes it hard for her to notice anything else.
Horny, she’s horny. There’s no other way around it. And it’s driving her insane.
Breathing the same air he does makes her feel like she needs to handcuff herself to the nearest stationary object or else she might jump him because she wants him so badly; it would be the easiest thing in the world to give herself over to him. But she usually manages to hold herself back, finds ways to calm herself down, to stay in control for one more day. But she’s always had an active imagination, and now it’s too easy to imagine what they would do if they were alone in the theater. How she would leap into his lap and yank his sweatshirt over his head, how he would squeeze her ass, pulling her closer. How his hands would wind under her skirt, how his fingers would tease at her skin. How she’d kiss him so long and hard that both their lips were swollen and pink and they would—
Jolting her out of her fantasy, Evan’s hand slips into hers, sweet as can be. By the pale glow of the movie screen, she can see his profile and the smile that lifts his cheeks. She knows he can’t read her mind, but for a brief, panicked moment she wonders what if he could and how embarrassing that would be. Heat on her face lets her know she’s blushing hard, and she gives him an embarrassed smile in return. She’s being so ridiculous, but he doesn’t have to know that.
He doesn’t let go of her hand for the rest of the movie, or even after the movie ends, or as they walk outside.
“Tonight was really great,” Evan says. He tips his head back, breathing in the night air. Only then does he let her hand go as he tucks his in his jeans pockets against the brisk wind that sweeps down the street. He does that a lot, tucking his hands into his pockets.
It’s easier to notice those quirks more often. How he can only raise his left eyebrow or both—never the right on its own—or how his ears lift when he smiles, or how he twists his wrists before he starts typing a new article as if he’s warming up. But her favorite is when he steps up to any bookshelf he comes across, picks up a random book, and flips to an equally random page to read a couple of paragraphs before setting it back in its place and moving on, like he’s sneaking into a show during intermission and sneaking back out again before he’s caught.
What feels like ages ago, she thought she had him all figured out, and still he has ways of surprising her. Like now, when he asks, “Would you like to come over to my place tomorrow? You can finally meet Tallulah.”
Dalisay’s smile falls a little. That coil inside of her winds up again. “I don’t know.”
Evan’s brows knit together, concerned. “You don’t like dogs? Are you allergic?”
“No! It’s not that …” She licks her lips and looks off to the middle distance, as if there she’d find a way to explain it.
Why did she say that? Why is she still holding back? Why is she so afraid of being happy? What is she afraid of ? Evan isn’t Luke. She’s a tangled mess of conflicting desire. She doesn’t want to disrespect her family’s wishes and have sex before marriage, but she wants to lose her virginity to Evan. And yet she isn’t sure she’s ready to physically bare herself to someone yet, but she knows deep down she can trust Evan not to hurt her. And to make everything worse, she’s terrified of the desire that rages through her. It’s a brand-new feeling, and she doesn’t know how to wield it. She’s never felt like this about anyone, not even Luke. And she’s certain that being with Evan is everything she wants, but she won’t let herself have him. It’s such a mess inside her brain, it’s a miracle she’s still standing. “I’m sorry,” she says, after what feels like an eternity.
Evan looks surprised, then lets out a breathy laugh and shakes his head. “If you think I’m trying to get you in bed—” He holds up two fingers in some sort of salute that Dalisay doesn’t understand and crosses his heart with his other hand. “Scout’s honor, I’m not. I’ve been over to your house dozens of times by now. I thought you’d want to …” He trails off, biting his lip, because he notices the way Dalisay’s face is bright red. Another quirk of his, lip biting when he’s trying to think of what to say.
Evan looks confused, and he shifts his weight from one hip to the other.
Why is her heart pounding so hard?
Gently, Evan takes her hands and looks deep into her eyes. Sincerity is always in style, especially on him.
“It’s normal for people who are in a relationship to see each other’s homes,” he says, gently nodding and smiling. “But you don’t have to come over if you don’t want to.”
It occurs to Dalisay that she hasn’t the faintest idea what “normal” means in America.
Dalisay steels herself, standing on Evan’s porch. Her nerves twist and turn inside of her, competing for the warmth spreading in her belly at the thought of finally going into his home. Alone.
It’s only lunch, she reminds herself. She checks her reflection in the glass of his front door and smooths out the creases of her sweater, a last chance to make sure she looks her best for Evan. She curled her hair, put on lip gloss, even used some of her favorite jasmine perfume. Why is she so nervous suddenly? The coil in her gut feels like it’s about to spring.
