finn
CHAPTER NINE
I showered twice, which wasn’t something I made a habit of before a first date, and decided somewhere around the second rinse that it had more to do with the run I’d gone on that afternoon than with the fact that this particular name had been picked by someone I still trusted with my life.
And with the rest of my life, apparently.
Nice try, brain. I toweled off and told it to shut up.
The truth of it was, I had spent weeks going out on dates, not letting myself just hook up at random, and waiting for Mr. Perfect to sweep me off my feet.
And if this last attempt didn’t land me a happily ever after, it would at least get me laid.
La Taqueria sat on the corner of Birch and Fifth, with lights strung low enough over the patio that anyone over average height had to duck under them going in, which I was, so I ducked.
Somebody had painted the outside wall a blue that had faded down to the color of a pale summer sky, and a chalkboard by the door still advertised a Thursday special that had clearly been up there since sometime in August. The smell hit before the door did.
Charred onion, lime, and something sweet underneath that I never could place.
He was already at a table when I got in, which by now felt like an unwritten rule nobody had mentioned to me.
Corner booth, back to the wall, one boot up on the opposite bench like the place belonged to him.
The mustache from the photo was real, and it suited him better than I’d expected.
Ink climbed one side of his neck from somewhere under his collar, faded soft enough at the edges that I’d have guessed it was older than it looked.
He’d caught sight of me before I caught sight of him and lifted two fingers off the table, something between a wave and a salute.
“Finn,” he said, not really a question, half rising to shake my hand like we’d met at a conference and not through somebody’s spreadsheet. “Alejandro.”
We sat down. A server dropped two waters and a basket of chips between us as a welcome gift.
“So,” he said, once I’d gotten myself settled. “Full disclosure, I have no idea what I’m doing here.”
“Join the club.”
“No, I mean it,” he said, turning his water glass a quarter rotation, like he was just a bit imperfect before. “Some guys came over at a bar and struck up a conversation. Next thing I knew, I was being polled, and they were getting excited.”
“A tall jock and a cute nerd?” I asked.
“Those would be the ones, yes,” Alejandro said, laughing. “But then they went quiet, and I forgot all about it until Jason called me up yesterday.”
“Mm, the committee needed a few days to make the final selection,” I said, not mentioning that the final pick was referred to a higher authority. A freelancer who maybe knew me better than he was willing to admit. Or maybe he was throwing a wild guess.
We ordered too much food, mostly because neither of us wanted to be the one who suggested less, and somewhere between his carne asada and my attempt at a dish, whose name I mangled with real confidence, he told me he was two years into a nursing program and picked up ride-alongs on weekends with a cousin who drove for the county.
“Mostly,” he said, “because I like knowing what to do with my hands when things go sideways.”
“Give me an example,” I said. “Of sideways.”
He thought about it, chewing in a way that told me he had at least six good ones stacked up and was deciding which wouldn’t ruin dinner. “Guy tried to prove to his fraternity brothers he could eat a whole ghost pepper on a dare. We got called because he was positive his throat was closing.”
“Was it?”
“No. Try telling a twenty-year-old his throat isn’t closing while he’s convinced God personally installed a pepper in there to kill him.” He shook his head with amusing fondness. “We gave him milk and a stern talk.”
I laughed loud enough that the couple at the next table looked over, and I meant every bit of it, and for a second the whole evening felt like it might just go somewhere good and uncomplicated.
“Family thing?” I asked, nodding at his neck when the tattoo caught the light.
“My sister.” He didn’t elaborate and didn’t need to. “She’d tell you it’s tacky. She’s wrong.”
He asked what I studied, and I said business, mostly because it was true and easier to say than the truth, which was that I didn’t fully know yet, and I was midway through explaining my family’s various ventures to a guy who was visibly humoring me when I caught a thread of something in the air.
Woodsmoke, maybe, off somebody’s jacket two tables over, and underneath that, so faint I might have invented it, sea breeze.
I lost my own sentence for a second. Alejandro either didn’t notice or was decent enough to pretend he hadn’t.
His phone buzzed. He held up one finger, mouthed sister, and ducked out toward the patio to take it, and I sat there alone with a basket of chips and no good reason to be thinking about anything except how well this was going.
I thought about Jesse anyway.
Not on purpose. It came the way it had all week, out of nowhere, uninvited: two in the morning during the storm, lying on my side with a full extra foot of mattress unclaimed between us because I’d been careful to leave it there, and how he’d smelled like my spare T-shirt and something underneath the T-shirt that wasn’t mine at all.
I hadn’t asked what it was. I’d wanted to put my face against his shoulder and find out properly, which wasn’t a thing you did to a guy you’d grown up with, historically, as a rule, one I appeared to have invented for the first time that exact night.
Through the glass, Alejandro laughed at something his sister said, head tipped back, easy about it, a whole separate life going on out there that had nothing to do with me.
I thought, not for the first time that week, that there was something wrong with a guy who could sit across from precisely what he’d have ordered off a menu and still end up thinking about someone else in their spare T-shirt.
