Chapter Seven #2
That seemed to impress her. She picked up her beer with the ‘playing along’ look twinkling in her eye. “Like professionally?”
“Yep.”
“Are you good?”
“Oh, I’m good, Mami.”
“Yeah? How good?”
“The best.”
“Uh huh.” She lifted her eyebrows and sipped. Her lips came away foamy, and she tucked them together and tipped her head toward Dustin, who was on his way back. “Is he your teammate?”
Elliot laughed. “No.”
“Is he good?”
“He’s the second best.”
She sipped again. “But you’re the best best.”
Dustin slid onto the stool on the other side of Fatima, and caught Elliot’s eye and winked. Elliot felt his insides tilt, and covered with, “Pretty much.”
Drew lifted her glass and clinked his. “That better be true, Mr. Rodriguez. Or I’m not gonna let you come clam diving.”
Dustin
So far, he’d learned Fatima didn’t drink, but she sometimes smoked weed, and that the best time she’d ever had was at a Desi warehouse party, which sounded like the kind of thing ten-years-ago-Dustin would have crushed, but which now sounded pretty exhausting.
They’d moved from the bar to a booth in the corner, because sitting so close to Rodriguez was throwing Dustin off his game.
He kept trying to check in and Elliot kept refusing to let him, and this was supremely bumming him out.
He’d been more excited to hang out with Elliot tonight than he’d realized. Which was a little weird.
The booth was quieter, anyway.
Fatima took off the scarf, saying, “Fuck my life, it’s hot in here,” and threw it across the table at him, which he found very charming.
Underneath, she was wearing a slinky top that blended seamlessly into the elephant pants, and revealed a lot of what was going on underneath, which was very, very nice.
Dustin did his best to let her know he’d noticed this as he handed back the scarf, but not to notice it too obviously.
He’d never hooked up with anyone so young before, and he wasn’t totally sure he was allowed to…? But he was making progress, and she was interesting, so it was easy to divert questions back around to her; he liked to talk about himself as little as possible in these situations.
She seemed to be catching onto this trick, because when he asked where her favorite Pakistani street food cart was in LA, she eyed him across the table and said, “There is a limit, you know.”
He blinked. “To what?”
“To the number of questions I’ll answer for you.”
“Oh!” He put down his beer. “Sorry–”
“It’s fine.” She smiled and reached for the popcorn he’d got from the machine. “It’s cute that you’re interested. But some guys are, like, really, super interested. If you know what I mean.”
He didn’t.
“Because I’m so exotic and mysterious.” She lifted her eyebrows and put a piece of popcorn in her mouth.
His stomach turned over. “Oh God, no, I didn’t mean that at all.”
“They never think they do.”
The table went quiet between them. Dustin sat with his hand on his beer glass, having no idea what to say.
Fatima shook her head. “Sorry, not that I’m saying that’s you–”
“You definitely don’t need to apologize–”
“You’re very nice–”
“I really just thought–”
“Why don’t we talk about something else?” She smiled brightly. “I feel like you haven’t told me anything. Where’d you grow up?”
Dutifully, Dustin said, “Kamloops.”
“What?”
“It’s in Canada.”
“Ohh. Okay, so you’re not American.” She ate another piece of popcorn, frowning. “Why have I never heard of Kamloops?”
“It’s kind of a drive-by. There’s a lot of sports and not much else.”
She nodded. Then she leaned in and said, conspiratorially. “To be totally honest, I haven’t heard of anywhere in Canada except Vancouver and Quebec. Wait…what is Montreal?”
“A city in Quebec.” He gave her a mock-disapproving frown. “Do they not teach you kids anything about us in school?”
She pitched the look right back. “Did they teach you anything about us in school?”
Fair. Damn, she was quick.
She looked pleased with herself and sat back, picking up the hijab and draping it back around her shoulders. Not hijab. What had she called it? Ducati? No, that definitely wasn’t it. Shit, he was going to have to ask her again.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, “what is it called? The hijab?”
“Dupatta.” She winked, which somehow made her seem both older and younger than she was. “Don’t worry, the test isn’t until next Tuesday.”
Elliot
Drew was even better at talking than he was, which was nice because it was distracting him from wondering what Dustin was doing in that booth.
She told him a guy in her cohort had nearly drowned during a kelp survey in a tone that suggested she wished he had, and Elliot laughed.
She grinned and said, “Sorry, that was mean. I’m not usually mean.
” She sipped her beer and asked, after a beat, “What’s the meanest thing anyone’s ever said about your hockey? ”
“You’re asking me to volunteer that?”
