5. Nick
5
NICK
B ernie was right. I look fucking spectacular in a suit. But I only have one. And tonight, I don’t feel spectacular at all. It’s not this suit’s fault. The sales associate assured me the navy blue, modern fit, single-breasted Italian wool was the kind of design that would never go out of style, which was perfect for me since I don’t have a lot of reasons to wear a suit. I pull it out of my closet once a year, tops. I’m about to set a new record, though; this is my second time wearing it this week.
I forwent the tie and opted for a light-blue collared shirt tonight, instead of the white shirt and gray tie I wore to my meeting with my bank’s business loans advisor on Tuesday. Like a few small changes would ensure tonight went better than that meeting did.
Still, the bad vibes cling to the wool like the lingering scent of a nut-and-lentil loaf from the vegetarian, gluten-free bakery and café run by the crunchy granola mom in my hometown.
The only thing with stronger lingering power was the collective look of disappointment Bernie and Rocco gave me when I told them my bank loan to buy the bar wasn’t going to happen.
Despite my surprisingly good credit, I don’t have the assets or collateral needed to be a good candidate for the loan, not with Moonbar’s annual revenue, cash flow, and financials. And while the advisor assured me those factors aren’t insurmountable, the loan amount is. It all comes down to location and Moonbar’s is prime, skyrocketing the valuation from a mid-six figures to an easy seven.
No amount of charm or offer of free drinks is enough to make a bank write me a check with that many zeroes.
Which is fair. If we all have to opt in to this capitalist hellscape, then the least the authors of our current economic construct can do is not bury me in debt.
“Nick?” Jasmine asks from a few feet away. I offered to pick her up, treat this like the real thing, but she was cagey about giving me her address and insisted we meet “somewhere neutral,” which turned out to be the benches across from the big clock in the Great Hall at Union Station. She wants to finalize the pages’ worth of details she texted me this week before we head to the engagement party across the street.
“Hey.” I lean in for a hug but stop myself before I can make contact. Shit. That’s probably weird. She shook my hand when we met but that was probably weirder. I wave instead. Unfortunately, that’s weirdest.
She inspects me, blatantly so, her mouth a squiggly line of disapproval.
“Do you have a specific grievance?” I ask, stuffing my hand in my pants’ pocket. “Or has the whole package turned you off?”
The disapproval frown deepens. “You said you’d wear a suit.” Her voice is higher than I remember, maybe from nerves.
I make a point of checking my clothing, plucking at the pant leg, opening the jacket to reveal the hot-pink paisley silk lining. “Oh, I’m sorry. What do you call these in your culture?”
That almost does it. She almost breaks. But at the last second, she slams down the hint of a smile making her lips wobble and rolls her eyes instead. “I just meant you’re not wearing a tie.”
“You didn’t say I had to.” I even checked and double-checked the list she sent in her fake dating information package.
Then I showed it to Rocco in the hopes of sharing a laugh about her level of organization. They glanced at it with an arched, well-groomed brow and told me she was probably too good for me.
Technically, they’re not wrong.
“I didn’t think I had to,” she says through gritted teeth. She brushes off my dandruffless shoulders and straightens my straight collar, her fingers grazing my collarbone and the dip at the base of my throat where my shirt is open and unbuttoned.
I pull away when she reaches for my hair, my skin prickling in anticipation of her nails against my scalp.
“Can you chill, please?”
She freezes with her hand still in the air. “I am chill,” she says in the least chill voice I have ever heard.
Gently grasping her wrist, I bring her hand back down to her side. Her skin is warm despite the cold she just came from. She’s wrapped up so tight in the same long coat she wore to the bar that I can’t see what she’s wearing beneath, other than the deep emerald green pants where the coat ends at her calves.
Union Station is both loud and hushed around us. It’s filled with the familiar noise of people running for commuter trains, announcements for departures, and families reuniting, echoing off the vaulted ceiling high above us. When I came to Toronto on my eighth-grade class trip, we arrived through this very station, our underpaid and overtired teachers trying to wrangle three classrooms’ worth of feral preteens with the kind of energy that only comes from a three-hour train ride. Even then, as I’d looked up at the arched iron-and-glass roof, I’d known I would do anything to live in a place like this. A city whose train stations look like a place of worship rather than a transient space.
I step in closer, telling myself it’s so I can hear her better and not because I want to catch that honey-rich scent again. “Jazz,” I say. “Can I call you Jazz?”
She lifts her chin, imperious. “You may not.”
“Yeah, you sent me a twenty-point bulleted list on what I may or may not wear tonight, so I’m going to call you whatever I want.”