She rings the doorbell with shaking fingers. Immediately, she hears a small dog barking.
“It’s okay, Tallulah! It’s just Dalisay!” she hears Evan say behind the door. He opens it and immediately she’s overwhelmed by the smell of fresh-baked bread. Evan stands in an apron, wearing a smile and a black T-shirt with a smudge of flour around the neck.
A little brown dog leaps at Dalisay, tail wagging, jumping up on hind legs to greet her.
“Hello!” Dalisay says, leaning down, letting the dog sniff the back of her hand. “You must be Tallulah. I’ve heard so much about you.”
Tallulah takes kindly to that, licking Dalisay’s hand enthusiastically.
“Come in!” Evan says, beckoning her inside. Tallulah leads the way and Dalisay follows.
Evan’s condo is, strangely enough, exactly how she imagined: minimalist and monochromatic. Evan likes his whites, blacks, and grays. Everything is neat and clean, save for the towers of books leaning against the walls. A plush dark gray couch stands opposite a large TV and dozens of maps of all different sizes, origins, and orientations decorate the walls. His home is simple, but not boring; mature, but not cold; organized, and yet somewhat chaotic. Most importantly, it’s all Evan.
“I was just making some focaccia,” Evan says. “You’d better be hungry.”
“I’m starving.” She had no idea Evan could cook.
He brings her to a kitchen where glass double doors overlook a small patio garden. The garden is bursting with color, the only place in his house that isn’t monochromatic, and he brought some flowers inside to sit on a small vase on the table. Evan went all out making lunch. Caesar salad, pancetta and pesto pasta, antipasto skewers, shrimp-stuffed avocado. Everything looks delicious.
“I mistimed the focaccia, so it’ll be a few extra minutes until it’s ready,” Evan says, leaning down to peer through the oven window. “Hope you don’t mind waiting.”
Dalisay’s heart swells. “I don’t mind. I never figured you were the home chef type.”
“Traveling so much, I crave foods from all the places I go. Sometimes the only thing I can do is learn how to make them myself.”
“You’ll have to teach me sometime,” she says. Her heart skips when he smiles at her and pours her a glass of red wine. When he hands it to her, he swoops in and kisses her, tasting like olive oil and salt. Like a proper cook, he’s been tasting the food.
After stealing her breath, he leans back and smiles. “Hi. Can’t believe I forgot to do that earlier.”
The blush creeps its way up her face. The pressure below her gut builds and she searches for a distraction. “Want to show me around?”
“Sure, we’ve got time.” He unties the apron, then takes her by the hand.
His condo has a lot of space for one man and his tiny dog. It has two bedrooms, one for himself, and the other he’s turned into an office. His office is the messiest, most chaotic room in the whole house. Seemingly every wall is covered in maps.
“I collect them,” he says when he notices her looking. “Kind of a weird hobby, I know.”
“It’s not weird.”
Evan grins. “It’s a little weird.”
His office has a desk stacked with books, a lamp, and a wide filing cabinet as large as one wall. One of Tallulah’s dog beds is situated in a corner, surrounded by even more books. It smells like paper here and immediately Dalisay feels at home.
“Sorry about the mess,” he says.
Dalisay sets her wine down on top of the filing cabinet. “Do you work in here?”
“Sometimes. Write, read, research.”
“Using maps?”
“Maps can tell you a lot, not just about the place charted, but the people who charted it. Here, look, let me show you.” He goes to a cabinet and pulls one of the thin drawers open. The drawer is about an inch deep, but Dalisay can see a stack of maps laid out inside. He flips through a few and brings one out, laying it flat on the desk. It’s of Ancient Greece, with Greece surrounded by Africa, Europe, and Asia and then the oceans like rings, the dimensions completely skewed from modern satellite imagery. “It’s not so much a map as it is the idea of one,” says Evan.
“Navigation by vibes only.”
Evan laughs. “Exactly.” His gaze lingers on her for a minute, and then he clears his throat and turns back to the cabinet drawers, pulling out another one. It’s an explosion of saturated reds, blues, and yellows with hundreds of detailed geographic illustrations and illuminated texts. “Fra Mauro. It’s one of the biggest maps from medieval Europe. Notice how south is oriented at the top.”
Dalisay traces her fingers over the print. The lines look so textured, she almost thinks she can feel them popping out of the page. The world seems so different turned upside down.
Evan pulls out another map. “Now this one is my favorite.”