“I’m a stranger.” She put her hand on her heart. “We’ll never see each other again after tonight.”
“Oh, that’s the deal?”
She winked, lifting one shoulder. “That’s the deal.”
Perfect. He sipped his beer and thought about it. “Somebody wrote that I was just the new version of an older guy. Actually, a bunch of people wrote it. Everyone, pretty much.”
“Is that mean?”
“He’s a legend, so it’s good to be in the same league, I guess. But I’d rather be the first me.”
Elliot only realized that was true as he said it. He watched Drew sip her drink, and tucked it away for later. It was a good line for the press.
When he asked what her favorite food was, she told him, “Officially? Pizza,” and leaned in to whisper in his ear, “but actually? Big, salty, nuts.”
He snorted a laugh, and the hair on his arms prickled.
He was tracking all of that: the brush of her breath in his ear, the way she smelled as she leaned in, the way her tongue touched the rim of her glass when she drank.
And at the same time, he was looking past her, at the booth Dustin had moved to with Fatima.
He could pick them out well enough in the dark now to see that Dustin was holding her hands across the table.
Elliot rolled his eyes and tried not to remember the way his hand looked tented on the pool table with his cue sliding between the knuckles.
He tried not to imagine what it might look like wrapped around his cock.
I’ll even blow on your cue, if you want, said Dustin, in his head, and he quickly turned back to Drew. “What’s the craziest thing you know about sea urchins?”
“Oh, don’t get me started.”
He smiled and shook his head. “You’re weird.”
“I get that a lot.”
Dustin
“Okay, so you’re born in Kamloops, you move to Vancouver, you go through the QL…H…what is it?”
Dustin smiled over his beer. “QMJHL. Unless you’re French, then it’s LHJMQ.”
She blinked like that made her dizzy. “Say it again?”
“Don’t bother.” He winked. “French is fucking impossible.”
Fatima laughed. She drained the last of her soda, circling her hand in a Let’s get back on topic, motion, then put the empty glass on the table beside the popcorn basket.
“You’re trying to distract me again. So you go into the…
QM…hockey league with all the letters, and then you go to the NHL. In Vancouver?”
Dustin nodded.
“And then you moved from Vancouver to Denver?”
He nodded again.
“Okay. So how did you get into hockey originally? In Ally-oops.”
Dustin snorted into his beer. It went up his nose, and he wiped his face on his shirt and said, “Kamloops.” And hoped she would forget about the first part of the sentence.
Obviously, she didn’t.
“You skirted around the question again.”
He sighed, still drying his beard. Normally he did a better job of redirecting the conversation away from this, but he felt bad for grilling her about Pakistani street food. “My dad was a coach in the hockey league with all the letters.”
“Oh! Does he still do that?”
“He’s dead.”
Her mouth stuck open and stayed there a moment, and then she said, “Oh. God. Sorry.”
“It’s okay. It was a long time ago.”
They sat in the uncomfortable silence. Fatima said, “Now I don’t know if I should ask you about it, or…”
“He had a heart attack.”
She nodded, turning her glass on the table. “When was that?”
“Two thousand…seven? So I was ten.”
“Oh wow.”
More silence.
Dustin sometimes wondered if he should just lie when moments like this came up.
Because there was always the risk it would completely kill the mood, and honestly, it had been a long time ago, and he felt pretty normal now.
He could talk about it without feeling like he needed to throw something across the room, at least.
He picked up his beer. “It really is fine. We don’t need to make it a thing.”
“Right.” She pushed the empty glass to the middle of the table. “God, I can’t believe I gave you shit for asking me about street food.”
He smiled, and suddenly she leaned across the table and took his hands.
That was not an uncommon response girls had to hearing this information, but it was nice when it happened.
Did he kind of know exactly what he was doing when he told a girl all that stuff?
Sure. He tried not to. But he didn’t feel so guilty about it this time…
tonight was a competition, and he came to win.
He sat forward and linked his fingers through hers and squeezed.
She opened her mouth, and Dustin waited to see what would come out of it.
This had actually become one of his favorite parts: whatever the person said next.
Sometimes it was reasonably thoughtful. Sometimes it was patently hilarious. Usually it was pretty boring.
“I literally don’t know what to say,” she said, in a very matter-of-fact way.
“That’s fine,” said Dustin. “I don’t think you’re supposed to.”
She looked grateful and squeezed his hands again. Now he knew another thing about her: her hands were wonderfully soft.
Elliot