In heels, she’s almost as tall as me. When she huffs out an exasperated breath, it blows across my lips and chin. I turn my face away, just an inch, because she suddenly feels too close.
“Smell me,” I say.
“Excuse me?” She rears back, sounding horrified.
“Smell me.” I open my jacket, lift my arm. “Since you’re so worried about my personal care practices. You can check to make sure I’ve showered.”
“No.” She bats me away, scrunching her nose in disgust. “I believe you. You showered.”
“Damn right, I showered. My hygiene is impeccable.” I even got my hair cut for this.
“I’m sorry, okay,” she says, sounding not very sorry at all. “I’m a little nervous.”
“Wow. I never would have guessed,” I retort, deadpan. “It’s almost as if passing off a complete stranger as your boyfriend to make your ex-boyfriend jealous isn’t such an airtight idea.”
It’s meant to be a joke, the kind of sarcasm I’d drop into conversation with Rocco or Bernie or my siblings. Light teasing that people who are comfortable with each other can do, but when her face falls, I remember. She’s not Rocco or Bernie or my siblings and she’s certainly not comfortable with me.
She presses her glossy pink lips together. “I’m not.”
“Not what?”
“Trying to make my ex jealous.”
“Sure. Right.” I’ve spent much of my life pretending I don’t care; being unserious even about serious situations is its own sort of therapy. But I can’t be anything but serious about this, or maybe I just can’t pretend. Not tonight. Not this week, with the loss of Moonbar and my trip home looming over me.
“Please don’t,” she says, her tone quiet, her head lowered.
“Don’t what?”
“Make fun of me.”
Fuck.
“Hey.” Chest tightening, I squeeze her wrist between my fingers. Regardless of how I feel right now, I made a promise to this woman. This equal part fearless and shy, strange, beautiful woman.
“I’m sorry. I think I’m just…nervous, too. Had a shitty week.”
She pulls her hand from mine. “What happened?” she asks as a family of three plus grandparent runs through the Great Hall and down the ramp to the Concourse Hall to catch their train.
I hesitate, shifting in my Chelsea boots. My job has made me good at listening to other people’s problems, but I’m still incapable of sharing my own.
For a long moment, she’s silent, giving me time. When I don’t respond, she shrugs. “We should know stuff about each other. How our weeks went. That kind of thing. Since we’re supposed to be dating.”
She’s right. And yet, that doesn’t make it any easier to share such a big personal and professional failure.
“Okay,” I say, nodding toward the Front Street exit and the Royal York Hotel across the street where the engagement party is about to begin. “I’ll tell you on the walk.”
It’s a short one, so I won’t have to get into too much detail. Unfortunately, it’s also colder than Kris Kringle’s asshole. Jasmine’s teeth are chattering before we can even cross the street; her coat is long, but she isn’t wearing gloves or a hat. I pull off my gloves—an old leather pair I stole from my parents’ front closet years ago and have somehow managed to hang on to all this time—and hand them to her. She takes them slowly, like she expects she’ll have to trade something for them, but when I simply continue to tell her my tale of woe, she slips them on.
“Do you have any savings? Investments?” she asks, curious more than judgmental.
That doesn’t stop the defensiveness in my voice. “I have some savings.”
“ Some ?”
“I was thinking of starting a retirement plan…?” Not that it’s any of her business.
“Most financial advisors suggest contributing to an RRSP as soon as you begin earning a full-time salary.”
“You wanna see my tax returns next?”
She stops at the bottom of the steps to the hotel, shuts her eyes tight.
“Sorry,” she says. She opens her mouth like she’s about to say more, but shakes her head and trots up the steps instead.
“What are you going to do, then?” she asks after we finally push through the revolving doors at the front of the Royal York. I don’t even take the door for an extra spin, which feels like personal growth.
I sigh. My only option for a loan—and it’s a long shot—is my dad. “Hope for some help from generational wealth, I guess? Though, that’s unlikely.”
“How come?”
I catalog the opulent details of the lobby, the dark wood ceiling and crystal-and-gold chandeliers. I listen carefully to the muted rhythm of our steps as we cross from the marble tiled floor to the carpeted sitting area, anything to facilitate disassociation while I explain my father and his expectations of what “success” looks like. To Dad, professional success is informed, improved, by family. Both building one’s own and listening to the one already in existence.
The party is hosted in an event space off the main lobby that is inexplicably still called the Imperial Room.
Classy.
In the room sponsored by white supremacy, a live band plays the kind of instrumental music best described as pleasant, in that it’s the perfect volume to exchange pleasantries. The lights have a soft purple glow that reaches through the open doors to reflect into the marble foyer.
