Chapter 19
I manage to drip both queso and honey-chipotle sauce on Nick’s hoodie.
He assures me it’ll come out.
“Kira uses her sleeves as napkins most of the time,” he says, and I remember that this man regularly loads a washing machine with little skirts and socks. “I’m used to it.”
While I’m finishing the last cheesecake dumpling, Nick is down on the floor, working on what has to be his final task of the night: reassembling the dishwasher pump.
“God, you are handy,” I say, probably with my mouth full. “Do you just wander around whatever room you’re in, looking for issues to solve?”
“I wouldn’t have to wander very far in this building.” He’s hunched over an assortment of bolts and fasteners and wrenches. “I have a list of broken shit that keeps getting longer.”
I watch him put on a pair of gloves. It does something to me.
Back in grad school I had an internship where I assisted an art conservator and every time I’d watch him put on gloves and oh so carefully dab at a fragment of varnish, my crush would grow a little stronger.
It didn’t matter that his face was usually covered by a head-mounted magnifier.
And maybe Nick is tending to a dishwasher and not a priceless work of art, but this is unadulterated competence porn—involving hands—and I am looking. Not respectfully.
I get a flash of the person Nick must have been in his twenties…
dismantling all the stuff on stage that looks like it regularly electrocutes someone.
He’s so fucking good at doing things. Do I just never interact with people who are so mechanically capable?
In this confident way? Could Hal fix a dishwasher?
No. Hal would simply move to a new apartment.
Now that I’ve finished scarfing down probably eight hundred calories worth of food, I hop up onto the counter behind Nick. And yes, I’m relieved and kind of proud that I make it up there in one attempt.
“Nope.” He shakes his head. “Off the counter. That’s a health code violation.” I like how he’s concentrating on his task but able to pay attention to me at the same time. “So…where were you tonight?”
And that innocuous question pulls me right back to an hour ago at the bar and all that stupid hope and disappointment building up in my chest, followed by feeling like a complete moron for expecting something different. I make a calculated decision not to mention Hal.
“How upset would you be if I said Applebee’s?”
“Devastated.” He turns the wrench sharply, making a little clanking sound. “I probably don’t know most of the places where young, single people hang out. You could make up a name and I’d have to nod and say, ‘Oh yeah. Great bar.’ ”
“I was at Treehouse. That’s what we—I call it.” I catch myself allowing Hal into the conversation and shut the door on him. “There’s a tree trunk in the middle of the building.”
“Oh yeah.” He does an exaggerated nod. “That place. Great bar.”
“They don’t serve food. I guess that’s why I was drunk and hungry.”
“At least we took care of the hunger part. Unless you want more.”
I shake my head, and my stupid brain twists his words into all sorts of inappropriate innuendo. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m feeling the sting of rejection or because part of my mind is still focusing on Nick and his hands. How careful and precise he is.
How Hal stated, “That guy wants to sleep with you” in this matter-of-fact way. Like it was so obvious.
“I’m usually not this chaotic,” I say, even though I feel incredibly chaotic lately. “I think I’ve made a really strange impression on you.”
“I’d like to claim I’m not usually this boring, but you’ve been exposed to most of the major facets of my life. Taking Kira to the pool, sitting on the couch with a bottle of wine, and reinstalling bolts.”
“It’s not boring watching you fix things. You’re like a surgeon.”
“Maybe it’s fascinating to a drunk person.” He repositions himself on the floor, returning his attention to a stubborn bolt on the dishwasher.
“I’m not drunk.” Indeed, the buzz is starting to wear off. I suspect the heady sensation is coming from something other than cheap gin.
He gives the bolt one more twist, grunting with the effort, and grabs his screwdriver.
“When something’s broken, it’s easier to just figure out how to fix it myself. These repair guys come in and it turns out that I know the equipment better than they do. I don’t really mind doing stuff like this. It’s better than filling in corporate paperwork, which is most of my day.”
“You’re too easy.”
He glances up at me. “What?”
“You said that being on the road made you easy. Maybe you should mind sometimes.”
“Oh,” he says, chuckling. “I thought you meant easy in a different way.” He starts to reattach the front plate before abruptly setting down the screwdriver and turning around to face me. “I like your glasses,” he says, out of nowhere. “They look pretty on you.”
He has the same non sequitur tendencies as his daughter.
“Thanks,” I say, the unexpected compliment nearly derailing my train of thought. I watch him pick up the screwdriver and continue working. “What I meant was, you take on a lot of stuff. Don’t you ever need a hand with, like…anything?”
He gives the screw a last twist and looks up at me. “I’m good with my hands, remember?”
I try (again) not to stare at the hands in question and we end up making eye contact.
He stands up and takes one step toward me, and we experience the most lingering pause that ever lingered. He takes off the gloves and my weakness for good hands seizes control of my nervous system.
“Okay,” he says finally. “I’ll be upfront here because I’m not exactly sure how to read you.”
“I’m inscrutable,” I babble. My heart is racing. “I cannot be scruted—”
“I like you.”
I let that statement sit for a second; I’m waiting for the other clause. The part that’s going to nullify the liking.
He just looks at me.
“What’s the but?” I finally ask. “The rest of that sentence. The thing you’re not saying. The caveat.”
“There is no but. I like you.” He pauses. “I’m attracted to you.”
My heart hammers away all the lingering effects of alcohol. Everything’s in sharp focus now. Too sharp. Too direct. There’s no gray area, nothing open to interpretation.
“I still feel like there’s a but coming,” I say.
“I keep trying to flirt with you in the lamest ways possible because I haven’t had feelings for someone in a long time and I…want the chance to keep talking to you.”
If he’s not going to throw up the obvious barriers, I’ll do it. “But we’re neighbors. But you have a kid. But we circle different age ranges on a questionnaire.”
