He slept over. Her last night before cohabitation, and she spent it tangled up with him.
At six a.m., he rolled out of bed and skedaddled back to his place, leaving her to curl up with her solitude for three hours of dozing and pretending she wasn't going to open the door at ten to a porch full of parents with boxes.
She'd say this for Evan: he didn't have a lot of stuff. He filled the spare closet, and it took work to rearrange her stash of yard signs so the garage could fit both her work supplies and his bike, but most of her house still felt like her house. Except for the stairwell. She'd removed half her framed photos to make way for his. There'd been no graceful way out of it, with his parents right there, holding stacks of family pics. He pulled her aside to apologize. She brushed him off.
"It's okay. Now we're in the same boat. Seems like every time I head up lately I catch Mom's eyes following me. So I replaced her with one of your parents. Staring right at you. As you mount." She put special emphasis on the word mount. Evan growled and grabbed for her, but she slipped past him to the kitchen. Elaine was assembling lunch, pulling together a Mediterranean-style feast with a heavy Turkish influence.
"Sweetie, where are your crudité platters? Don't you have olive boats?"
"Right here." Natalie opened the cabinet above the microwave. Her friends joked about her serving ware assortment, but Elaine taught that good manners dictated a dish for every occasion. It was easier to agree. She arranged the cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, pistachios, and chunks of feta before carrying a stack of plates and cutlery to the table. Her dining room was, so far, Lee-free. She liked Evan plenty, and his parents, but having her place topsy-turvy with thirteen hours' notice stretched her nerves. She relished three minutes of staring out at the brick patio and focusing on the faint plink-tink-trinkle of water flowing in her fountain.
Evan cleared his throat, but she'd been aware of his entrance, so she wasn’t startled.
"Lunch is almost ready," she said, turning around.
He walked towards her, slow, studying. "Do we need to abort Op: Pom?"
She hesitated. "No. It's fine."
"Could be like ripping off a Band-Aid, you know." He rubbed a hand through his hair. "We'll just lay out the whole thing. They tell me I'm a jerk, and I agree, and in a few days they'll be gone."
"They're not going to call you a jerk."
When he stopped, he was a step further away from her than he usually stood. "They'll pelt me with cacık. I'll pay to steam-clean your rug, grab my bike, escort my folks out of here. They'll send you email apologies for my existence."
He was facing the window, lit by midday radiance. Despite the July sun being filtered through the trees above her patio, it made his expression stark. She knew how little sleep he'd gotten the night before, so it was no surprise he looked tired. There was a tightness at his eyes, a careful set to his shoulders, which she couldn't ascribe to lack of shuteye.
"I don't actually mind all this, you know."
His half-smile was always on the right side of his face. "Only a crazy person would say that."
"Sex-crazed is all. I was taking a time-out to adjust. Wrap my head around it. That's not the same thing as minding."
"Or hiding?"
"Or hiding. Or running away." She slipped her arms around his waist. "What about you? Are you a crazy person? Or do you want to abort? Because I know Elaine will freak, but I suspect you'd get more collective long-distance grief than I would locally."
His hug pulled her in, and his jaw stroked her hair when he shook his head. "I guess I'm no more batshit than you are. Let's just get through the next few days. And anytime you want to call it off...."
"Right back at you."
Marisa carried in the bowl of tabbouleh, pausing when she caught them pulling away from each other. Natalie could practically hear her internal camera shutter capturing the image for eternity. But Evan's shoulders had loosened, and it was possible Nat herself would long remember the complicit, relieved look he gave her before helping to set food on the table.
"Can I get you to take our picture real quick?" Natalie asked the waiter before she turned their order in. They leaned towards each other and lifted their champagne glasses in a toast. "That's great. Thanks so much."
Evan asked, "Are you tagging me?"
"Of course I'm tagging you. That's the point, right?" She looked up from the screen. Did he not want to be virtually seen with her? She'd had her hair blown out that afternoon and was wearing a great new lip shade. Even Elaine would approve of the photo. Of her appearance in the photo. Elaine would approve first and foremost of her status update: "Sushi with Evan = Happy Hour."
"Yep." But he took her phone and messed with her caption before posting it.
"What did you do? You better not have screwed this up." It was their first official pretending-to-date date, and the plan called for social media proof of the pretense. Which, as Evan pointed out, meant hearing from his gossiping siblings within minutes of upload.
She scrolled, then hid her mirth in her bubbly. He'd edited her to read: "Sushi with Evan = umami time!" and his brother Danny had liked the post already. As she watched, a couple of her friends and his sister Alice added their approval.
"You're in trouble," she sing-songed, showing him the evidence.
"Don't I know it? My pocket's been buzzing like crazy."