I turn back to Jasmine and find her watching me, her eyes bright and her lips turned up. While not an unwelcome sight, it is surprising.
“Have you reached a new level of nervous where you’re just going to smile like that the whole time?”
She skips the step between us and flattens my lapel, then tugs on my cuffs. When she reaches for my hair, I suppress my natural instinct to needle her and let her run her fingers through it. I do not close my eyes. But I want to.
“That’s how I’ll repay you,” she says, her tone bright.
Confusion clouds my thoughts. “Huh?” What were we even talking about?
“I need you to…” She steps closer, looking for eavesdroppers even though there’s no one around. “Be my boyfriend,” she whispers. “And you need me to be your girlfriend.”
Oh. My heart rate picks up at the thought. “You’d do that for me?” Where did this girl come from?
She opens her clutch and rummages through it. Though she never actually pulls anything out of it, she smiles the whole time like she has a dirty little secret. “Of course. You’re doing it for me. It’s the least I can do.”
“Let’s wait and see how I perform before you commit to a road trip to the Muskokas with me.”
She snaps her clutch closed, then pulls at the belt on her coat, revealing a crushed velvet jumpsuit, the emerald green color making her matching eyes sparkle and complementing her red hair and the pink blush in her skin.
“Just as long as you don’t completely embarrass me”—she slips her coat from her shoulders and good fucking god there’s no back on this thing; the straps tie around her neck and dangle down the soft curve of her spine—“or mention that we met through a matchmaker, I think we’ll be good.”
“Uh-huh.” I tear my eyes from her body. Clearly, I can’t listen and look at her at the same time. “What matchmaker?”
She points her finger gun at me and winks. “Exactly.”
My stomach lurches. “Wait. No. What?”
She spins on her heels and heads into the ballroom. I have no choice but to follow. I reach for her, my fingertips brushing a strap gently bouncing along the base of her spine. She giggles as I make contact with her skin. Fucking giggles, sweet and soft and terribly cute.
She’s on fire tonight. I wouldn’t mind getting burned.
Jasmine was lying. She had to be. Before we arrived, I was expecting…well, I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this. After what she told me at the bar and the information she sent in her pre-date package entitled “Org Chart”—I wish I was making this up—I thought we’d be walking into a pit of vipers.
Instead, everyone is nice .
Her co-workers are friendly and welcoming and seem genuinely happy to see her. Even her bosses, who the Org Chart identified as “nice to your face but would not hesitate to stab you in the back,” were polite. Ana?s double kissed my cheeks and Butch shook my hand like I was his own personal Shake Weight. Jasmine hasn’t exactly ditched me, but I’m not really sure why I’m here. I’m basically arm candy, which is a compliment, I guess.
When a new band set up on stage and launched into a set that included danceable music, she eyed me tentatively. Then and there I told her, with much conviction, that I don’t dance. Now, she and a few co-workers sway and bounce to the beat but mostly chat with each other.
“You’re Nick, right?” A petite woman with light brown skin, a tentative smile, and a pink and tan turban-style hijab slides next to me against the bar. “I’m Zara.”
“Yeah. Hi. Nice to meet you.”
She nods toward Jasmine, making her gold hoop earrings glinting in the ballroom lights. “She told me how you met.”
I pause, stomach twisting. Is this a trap? Or maybe it’s a test. Was the matchmaker thing some sort of inside joke?
I stall. “Interesting.”
“The matchmaker? I think that’s really cool.”
Okay. What the hell is going on? A nervous laugh escapes me. “Yeah. So, what matchmaker are you talking about?”
She laughs, but the sound is drowned out by a group at the other end of the bar, the center of which is Jasmine’s ex, Mitchell. Around him, his bros raise shot glasses and toast him with a series of intricate gestures and call-and-response phrases fitting of his douchebag culture. I’ve served enough guys like him over the last decade to instantly recognize the type.
Am I being unfair to him? Probably. I don’t know the guy, other than shaking his hand when he approached Jasmine and me and thanked us for coming, then introduced us—Jasmine, really—to his fiancée, Catherine.
“It’s okay.” Zara leans in closer, dropping her voice to almost a whisper. “She told me about it in the bathroom. And about how you guys are keeping it on the DL.”
I survey Jasmine on the glossy wood dance floor, then eye Zara next to me again before scanning the space, searching for the hidden cameras. Maybe Carrie will pop out and tell me that she signed me up for Core Cupid behind my back, because with every mention of this matchmaker I have to remind myself that I did in fact say no when Carrie suggested I join.
“Is this a joke?” I ask.
“Why would I joke about that?” Zara asks, a line forming between her brows.
