14. Chapter 14
Chapter 14
Jake
I went into the karaoke bar a few minutes early, hoping to settle into the ambience and feel comfortable. The text I received made that very difficult.
Gabe : We're so sorry, but we're going to have to cancel. I'm late with a meeting and Lina has to go help Lucía with something. After my meeting I'm going to help Lina and Lucía, too
Lina : I'm so sorry! We'll make it up to you guys. I hope you and Vi have fun
Gabe : we'll schedule another one, I promise
I found a small table and sat on the stool, contemplating my options. After our conversation at the restaurant a few days before, Vi and I had a common objective— to learn to spend time together without devolving into dangerous territory.
Years and years of pining and restraint, all gone as soon as we spent time together alone. Without Gabe and Lina, karaoke left us testing the strength of our wills. Considering how easily we showed our cards to each other; how her mere presence seemed to push me to the edge, an evening alone might be playing with fire.
I didn't get to reach a conclusion before Vi appeared by my side.
"Hey! Gabe and Lina aren't here yet?" she asked.
"I guess you haven't checked your texts?"
"No— what happened?" She took out her phone.
I answered anyway. "They can't make it."
Her eyes ran over her screen, before she lifted her sight to me, her body still. "Oh. What do you want to do?"
She still had her bag hanging from her shoulder and her phone in her hand. We shared a long gaze as we assessed each other.
The place, until then only playing some background music, broke into the first karaoke song of the night. Someone started singing a recent pop song that had made the rounds on the radio.
Vi shifted her eyes to the stage, then back to me, and humor lit her sight. It brought a small smile to my lips.
She let out a resigned chuckle. "We can do it. Right? Just spend a casual, friendly night at karaoke. We'll sing a few songs, have a drink, then go home. We can totally do it. We're friends!"
I scoffed, allowing my amusement to show through. "Absolutely. We can be friends. I'll sing a song or two, you will, too, and we'll call it a night."
"Then when Gabe and Lina ask, we can tell them we had fun, and it'll be the truth. Nothing suspicious."
"Excellent." I snorted. "Get comfortable. I'll go get us drinks."
Twenty minutes later, with beers and a shareable plate of loaded fries between us, we searched the song binder for options.
Her eyes roamed the plastified pages. "I say we have fun. Let's sing a couple of songs and eat these fries— An innocent good time between adults who only have platonic feelings for each other."
I sighed. "That's what the doctor ordered. Getting joy out of singing in front of people. Let's add… zest."
"Zest! Joie de vivre! That's what we're here for. Nothing else."
"I think it's a boy band kind of night. What do you think?" I flipped through the pages and found B. "Maybe I'll start with Backstreet Boys. But we can do *NSYNC, or go older and do New Kids on the Block. Hell, we can even go British and try Take That."
"Let's make it a BSB night." She laughed. "If you sing something like ‘I Want It That Way’, I will not read anything into it."
I gave her a playful smile and found the code for the song. "Good to know, because I'm definitely singing that one first."
I texted the code and grinned at her.
"Oh, that's fun." Mirth still shone on her gestures. She flipped back to the B section herself. "I'm going to start with ‘Quit Playing Games With My Heart’. For no reason at all."
I let laughter explode out of me, loud and free, and the grin she offered in return filled me with sparkly, grateful awe.
I didn't even remember to be nervous, when we sang the songs while pointing at each other.
Drinks half drunk and plate half full, Vi took to the stage for her second song.
"This song is for no one in particular," she said into the mic, right before 'I Wanna Be With You' started playing, and she sang her heart out.
Even through lyrics about wanting each other and waiting, fully making fun of our situation, we had fun. We cheered, we laughed, and we kept choosing songs that we could have dedicated to each other on a late night radio show.
So I sang 'All I Have To Give', and she sang 'Don't Go Breaking My Heart'. We had a couple of beers, at the end, and finished all the food. It was a few hours of conversation and banter and laughter and, by the time we decided to call it a night, my chest was light enough to forget Vi and I had been stuck for weeks.
In fact, in my mind, I kept thinking of it as a date.
"Did you call a driver?" I asked her as we walked out of the building. "We can share mine if you like."
"I did. They'll be here any minute now."
"I'll wait. Mine will be here in about ten."
She nodded and gave me a brilliant smile; a free one, like she rarely directed my way. "How did you like it tonight? It didn't seem like it was that hard to sing."
"It wasn't." I grinned back. "I had lots of fun."
"Now we don't even have to lie, if Gabe or Lina ask."
"That feels good. We really had fun. We did it, Vi. We were friends tonight."
"Singing songs that we did not mean." Her smile widened.
I laughed again. "The lyrics for the songs we chose? No meaning behind them. At all."
She shook her head, enjoying the absurdity of our charade with me. But we stretched the moment too long, until the tension broke the elastic fibers keeping it in place.
Our smiles disappeared slowly as we gazed at each other. We stood face-to-face near the karaoke place's door; the night was warm, and she held a light jacket over her interlocked fingers.
This time, the tilt of her lips aimed for a smile, but there was wistfulness to it.
"I'm glad you enjoyed singing," she said. "You really have a wonderful voice."
"Thank you. It really was fun. Singing like that with no worries… and spending time with you like we simply enjoy each other's company."
"I did— I enjoyed your company." She pushed her lips to the side, and this time the humor in her gesture seemed genuine. "It's good to know that underneath everything that's been going on the past few weeks, we still can just… have a good time."
"We did it, Vi." I put my hands in my pockets and smiled at her. "We can be friends."
"It would look that way, yes." She raised an eyebrow. "To anyone looking, we're friends."
I gazed up and down the street. No familiar company vehicles had shown up yet.
"I'm sure that some people out there wondered if it was a date." I cocked my head. "But we know the truth."
She gave me a slow nod. "Not a date."
I quirked the corner of my lips. "Not a date."
She opened her hands in a tremulous invitation for a hug. "And this is a friendly hug goodnight, after a platonic, not-a-date evening together."
"Yep." I stepped closer and enveloped her in my arms. "Nothing romantic about it."
She splayed her hands on my back and pulled; I did the same, until our bodies aligned and the hills of our torsos melded together. I pressed my cheek to her temple, and she seemed to melt into the embrace. I brought her closer, hoping she would lean on me, put her weight on me, so I could be her pillar for the few seconds we could steal in this hug.
She took a deep breath I could feel against my chest. "I'm not going to kiss you goodnight. Not even on the cheek like we do in Chile."
"You shouldn't." I gulped. "We won't."
But I lowered my head and she brought hers up, until we were cheek to cheek.
"We're not starting anything," she whispered. "We're still not romantically involved."
I wet my bottom lip. "We're still just Vi and Jake, and we're… something."
She pulled back slowly, so our noses touched for a brief instant. Her breath hitched, and I felt it on my lips.
She lifted her face to me, still clutching to me the way I held her close.
"I don't know a language that has a word for what we are," she said. "But we're staying here for a little while."
"At the letter of the law… if not in its spirit."
"One week until you're a VP, Jake." She took a deep breath, let it out in a long sigh, and stepped back. "Technicalities are all we have left."
My arms felt empty, my chest cold, without her close.
"Thank you for staying here and having fun with me, Vi."
We both glanced at the car parking by us on the street. I checked my watch; this would be her driver.
"Goodnight, Jake." Her lips curled at the corners. "I can't wait to hear you sing one of your songs one day."
"Goodnight, Vi."
And I watched her leave me alone on the sidewalk again, aching for her love and a day where we didn't have to pretend friendship was all that we had.