Chapter 17 Displacement #3
“Two?” The hostess greets us, chirpy. “Would you prefer a table or a booth?”
Jack looks at me like we’re a drug cartel and I’m the ringleader who needs to sign off on any decision. Dammit, this honesty business is hard. Okay, so not the booth—Jack’s legs are skyscraper long, so he’d probably hate it. But tables are less private, which he also might hate—
He leans into my ear. “Stop building observational models about what you think I’ll like, and just be honest about—”
“Booth,” I grunt out. The hostess makes an obvious mental note to tell our waiter that I’m a weirdo, but her “If you’ll follow me” is impeccable.
“Excellent choice,” Jack murmurs while we weave toward the table, and all I can think of is that Two-Weeks-Ago-Elsie, bright-eyed and future-hopeful, sat in this very restaurant across from Jack and contemplated slipping under the table to power-drill his kneecaps.
Tonight-Elsie gapes at him as he tells the waitress, “I’ll have your craft beer. And she’ll have the cheese board.”
I lift my eyebrow. “What happened to me asking for what I want?”
“The cheese board is what you want.”
It is. But. “How can you be so sure?”
“Ikagawa ordered it the other night. I saw the way you looked at it.”
“How’s that?”
“Like people look at porn.”
Laughter bubbles out of me. “Okay, you want me to be honest? I’m going to be honest.”
“Go for it.”
“Brutally honest.” I take a deep breath.
Maybe it’s the booth, but it almost feels like we’re alone in his apartment again.
Just the two of us. Intimate. “Sometimes, when I can’t sleep because I’m nervous, I look up cheese on Google Images and I just .
. . scroll. I scroll infinitely. And I feel peace. ”
“That’s nothing.” God, his dimple. “George’s entire YouTube history is pimple-popping videos.”
I snort a laugh into my water. “By the way—she mentioned you wouldn’t give her my number.”
Jack’s beer arrives. His tongue pushes against the inside of his cheek. “I had a very disturbing mental image.”
“What mental image?”
“Of George reminding me daily for the next few decades that she got to take out the girl I liked before I ever did.”
I laugh, picturing her starting her maid of honor speech with “Webster’s Dictionary defines sloppy seconds as . . .” Then I realize who the bride would be in the wedding, and my face is suddenly cooked medium rare. Whoa.
“You look like that again.”
“Like what?”
“Worried.” He searches for words, like he’s not sure himself. “Vigilant. Overthinking.”
I play with the cloth napkin. “How can you always tell what’s in my head?”
“Same way you can tell what’s in everyone’s head.”
I frown. “I just look. Try to pay attention to what people want.”
“That’s what I do. Except that I don’t care much about most people, but I can’t stop paying attention to you.” He shrugs. There is something so utterly, disarmingly honest about him. “So I look.”
Is it really that simple? Is that what’s happening here? “What am I thinking now?”
“You have questions.”
I laugh. “That was a softball.”
“It was. Just ask the questions.”
“They’re kind of . . .” I exhale a laugh. “They’re not really just-casually-getting-to-know-each-other questions. They’re not . . . normal.”
“You’re not a normal person,” he says, in a way that feels like the opposite of an insult. “And I’d rather you ask than overthink.”
I close my fingers around his glass, feeling the condensation pool in my palm. Then I pull my hand back into my lap, wet, cold.
Okay. “Back at Monica’s place, you said that you don’t date. And Olive told me the same . . .”
He laughs. “Olive?”
“We may have touched on your love life.” I flush.
“Ah. Olive.” He nods. “She and Adam are . . . I think she wants others to have what they have.”
I nod. I’ve known her for two hours, but it’s the impression I got.
“It’s not a hard and fast rule—no commitment, no dating, no feeding past midnight.
I haven’t sworn it off because love is a capitalist construct or some bullshit like that.
” He shrugs. “But when I was younger, I was in a couple of relationships where the interest didn’t match up, and .
. . It’s better to be up-front. So no one gets hurt. ”
“I see.” I picture a boy being told by his mother that he’s not her son anymore. Then growing up to hate the idea of telling a woman that she’s not his girlfriend anymore. It makes sense, this determination of his. It also makes my heart heavy.
“What about you?” he asks.
“Me?”
“Do you date?”
I smile. “For a living.”
“Right. How did that start?”
“Oh.” I go back to tracing patterns on the glass. “In college. It’s kind of a depressing story. Does not pair well with cheese.” I let out a nervous laugh, hoping he’ll laugh, too.
Instead he asks, “Why depressing?”
Honesty. Honesty. It’s a thing that I can probably manage. “Because . . . I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t know you were dating someone?”
“No.” I swallow. “I didn’t know it was fake.”
His attention shifts. Still on me, still focused, but more cautious. Gentle. Land mine territory. “You didn’t.”
I’ve never spoken aloud about what happened, not even with Cece, because .
. . I’m still not sure how it could have happened to me.
It’s been years, and it still doesn’t feel like my story.
I’ve always been so guarded. So careful-footed.
And when I stumbled, I didn’t just skin a knee.
I fell facedown and knocked out all my teeth.
“When I was a sophomore, this guy I knew moved abroad. The place he rented was cheap, so I took over his rent. That’s how I met J.J.
He was the roommate.” I push the glass away.
“I’d seen him around the Physics Department, and I thought he was an okay guy.
Though he was planning on becoming an experimentalist.”
“Should have tipped you off.”
I laugh. “We spent almost one entire year politely ignoring each other. Ideal roommate situation. Then he broke up with his girlfriend.” I sigh.
“It was messy. Twenty-year-old messy, you know? There were still feelings, but she’d met someone else, and .
. . All I know is that a couple weeks later she came over to pick up her stuff, and she found J.J.
and me having dinner together while watching something on TV.
She went ballistic. She was so jealous, which was hilarious, since J.J.
and I were sitting ten feet apart and I was having chickpeas—officially the least romantic food.
But that’s how J.J. got the idea that we should pretend to be together so she’d get even more jealous and .
. . I don’t know, race through Boston Logan to confess her undying love?
It was a fuzzy plan. But I said yes, because . . .”
“Because you weren’t any better than you are now at saying no?”
“Hey—no personal callouts.” He smiles, and I continue.
“We started the ruse, and . . . we didn’t just fake it on campus, when she was around.
He told everyone—his friends, my friends.
And in my defense, which—maybe I have none, but we didn’t talk much about the fact that it was fake.
He brought me home to his parents for the holidays, we studied together, he taught me how to play Go. ”
Jack nods slowly. “How quickly did you get better than him?”