Chapter Eight #3
“No, they don’t,” he says. “They want me to be who they think I am, and I indulge them. They like the performance.”
What I’m feeling isn’t empathy, exactly.
I’m precisely the kind of woman that most people don’t like: too prickly, too unaccommodating, too much the career-obsessed harpy that every early 2000s rom-com sought to fix with the power of love.
But I get it. On the occasion when being liked has been necessary, the box I’ve had to fold myself into has always felt constricting.
“Then stop performing,” I say, matter-of-fact. “Just be you.”
The look that Julian gives me is half exasperation, half affection. He opens his mouth to respond when a hand taps him on the shoulder from behind.
Julian turns, and I have to school myself not to gape.
The young woman standing behind him is movie star striking, with feathered bangs and a perfect smoky eye. She looks chic in an ankle-length duster, unbuttoned to reveal a slender figure that turns her simple black shirt and jeans into a statement.
“Hi. Sorry to interrupt,” she says, acknowledging me with a brief glance. “But is that vintage Burberry?”
Julian straightens and gives her an answer, and I shrink as blood rushes to my face.
A woman is flirting with my date, and he is flirting back.
Well, okay, flirting might be an exaggeration, but he is engaged in a conversation about his coat, the small signs in the stitching that the beautiful woman (“Alicia,” she says) used to verify it as the real deal.
The only time I’ve ever commented on Julian’s distinctively posh style has been to poke fun at it, but Alicia appreciates it, can pick out the value of his pieces on sight.
They look good together, like they would be paired for a magazine photo shoot or cast opposite each other in a romantic comedy.
Anyone passing by would assume that they were a couple, and I just an awkward bystander struck still by their beauty.
I realize, suddenly, that what I am feeling is insecurity, and the twist in my stomach that comes soon after is shame.
“Where did you get it? I’ve been hunting for one forever,” Alicia asks. She reaches for his lapel, trails a finger down it in a caress. “Maybe you can show me your favorite thrifting haunts?”
Julian takes a full step out of her reach. The rejection is anything but subtle, and Alicia and I simultaneously flinch.
“Please don’t touch me,” he says with a smile so tight with disgust that I wilt with secondhand embarrassment.
Alicia rears back as if she’s been slapped.
“S-Sorry,” she stammers. “Sorry, I just…I didn’t think…”
Julian nods patiently, like he’s pretending to understand a babbling toddler.
“Right,” he says. Then he turns his smile to me, and his expression softens. “I should get back to my date. Good luck with your search.”
“Ah,” Alicia says. Her eyes drift to me, tick up from my sensible DSW boots to my polyester blend TJ Maxx dress and linger on my fading roots. “Sorry, ma’am. Didn’t realize he was your man.”
I bite down hard on my tongue to keep from saying something I regret—but I don’t have to. Because Julian tugs me tight into his side.
“You didn’t?” he says warmly, lifting my chin toward his face. “But we look so good together.”
The way he’s looking at me, I’m surprised I don’t burst into flames. Alicia clears her throat, then excuses herself with a muttered Have a good day.
Once she’s shuffled out of sight, Julian lowers his hand, and my stomach somersaults back into place.
“That was kind of mean,” I mumble, fixed somewhere between pity, because that poor girl will be replaying that interaction in her head for the rest of her life, and schadenfreude, because calling me “ma’am” was absolutely unnecessary and so maybe she deserved it.
“Well, you did just tell me to stop performing. Maybe being ‘kind of mean’ is my natural state.” He smirks. “So? What do you think? Do you like me a little less?”
The truth is that I like him a little more, but admitting that out loud feels like a disservice to poor Alicia. So instead I tell him through touch, lace my fingers through his and bite my cheek when he squeezes them.
“I think we’re done here,” I say. “Next stop?”
“As you wish,” Julian says.
The New Art exhibition at Hyde Park Art Center is larger than I expected.
Every medium possible is represented on the large white walls and concrete gray floors: rich, colorful textiles next to pieces that look like textiles but are exquisitely molded clay, TV screens with grotesque but arresting imagery and inscrutable titles like Leishmaniasis.
Julian wanders the floor ahead of me, assessing the pieces with a curator’s focus, hands clasped behind his back.
He stops at one, then looks over his shoulder for me.
“What do you think of this one?”
I jog to catch up. The piece he wants to show me is an oil painting.
It’s small, not much bigger than the sixteen by twenty posters I have on my gallery wall in my apartment, but I can understand why it stopped him in his tracks.
A woman, rendered in black and white, huddles in a blanket that consumes the entirety of the canvas, like she’s wrapping herself in the empty space.
One eye stares out from under the fold overhead, and it captures me head-on, both fearful and defiant.
It’s the look of a cornered animal that has chosen fight instead of flight, one who is ready to lay her life down in defense of it.
I don’t have Julian’s eye for fine art, but I know that this makes me feel something, and that means it’s good.
“It’s…” I search for the word. “Striking.”
“Thank you!” a voice says from behind us. “It’s one of mine, actually.”
Julian and I whip around. A young man with a head full of ringlets stands behind us, and I have to swallow back a sudden rush of emotion.
Because I know this man. His heavy brow and long, diamond-shaped face.
A body that, eight years ago, was lanky with youth and has become svelte in adulthood.
Eyes that are a pretty brown to his brother’s hazel, but skin that is his same dappled ochre.
My heart is a battering ram against my ribs.
Blood drains out of my head and rushes downward, and I slip my arm through Julian’s, holding on to him like a pillar as stars dance in front of my eyes.
When Eric and I first broke up, the fear of running into his family or friends haunted me every day.
But with time, the fear faded, so much so that I forgot that this particular nightmare could become reality.
Jared, Eric’s youngest brother, and I regard each other for a second, and his brows squeeze together in confusion.
Then he grins, and the shock of his delight almost offsets the churning in my stomach.
“Oh my god, Sean!” he says, launching himself into my arms.
The last time I saw Jared, he was seventeen and desperately hunting down a gold tuxedo for prom that we’d eventually found in the back storeroom of a vintage thrift store in Milwaukee.
He’d always been a sweetheart: good-natured, quick-witted, and one of the few members of Eric’s family I genuinely missed after our split.
It doesn’t come as a surprise that he’s pursuing art as a career, and yet seeing him here, holding him, feels surreal.
“Sean. Who is this?”
I draw back from Jared’s hug to meet Julian’s stony expression.
“Oh,” I say dumbly. “Um, this is…Jared.”
Jared snickers knowingly.