Zach didn’t get nervous before a date. He didn’t really get nervous, period. Or too sad, or too angry, or too anything. It wasn’t that he’d always been the cool customer he was now. His stoicism was born of necessity. It had certainly not come from nurturing.
And yet, his temperature was up a few degrees thinking about his date with Camila. His dating life was nonexistent since he returned home six months ago. He didn’t know how to navigate his guardianship of his sister, this pseudo parenthood. He’d run into someone he went to high school with at the grocery store or while running errands, and they’d make small talk that the other person steered in a flirty direction. But he didn’t really want to reminisce about the past. He didn’t want to get into the whole thing about his mom. He felt wildly uncomfortable imagining bringing a date into the room where he’d lost his virginity to his high school girlfriend. And he definitely wasn’t going to move into his mom’s room. There was always the basement…
No. The only thing worse than bringing someone home to your high school bedroom or to your dead mom’s bedroom was to bring them to the basement where you used to smoke pot with your friends and hook up with your ex-boyfriend.
Yeah, he was definitely going to sell this house.
But when it came down to it, his nerves were Camila-specific. In the few interactions he’d had with her, he’d noticed the ways she could seem transparent and open, yet leave him with the feeling he’d imagined it all, the realization he’d been the one doing all the talking. If stoicism and dispassionate bluntness were his poker face, his disguise, then maybe extroversion was hers. He wanted to see what was behind it, wanted to get to know all the sides of her.
And damn it if all the sides he saw of her weren’t sexy as hell.
Camila had asked him to meet her at a restaurant on the south side of town, closer to her. He got there first and put his name in for a table.
She wouldn’t stand him up, would she?
He was about to text her when she breezed in.
“Sorry I’m late! I just got off the train. I lost track of time writing up notes.” She looked as effortless and put together as she always did, in a knee-length dress and a blazer, and not at all like someone who had just run off the T in the summer and walked the few blocks here.
“No worries, I just —”
“Wait, let me go back. Thank you for your patience,” she said primly.
“Sorry?” Zach asked.
“Exactly. I’m getting a lot better about not apologizing, but I still slip up a lot. Anyway, thanks for waiting. We’re going to have to stop by my place before we go to the concert so I can change. Have you ordered anything yet?”
“I just ordered a gin and tonic and two waters. I didn’t know what you like to drink.”
“Water’s great,” Camila said brightly. “Think I’m going to get the mango lassi, too. Yeah, I looked at the menu in advance. I hate surprises. God, it’s scorching.”
Yeah she was. He was grateful that the server swooped in just then, because suddenly he needed to chug that ice water.
Soon they were waiting for their dinner and chatting over samosas, discussing their days at work and what other restaurants in town were worth trying. Most of Zach’s nervousness had dissipated. He was enjoying being able to really look at her, unhurried and without the energy of a group interloping. Her curls were piled loosely atop her head, revealing deeper caramel streaks he hadn’t noticed when she wore her hair down. She had a few freckles on her nose, what looked like a tiny scar under her lip, maybe from an old piercing. And she’d taken off her work blazer to reveal an utterly kissable collarbone framed by a dainty lace neckline.
“I hope you come out with us again. That was such a fun night.”
“Between the shop and everything at home, I don’t get a lot of socializing.”
She nodded, sipping her lassi. The way she would hang on every word he said was unnerving. The pinpointed focus on him, being in the warm spotlight of this smart, charming woman’s attention, made him feel high.
Even though her eye contact was gentle, he sensed there was so much she was formulating in her head and not voicing. He was now less worried about saying something she’d scrutinize, and more worried that he would completely bore her.
He switched the focus back to her. There was something he couldn’t stop thinking about, and he wasn’t going to be less scared to bring it up the longer he waited. “So, the not drinking. I assume there’s a story there, not that you have to tell me.”
“Yes and no,” she said, dipping a corner of the samosa in the tangy sauce. “So I’ve never done AA or anything, and for a while I tried the whole ‘sober curious’ thing and just moderating my drinking. It seemed like a step up from being blacked out for chunks of my 20s. But ultimately, I just realized that my drinking was definitely not cute and I felt better mentally and physically the times I cut it out completely. Mostly, I was just rethinking a lot of things in my life and drinking didn’t make the final cut. It sort of heightened things in a way I didn’t like.”
He mulled that over. “What did it heighten?”
“Anger, mostly,” she said. “Thinking I should act on every bad feeling in my head. I was usually a pretty fun drunk, you know? Until I wasn’t.”
He understood that deeply, having watched for years as outsiders enjoyed his mother’s antics while never having to clean up the resulting mess at home. “Making a big change like that, I’m sure it wasn’t easy. Is it hard not to drink, now?”
She shook her head. “It’s the easiest thing in the world now, honestly. If I ever miss it, I don’t think I’m missing how it really was, just the idea of it.”
There was a heaviness between them now. Camila twirled her straw around her glass.
“I sure did enjoy gin and tonics, though.” She gestured at his glass.
“Should I not drink around you?” he asked. She waved that off.
“Really, it doesn’t bother me.”