It’s a map of North America, or rather, it looks like someone’s best guess at what North America looks like, as if they’d heard about it from a friend of a friend of a friend. Noticeably, the western part of America is labeled as an island.
“Cartographers used to think California was this magical, mythical island,” Evan says. “Like, early European colonizers mistook the Baja Peninsula for one, and the rumor spread as other cartographers kept copying the same map. California became this fantastical place, separated from the rest of the land, as more and more maps were re-created based off that misconception for hundreds of years.”
“People didn’t check?” Dalisay asks, amused. “Could have asked the natives.”
“It only took them two hundred years.”
Dalisay laughs and so does Evan. Seeing him like this warms her heart. He’s so excited to show her the maps, she can tell he doesn’t get to talk about his collection all that often. They riffle through more maps, and Dalisay lets Evan rattle off historical details, realizing she could listen to him for hours. This whole time she thought cosplay and D&D was the geekiest thing about him. He’s a lot nerdier than he lets on.
“Growing up, with my parents’ work schedule and stuff, we didn’t really travel all that much. And I think they kind of hated each other by the time I was actually making memories anyway.” He lets out a small laugh. “So the only way I could travel was through books or movies. I remember being fascinated by the first Indiana Jones and those map sequences, and how they had so much texture and how the soundtrack made everything feel so … epic. I would rewind that part over and over and learned everything I could, and I even got to a point where I found mistakes, like anachronistic country names. I was so obnoxious when I was little, I would tell anyone within earshot that Siam wasn’t Thailand until 1939.” He smiles at her, his whole face bright, and Dalisay can’t help but smile back.
It’s clear he could talk about this forever, but the timer on his phone goes off. “The focaccia. I’ll be right back.”
When he leaves, Dalisay brings out another huge map, this time a map of the world. She spreads it over the entirety of the desk and her eyes glaze over all the words, simply taking in the shape of the world, and her mind drifts. It’s crazy to think that she started on one side of the map, and now she’s on another. She traces her hand over the archipelagos of the Philippines. It feels so small on the page, only an arm’s length from Manila to San Francisco. It doesn’t capture the enormity of the distance. Sometimes it feels like she left so much behind … and yet there’s still so much more of the world she wants to see. While her father always said, remember where you came from, that was only half the saying. When she won that writing contest, he said to her, his hand warm on her shoulder, “Remember where you came from, but also remember where you’re going.” It’s easy for Dalisay to forget that last part, especially since he’s not here anymore.
When Evan returns, Dalisay is still looking at the map, her thoughts a million miles away.
“Do you think we could make our own map someday?” she asks, lifting a shoulder.
Evan comes to her side, bringing the smell of bread with him. “Like, go on a trip together?”
“Why not? Cartography can’t be too hard, can it? I bet we wouldn’t make California an island.”
Evan’s smile goes wide. “No, we would not.”
“So then, where would we go?”
Either the wine is getting to her head, or it’s getting warm in here.
Evan looks at the world map in front of him, his brown eyes catching the light and turning to honey. He points, tracing his finger down the boot of Italy. “Rome. It’s the most romantic place in the world.”
“Oh,” says Dalisay. “The most romantic? How do you know if you haven’t been everywhere else first?”
Evan’s large hands splay on the map, and Dalisay’s eyes linger on them before Evan says, “You’re right. I haven’t seen everything. Where would you take me?”
She puts her hand over his and draws it across the paper, using his finger to point. “Hoi An, Vietnam. The Old Town, beaches, paper lantern festival.” She leads his hand again, appreciating the warmth of his skin. “Kyoto, Japan. Temples, yakitori, bright pink cherry blossoms.” She leans over, and her hair brushes against Evan’s forearm. “Bhutan. Tiger’s Nest Monastery, natural hot springs, snow-capped mountains.”
Evan teases, “I thought you didn’t like going on hikes. You’d want to trek the Himalayas?”
“With the right person,” she says.
And all at once, he goes still, realizing what she means. It’s only after she says it does she realize what she means.
She could fall into his eyes, they’re standing close, so close now, she can see every detail of him, each hair in his stubble, every single one of his eyelashes, a small scar above his upper lip.
This is what she was worried about. This feeling right here.
Evan’s eyes flick back and forth a few times, looking at her, taking her in. He moves as if to pull back, but she doesn’t let his hand go. She wants him to read her like a place on a map.
“Should we …,” he asks, his voice barely a breath. “Do you want …?”
And she kisses him.