I close my eyes, shake my head to clear it. “Tell me exactly what she told you in the bathroom?”
Zara shifts her weight, avoiding eye contact and fuck, she’s gonna tell Jasmine I’m a creep. “Just that she signed up for Core Cupid and that you guys were a ninety-nine percent match according to their algorithm or whatever and…” She shrugs. “Now she’s going to meet your family?”
“Right,” I say as a muted ringing fills my ears. “Right.” I nod in her general direction, though I can no longer see Zara, or Mitchell and his bros down the bar.
Instead, I’m replaying the night we met. Jasmine, nervous and shy as she stepped into the bar, like she was waiting for someone. The way she spoke to me like I was supposed to know her.
“And she said I was her match?”
Zara blinks at me like she’s worried I’m having a medical emergency. “Yes. She read me the email. Jasmine and Nick are a match ,” she says in what I suppose is her fake Jasmine voice. “She was so nervous because they don’t include photos of your match, which to be honest is not something I could handle, but it worked out well. Didn’t she tell you this?”
Realization washes over me in a frigid wave, like I’ve just stepped confidently into a slushy puddle in waterproof boots with a hidden hole.
Jasmine thinks I’m Nick.
Not this Nick. Not me Nick.
A different Nick.
A matched Nick.
She thinks an algorithm took all her complexities and nuances and broke them down into data points that fit like puzzle pieces with my data points. Shit. I don’t know her, not really, but I know enough that I can envision exactly how she’ll react.
Jasmine is going to flip the fuck out.
And so help me, I try to be a good guy. I do. I strive to be generous and kind, to tap into the well of empathy buried deep inside me without the help of psychedelics. To not be the kind of guy who would dump a woman over text message. If I’m not, then may the memory of Carrie Fisher strike me fucking dead. But in this moment, I’m not a good guy, not generous or kind and certainly not thinking about anyone but myself, because my first thought is not for her, the embarrassment she’ll feel, the anger. My first thought is that if she finds out, there’s no way she’ll laugh this off, and there’s no way she’ll come with me to my parents’ next weekend.
When she finds out I’m not the Nick she thought I was, I’ll never see her again.
That is untenable. Not just because she won’t help me, but because I fucking like her. I’m plagued by this unquenchable thirst to tease her, to wind her up and pull her apart piece by piece. She is charming and shy, sweet and vengeful.
She offered to help me, and she hadn’t questioned whether purchasing the bar was a good idea or suggested I give it up. She saw that my dream was out of reach and offered me a ladder.
“Well, anyways. It was nice to meet you,” Zara says, though from her awkward tone and frown, she very obviously doesn’t mean it.
“Yeah. Yeah. Sorry.” I’m a fucking mess, but she’s already gone.
The music changes again, the easily bopable tune transitioning into a slower, more romantic sound. The band has changed again. Damn. By the number of bands here alone, cost is clearly not an issue for these people. The song is about falling in love, which isn’t a surprise; most songs are. What is surprising is the way their cymbals collide in my head and their bass beats from the inside out, how everything inside me shifts out of position with a few strokes of the piano keys.
Especially when I see her. On the dance floor. With him.
That douche canoe is dancing with his ex-girlfriend at his own engagement party. His fiancée stands with his parents, chatting amicably, but Jasmine’s shoulders are hunched. He swings her around the dance floor with her back to me. I don’t know her, have no claim to her, and even if I did, I’m not the kind of man who would stop a grown woman from doing whatever the fuck she wants.
But I’ve gotten really good at picking up subtle cues a lot of men can’t or refuse to see. Cues that mean a woman doesn’t want a man to keep fucking touching her.
I owe her a conversation. I owe her the truth. I am not the Nick she thinks I am. But I’ll tell myself, her, anyone who asks, that the music made me do it. The music made me stride across this mostly empty dance floor and stop a little too close to them.
I’m not supposed to want her. But it’s the music. It’s rearranging what I want, shifting my needs and desires out of place with each incremental beat. It’s the music’s fault. It’s not the soft glow of her bare shoulders or the way light glints off her fiery red hair. The music makes me do it. Not the memory of her smile, lips stained blush pink and tilted up at me.
They stop dancing mid-turn. He smiles. She doesn’t.
“Mitch.” I grip his shoulder. Not too tight. I’m a nice guy, after all. And even if I did, it wasn’t me , it was the music. “Thanks for keeping her company.”
Mitchell’s smile goes rigid, and he drops his hands from her lower back.
I’m going to wipe his touch off the surface of her skin.
“Jasmine.” I hold out my hand to her. The music slows, stops. None of us move, Mitch and I dangled on the edge of her line. “Dance with me?”