“This is terrible anyway. Your drink looks much better.” He reached across the table and stole a sip, the sweetness filling his mouth. He watched her watch him as he sipped through her straw. Something flashed in her eyes, amusement and a surge of heat.
“You got a little bit of my lipstick on you,” she said. “Right … there.” She touched his lips with the tips of her fingers, just barely. He could smell the perfume on her wrist, chocolate and smoke like cocoa around a campfire. He wanted to take her fingertips into his mouth and suck.
Instead he took her hand and ran his fingertips up her palm, tracing her wrist, her forearm. He inched back down her wrist, ghosting circles over that pulse point. She tilted her head, neck exposed, so tempting but so far away with this table between them.
“Mutter paneer?”
The server had just arrived, hoisting a giant tray.
“That’s me,” Camila said, her voice tight in her throat. She’d pulled her hand away from his so fast that he wanted to demand she give it back.
“Aloo gobi, spice level 6?” the server asked.
“That’s me,” Zach said. “Thank you very much.”
“That’s way too hot for me,” Camila said. “I’m a baby. I chill right around a 2.”
Zach shrugged. “That’s not being a baby. You like what you like.”
She nodded. “Damn right. That’s why I stopped calling things guilty pleasures. Pleasure isn’t something to feel guilty about. Why not just earnestly enjoy whatever makes you happy and not apologize for it?”
“You’re speaking my language. I’m a hedonist. But you don’t really strike me as someone who apologizes for doing what she wants,” Zach said. “Or who cares too much what people think about that.”
“I care plenty,” she said, spooning rice into her bowl. “I care what I think about me more than I do what anyone else does, sure, but I think I’ll never stop being aware of how people perceive me. It’s interesting you see me that way, though.”
“I did just meet you, so I have no idea what I’m talking about,” he said. “Not that that’s ever stopped me.”
“So why do you think you make a lot of assumptions?”
“Honestly?” He swirled around his glass, spinning the ice around. “I don’t like to waste time. Better to get to know what you’re in for with people as fast as possible.”
Camila smiled at him, showing teeth. “I think people constantly shift, though. You can’t know someone now and that means you’ll know them five years from now.”
Zach turned this over. “Or 15 years from now.”
“Exactly,” Camila said, before Zach countered, “All the more reason to figure it all out fast before it changes again.”
He continued, “It’s like with traveling. I like to take a lot of photos, just a fuckton of photos of everything and everyone. People think that looking at your experience through a screen or a lens means you’re just addicted to social media validation, like you’re not really there, you’re just taking pictures. But that’s not how I experience it. Like, if I’m in Spain, I know that I’m never going to eat this exact meal again. I’m never coming back here. And if I did come back here, it would probably be someone else cooking it. Or, I’ll come back and they’ll be out of business.”
An employee was refilling their water, and Zach quickly hedged, “A hypothetical restaurant. Not this one.”
When he’d left, scowling at him a bit, Zach looked chagrined but kept talking. “I want to remember exactly what a moment felt like, and a photo puts me right back there. I can smell a photo, you know? I look at it, and I can remember how it tasted.”
He watched her swallow hard. “Do you, um, take a lot of photos of people, then?”
“I dabble in some … portraiture,” he said. He got half hard at the thought of capturing Camila’s image from every angle, even fully clothed. He imagined it would be more titillating than even the most artful nude.
“And can you remember how those photos taste?” she asked.
He gulped. “I remember a lot, yes.”
“You know what the best question to ask on a first date is?” Camila asked. “And this is my professional opinion. I don’t think I’ve ever tried this one out myself.”
“Well, you’re about to. Hit me.”
“OK. If you had a daily affirmation you had to say to yourself every single day when you wake up, at this point in your life, what would it be?”
Drawing up blank, he said, “I can see how you can weed out a lot of people that way.”
“Yup. So, what’s yours?”
She looked at him expectantly, with a glint of mischief.
“Here goes. Mine would be something like in Arrested Development, about the money in the frozen banana stand.”
“That’s not a serious answer!” Camila said, and flicked some of the condensation from her glass at him.
“You’ve seen that show, right?”
“Of course I have, but you’re just being silly.”
“Oh, I’m being earnest. It reminds me that there’s always some unexpected backup plan, some worst case scenario solace you can take. And if you decide to burn your backup plan to the ground, well, then you just have to build a new one.”
Cocking her head to the side, Camila weighed the explanation. “OK, yeah. That’s not a bad one. Yeah, so when you ask that question, someone might say nothing or get really flustered or annoyed, in which case they don’t like to be challenged in even a basic way or they have a lame sense of humor. Or they might say something religious, like misquoting the Bible or some shit. Or they might reveal something they really value in their lives, or something they don’t like about themselves.”
“It’s definitely a better question than ‘Where do you see yourself in five years?’ So,” he asked her, “what’s your affirmation?”
“I think right now it would be, ‘I’m good with the gray.’”
He speared another bite of food. “Like, gray areas? Or, hair?”
“Oh, I’m not ready to embrace the grays there. I am too young and beautiful and nubile to be all gray just yet. Though I shouldn’t judge. It looks amazing on other young women.”