He winces. “Ouch.”
“Sorry,” I say automatically.
Here’s the thing: I can’t remember a time in my life where a man I haven’t already hooked up with in some capacity told me he liked me. Plain and simple. Just like that. My brain doesn’t know what to do with it. How to dissect it to get at the real intent.
“So…any response?” Nick asks after a solid fifteen seconds of watching me perform these calculations in my head. “Other than calling me old?”
“As soon as I open my mouth, I make things weird. So I don’t think I should say anything, actually.”
He laughs at that. “You’ve already said things that made it weird about a dozen times—”
“Hey!” I instinctively reach out to swat at him.
My palm is an inch and a half from its target—the familiarish but not-quite-placeable line drawing that’s tattooed on his bicep—when his other hand reaches out to stop my momentum.
There’s a light smacking sound as his hand catches my wrist just above the hem of the hoodie sleeve. Neither of us is laughing.
We stand there, too close, his fingers wrapped around my pulse point. I’m sure he can feel my unnaturally fast heartbeat.
He doesn’t let go.
There’s a moment that happens before a kiss when you’re pretty sure it’s coming, but there’s just enough of an edge of uncertainty. Usually that moment is pretty quick—like, right before you see his head tilting down and a fight-or-flight reaction kicks in.
But this one stretches.
We’re staring at each other, his hand encircling my wrist, and I don’t know what else this could build to. Any second now, his head will tilt.
Except it doesn’t.
He moves his head past my mouth, toward my ear, and just as I think he’s going for my neck (oh GOD who goes for the neck first?), his lips touch my cheek and…
…I receive an extremely wet and loud raspberry.
“That Uber lady was right,” I say, pulling back. “That is disorienting.”
“I’m sorry.” He rubs his forehead. “I’m sorry. I wanted to just…and I wasn’t sure if…”
“Oh, I—”
“I suddenly felt like this creep. And then at the last second I tried to break the tension.”
“You didn’t need to,” I say.
“I didn’t?”
“I like creeps.” Unfortunately, this is true.
Even though I can feel that nervous excitement in my chest, my gut, the back of my neck—basically every location on my body that actually tells the truth—Nick doesn’t move.
Something comes over me. I’ve never said or thought that specific cliché before, but it does. I can’t take the waiting.
I grab his shirt with my other hand and pull him toward me. Maybe it’s more of a yank. Impetuous and half formed. For a card-carrying overthinker, I am underthinking everything I do and say to Nick.
He must’ve been waiting for me to make the first move because he tugs the hoodie off my shoulders about 0.3 seconds later.
Three or four things happen at once. We bump noses and my glasses hit his forehead and there’s no finesse to this kiss—our hands are grabbing at each other’s clothes, chaotically searching for skin. It’s so good to be wanted that I’m feeling dizzy.
My nails dig into his back—maybe I’m trying to keep my knees from buckling—and I feel something physically between us that I don’t remember ever feeling.
It’s like the tension between two magnets of the same pole—the kind that are supposed to repulse each other.
When I was a kid I would always try to smash those against one another—pushing these two little magnets together to kiss and feeling the funny little force in the air between them, resisting it.
There’s a gravity in that little space between our bodies.
This peculiar feeling in the pit of my stomach, pulling me in, while some equal, opposite force tells me to hold back.
I close my eyes and push past it. I need to see what happens next.
What happens is the best kind of chaos: an uncinematic kiss where our heads are moving too fast and we’re hyped up on pheromones or the potent molecules of Chili’s seasoning floating in the air.
I’m not sure why we’re rushing. It’s like a dream where you’re about to get to the good part with someone but you feel like you’re on the edge of waking up, so you need to hurry it along while you can still hold the illusion together.
Just me?
I think this is the first time I’ve literally groaned while making out with someone.
His hands move across my shoulders, down my spine, up to the back of my head—which sometimes I don’t like, but I like it now. Kind of a lot.
At some point, our shirts come off and I’m not sure who grabbed at which piece of fabric to make that happen. His chest presses into me and all of him is warm and solid against my cold, goose-bumpy skin.
I’m not thinking about anything: none of the buts, only ands and yeses. My lizard brain is at the wheel and it’s not heeding traffic signals or checking mirrors.
My lower back presses painfully into the stainless steel corner of the cold station. The little screws and fasteners he’d been carefully reattaching to the dishwasher clatter to the ground with a series of tiny metallic plinks.
He says fuck under his breath, but I don’t think it’s because of the screws.
Or maybe it is, because he pulls away suddenly and says, “Hang on a minute.”
I don’t know what else to do, so I pull my T-shirt back over my head and prepare myself for a serious discussion about what a wild mistake that was and how he should’ve stopped it ten minutes ago. But can we please still be friends and/or neighbors?
I’ve heard this refrain before. I have it memorized.
“I should really—”
“Come home with me?”
There’s silence as we stand facing each other, confused.
“Do you want to come to my place?” he says.
I’m trying to extricate myself from the catastrophizing thought spiral I leapt into ten seconds ago. When things come to a screeching halt, I like a quick escape.
“Don’t you need to finish, the, uh…” I glance down at the screws and washers strewn all over the kitchen floor.
“I really don’t think I can focus on a dishwasher right now.” He rubs his temple and lets out a chuckle.
“Is something…funny?” I pick his hoodie up off the floor.
“No,” he says. “I mean, yes, I’m laughing at myself.
I’m the one who’s nervous here. I just…I just couldn’t let things go further on the floor of a Chili’s.
” He grabs my hand again. “Definitely not next to a promotional sign for the Ultimate Cajun Pasta.” That gets a tiny laugh out of me.
“Let me lock up and I’ll drive you back home. ”