She glanced at his pants. For once he was dressed down, in jeans and a sage Henley that had almost prompted her to jump him in the car. It clung to his chest and did fascinating glow-reflecting things to his skin. "And here I thought you were just happy to see me."
"Clever. It'll be my siblings, giving me hell, because my life exists for them to ridicule."
"Glad I could be of help." She said it lightly, because she knew by now that the alphabetical Lees would harass Evan no matter who he was dating. Or fake dating. "You going to answer them?"
"In the middle of getting my umami on? Not a chance." He toasted her again. She was taking full credit for introducing him to the concept of champagne with sushi, and as their waiter brought out their platters, she sat back to watch the effect of the pairing on his first bites. It gratified her: his eyes widened, and he was reaching for another piece of yellowfin before noticing she hadn't taken any for herself. She snagged an unagi roll.
"What?" he asked.
"Nothing."
"That wasn't a nothing look."
"You're not the boss of my looks."
He eyed her, and she focused on chewing, because she didn't want him to push. She wasn't used to all this scrutiny. She liked keeping things neatly contained in her brain, not all over the table for him to poke at like he was picking up the right amount of wasabi to unlock the flavor of her raw self.
"Who is?"
She looked up from the entrancing sight of salmon, avocado, and rice rolls artfully displayed on the shallow rectangular plate. "Who's what?"
"The boss of your looks. Wait. Let me guess." His eyes narrowed. "Not your actual boss. You dress better than her. And we already decided your mom isn't allowed to have power over your self-expression."
"We did?"
"Gillian said so, remember? How it's time you stopped policing every centimeter of your attire as if Elaine lurked around a corner ready to attack you for not maintaining your--I forget her exact words. Gillian uses big words."
"Sartorial perfection."
He pointed chopsticks at her. "Right. Sartorial perfection."
"You should talk." She'd offered to drop his dry-cleaning off along with hers that morning. It had taken her two trips to haul everything in from her back seat.
"Hush. My mom doesn't care how dapper I am, so I can obsess over it all I want."
"Dapper?"
"Snazzy? Debonair? Modern metropolitan man à la mode?"
"Ridiculous?"
"Nah. People admire me. I make a killer first impression."
"And yet I'm not supposed to do the same thing?"
"We're not at work. We're not making killer first impressions on people we need to be predisposed to trust us and allow us to guide them as they make important decisions for the foreseeable."
She ignored his good point, because it wasn't the point. "And I told you Gillian said that?"
"Yep. You were ranting. It was after Elaine left that voicemail suggesting you should wear cream instead of white during the summer months. Which she's wrong about, for the record. Those pants you had on for the Fourth were...snazzy."
"You were too busy looking at my chest to notice my pants."
"Your chest is snazzy, also."
"And yours is debonair."
He bent forward in a little seated bow. "Why, thank you."
It seemed he'd been storing up that tidbit, what Gill said about Elaine, so he could throw her by quoting it back at her. She'd been working on changing. On loosening up about her appearance. Not just leaving the gym all sweaty, a torture she'd stuck with because, like boring exercise, it was good for her. She grocery shopped with her hair in a simple, messy ponytail. She removed her heavy jewelry before running after-work errands. She ate breakfast with him before applying makeup.
Policing every centimeter of her appearance just made sense when she knew Elaine would be superintending not just her body language with Evan, but also her hair and her eyelashes and her dietary choices.
She took a sip of champagne. An abrupt subject change would let him know his meddling was unwelcome. "At my four o'clock showing today the lockbox code was wrong so we walked the property while we waited for the listing agent to call me back, and the owner's dog almost dug a hole under the fence to get at us. I had to carry over some loose bricks I found by the garage to block his access."
"What kind of dog?"
She shrugged, glad he'd played along with her misdirection. "I couldn't tell. Something smallish. Yippy. You wouldn't have liked it."
He told her about some family dogs through the years. Trixie the Labra doodle. Butterfly the boxer mutt. The indeterminate Lola.
"I call naming rights over the Pomeranian when we adopt her," she said.
"What? That's unfair. Why?"
"You'd call her Bruiser or Admiral or Dagger or something. Clearly you're scarred from a lifetime of frilly puppy names and you'll try to overcompensate."
He folded his arms across his chest. "I named Lola. She was a showgirl. Well, she's what I thought a showgirl was when I was a kid. She was pretty and she liked to do tricks."
"I think you captured the essence."
"Cynic. And I would never name our Pom Dagger. That's absurd."
"Prove me wrong, then. What would you call her? T-Bone?"
"No. The name I picked out is perfect."
She wagged her fingers at him to hurry along his dramatic pause.
He leaned back and nodded like he was saying something profound. "Lancelot."
Well. He had her there. She was tempted to call the rescue society right away.