Chapter 14
Zola had been quick to embarrass herself in front of Ro when she met him.
Mom saw his socials and made it perfectly clear she thinks “that boy is foooine.” And when I told Liv about him, she applauded as she dove down her own Ro Jackson Instagram rabbit hole.
Still, watching complete strangers respond to Ro out in the world is a whole new study in human behavior.
The cute hostess lingered, the waitress batted her eyelashes so hard she almost took flight.
Random doormen don’t let Ro pass without engaging him in conversation.
You’d even think the guy with the chinchilla on his shoulder at the Fourteenth Street station was an old friend by the way he chatted Ro up.
Seeing Ro through everyone else’s eyes is like seeing him for the first time all over again. It makes me wonder about the guy under all that shiny packaging. He seems so good. And there’s nothing scarier to me than a guy everybody thinks is good.
We’re at a hole-in-the-wall consignment shop in the Village when Ro brings up my next date.
“Can we not?” I ask, thumbing through vintage jackets that cost more than I’ve got in my bank account. “Tell me something else about you. Save me the Google search.”
“You already know all the big stuff,” he says, passing behind me so close that the heathered cotton of his shirt brushes against my bare arm.
“It’s just you and your parents, right? No brothers or sisters?”
“Nah, but my parents both came from big families so I’ve got way too many damn cousins,” he says, laughing.
“We were that house on the block where somebody was always coming or going. And Pops has been playing surrogate dad to all the kids in the neighborhood as long as I can remember, so even as an only child, I’ve never been alone a day in my life. ”
Ro slips into a worn leather jacket from the rack, and my stomach drops a little at how good he looks.
It’s been happening all day—he smiles and my cheeks flush, he guides the small of my back and my whole body tenses.
But that’s not why we’re here. Today’s supposed to be my safe space away from all that.
Ro’s supposed to be my safe space away from all that.
Say something, I tell myself. Something friendly.
“Can your dad take me in too?” I don’t wait for my awkward joke to fall flat before I rush to explain. “It just sounds like a nice way to grow up.”
Ro shrugs off the jacket. “What about you? You and Zola seem close.”
“We are, yeah,” I say, turning back to the rack. “But when your family’s as small as ours, you kind of have to be.”
“It’s wild how different the two of you seem.”
“Yup.” It’s not the first time someone’s pointed this out to me. “She’s the firecracker. I’m the fizzle.”
His face screws up tighter than when he ate the oyster. “Whoa. That’s not what I meant at all.”
I trace the stitching on an old denim jacket. “Sorry. Childish insecurities die hard, I guess.”
“Maybe I should dig up my old sketchbooks to even the scales. My teenage insecurities had their own fan art.” Ro never breaks eye contact, but he’s still trying on old hats as he speaks.
I’m grateful not to feel like I’m onstage.
“But don’t apologize, I like when you let the real stuff slip. Helps me figure you out.”
My brows knit together pleadingly. “Please don’t try. It’s so much more fun to diagnose everyone else.”
“You sure?”
His full attention is on me now, and I’m pinned under the weight of it.
“I can be gentle.”
A tentative nod is all the agreement I can give.
“You’re a maze,” he says, before I can change my mind.
“You let me make a little progress in one direction, but throw up a wall before I get too far. So I gotta back up or find a different path, before you cut me off again. It’s why that night at the pizza place was so different.
Why I couldn’t stop watching you with the mural that day at the garage.
There are these moments you forget to be on guard.
You forget to put up the walls. I guess I hoped today could be that too.
Not even for me, for real. For you. So, at least for a little while, you could just be. ”
I’m quiet when he finishes, but once again, our shared silence isn’t uncomfortable.
“How do you do that?” I ask, finally.
“Do what?”
“Say a thing so real and honest like it’s the most natural thing in the world.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No,” I say, certain. “It isn’t.”
“Does it bother you?”
I don’t even have to think about it.
“No,” I say, just as sure. “It doesn’t.”