He came back in apologizing, dropped into the booth, and asked where we’d left off. Business ventures, I told him. He said God help him, and I laughed again, and meant that too, and decided I was allowed to hold both those things at once for one night if I had to.
The water went over about twenty minutes later, his elbow catching the glass mid-gesture while he did an impression of his tia that required both hands, and it went wide, missed the salsa by an inch, and caught the edge of my sleeve instead.
He apologized so fast and so thoroughly, grabbing napkins, dabbing at my arm like it was a genuine emergency and not a stripe of lime water, that I ended up laughing and telling him to stop before he mummified my whole forearm.
“I’m very good in controlled situations,” he said, mortified. “Uncontrolled ones, less so.”
“You’re an EMT.”
“I’m aware of how that sounds.”
It was a good bit, and I told him so, and he took a small, seated bow.
The server came by to ask about another round, and Alejandro ordered before I’d finished deciding whether I wanted one, which I appreciated more than I probably should have, since it meant not having to decide anything for a minute.
“For what it’s worth,” he said later, scraping the last of the guac with a chip that had already broken in half once, “I apparently looked good on paper. Somebody built a whole case for me.”
“You did,” I said. “You do.”
“But?”
I hadn’t said “but.” I don’t think I’d even let myself think it where it showed, and yet there it sat between us anyway, waiting for an answer I didn’t have.
“No but,” I said. “Just tired. Long week.”
He let it go easily, without expectations.
Somewhere around the second round, he asked, point blank, what my type was, no runway into it at all, which should have felt like a strange question on a blind date and somehow didn’t, not from him, because he asked it the way you’d ask what somebody wanted off a menu. Low stakes. Genuinely curious.
“I don’t know,” I said, which was true and also the safest lie available to me. “Smart, I guess. Funny without trying too hard at it.”
“Very specific,” he said. “A whole personality test in six words.”
“What’s yours?”
“Someone who laughs at the ghost pepper story.” He pointed his chip at me. “You passed, for the record.”
Something should have landed solid when he said that, the exact click I’d been telling my friends for three years I was waiting on, and for one full second, I thought maybe it had.
But then, my next thought was about telling Jesse what a great choice he’d made for this date. Maybe you know me after all.
When the check came, I got to it first, mostly because it felt like the least I owed him, some material proof I’d been present for at least part of the evening.
“I was going to fight you for that,” he said. “Weakly.”
“I could tell.”
He walked me out, hands in his pockets, and asked, with no weight behind it, if I wanted to come up. His place was two blocks over. Good tequila. No roommates, just a retired old tomcat named Lionel Purrington the Third, Lion for short.
I actually thought about it. I want that on the record, that I stood there under a string of lights and ran the data points the way Bennet would have wanted me to. Good guy. Funny. Kind to strangers on the worst night of their lives for a living. Every box checked, all the way down.
“I think I’m gonna head back, actually,” I said. “Genuinely had a good time. I just think I should go home tonight.”
“Yeah,” he said, and didn’t argue it, which somehow made it worse.
He studied me for a second, head tilted, not unkind about any of it.
“You’ve been somewhere else all night, you know.
Not in a rude way. In a very specific, very far away way.
Like you were doing this whole date from inside a memory of a different one. ”
I opened my mouth to argue and came up with nothing to argue. I’d never even gotten that other date to remember him by. I’d only gotten him crashing a coffee date his roommate hadn’t bothered to show up for.
“Whoever it was,” he said, “I hope it works out. And if it doesn’t, you’ve got my number, and I make genuinely great migas.”
He kissed my cheek quickly, no weight to it at all, then headed off toward the corner with his hands still in his pockets, whistling something I didn’t recognize, looking exactly like a guy who’d be fine by the time he crossed the street.
I stood there for a second longer than I needed to, feeling caught out at something I hadn’t consciously admitted to doing.
The walk back to BEL house went through the quad if you did it right, past the library, down two streets I could’ve managed blindfolded after three years of doing them exactly that way.
I didn’t do them that way tonight. I noticed, somewhere past the science building, that I’d gone the long way around without deciding to, past the vending machine that ate more quarters than it ever gave snacks for, and further still, right up to the front steps of a dorm that had absolutely nothing to recommend it as a shortcut to anywhere, because it wasn’t a shortcut. It was just where Jesse lived.
I’d already been there once that week. Wednesday. Holding a shirt in the hallway and not getting invited past the door.
I walked on, into the building with a loose lock, up the stairs, and to his door. I stood there for a minute, working out how I’d ended up there and didn’t get anywhere useful with it, and knocked anyway, before I’d fully decided to knock.
Something thudded inside. Jesse’s voice came through the door already mid-complaint. “You’d better be decent this time, Malcolm, because I am not doing a repeat of last Tuesday…”
The door swung open on wet hair and a towel slung low and no shirt at all, and whatever he’d been about to say next just stopped, like how a record stops when somebody lifts the needle mid-track.
He wasn’t looking at Malcolm.
He was looking at me.