“I’m sorry, I’m a little stuck where you said ‘nubile.’”
Ignoring him, she said, “So yeah, like with gray areas. I’m trying to learn to see the nuance in my own life and, I guess personality? It’s easy to do in my job for other people, and for my friends, but not for myself,” she said.
Grabbing Camila’s arm and stroking the inside of her forearm, Zach asked a leading question, his voice as neutral as possible despite the way his pulse accelerated. “So, would you say this date is going well, or are we in a gray area?”
She let out a breathy laugh. “You’re cute. So, since you brought it up. Where do you see yourself in five years?”
Zach groaned. “I don’t even know where I see myself in one year.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, my sister will go off to college, and I’ll probably have sold the store by then. I don’t know that I’ll be sticking around Pittsburgh.”
“Oh,” she said. He might have caught a ghost of a frown, but she fixed it fast.
“But I mean, I have no idea.”
“Right. Who does, really? We should probably get the check.”
* * *
After dinner, they took Zach’s car to Camila’s duplex so she could change out of her work clothes. Getting to her place required white knuckling it up one of the steepest hills she’d ever driven on, and people always commented on it.
“This is me,” she said, leading Zach into her soothing blue-gray living room. She loved her apartment. Whenever she got home, the city washed right out of her hair. At the moment her sanctuary was lit by the sunset streaming through the sheer curtains in front of the bay window.
Everything in her place was cozy and comfortable — the centerpiece of the room was an oversized couch with a movable sectional, fuzzy blankets and downy pillows. Her coffee table books included intricate connect-the-dots images and word searches, art books, anything that could help her unwind. Beneath the two pieces of furniture was a giant faux fur rug on which she’d rolled around naked more than once, for no reason at all other than loving how it felt. Years ago she would have said she wasn’t a candle person, would have said something incredibly anti-feminist about Yankee Candles, but now she couldn’t get enough of the calming scents and how watching the dancing flames felt like meditation.
“Can I get you something to drink?” she asked, taking Zach’s jacket. “I have coffee, tea, pop, um, green juice.” She felt self conscious watching Zach’s smile grow. “What? I know, but green juice is delicious. Can be delicious. Is not the worst thing I’ve tasted.”
“I love green juice, but pop would be great.”
She returned with a Coke.
“Your place is nice,” Zach said, thanking her for the drink. He’d found his way to an oversized photo overlooking her dining room table, a surreal scene with a nude woman in the foreground, her face obscured and her body strategically draped in long strands of pearls. “Who is the artist?”
She felt her neck redden. “Johan Nylund,” she said. “He’s a local.” Johan Nylund. Saying the name to someone felt criminal. Every so often she’d whisper his name to the riot in her skull, panicked she might one day forget it. A useless prayer for a useless fear. She would sooner forget her own name than his.
“I’ve heard of him,” Zach said. “He was in a Netflix documentary.”
“For maybe two and a half minutes,” Camila said. She appraised the photo. “What do you think of the model?”
“I mean, she’s beautiful, of course.” She watched recognition fill his eyes. “Wait. Is this you?”
“It is,” she said.
“You look amazing in this picture,” he said. “The way the shadows are playing with the pearls, creating these abstract shapes. It’s beautiful. Have you modeled a lot?”
“Just for him,” she said. “I suppose you don’t have to pay your model when you’re sleeping with her.” She studied the change in Zach’s face, watched the hard gulp of his drink and the muscles around his jaw work. “Anyway, not that I love having my ex’s art around, but I do look hot in it.”
“I could take a better nude of you,” he blurted, but when he looked at her he wasn’t embarrassed he’d said it. He was confident. He was enticing her. “Is that the only reason you keep it?”
She appraised him for a moment before responding. As far as his suggestion, she knew this dude wouldn’t be around long enough for her to want to do anything that intimate. But there was no point souring their night by saying so. “I keep it because it was an interesting time in my life. And I’ll remember your offer next time I redecorate. I better go change.”
* * *
“This is going to be amazing.”
Zach was certain it would be, but he forgot for a moment what “it” even was when Camila walked back out of her bedroom.
She looked incredible. She wore skinny leather pants with pointy flats, and a baseball tee with the words Bodega Cat Union Rep printed across her chest.
“That’s a good Darcy deep cut,” Zach said.
“Darcy Ortecho is, like, my goddess,” Camila said, leaning into Zach. “Here, take a selfie with me before we go.”
He obliged and posed. “Look at the camera!” she demanded. Zach had been looking at her on the screen, enjoying her obvious delight about the night ahead.
Once she was pleased with the selfie (“Look, we both look cute in this one!”) they headed toward the Improv. Most places in Pittsburgh filled him with some dread about his youth, but he had only good memories of working the ticket booth there, and standing in the back after the shows started to watch the comedians perform. He loved when someone whose name he recognized came into town, of course, but the open mic nights were his favorite — all those earnest amateurs, whose friends had skipped their Wednesday night TV to watch their pals risk public humiliation in the name of laughter.
He remembered how intimate the venue was, which made the crowd outside seem even more overwhelming.
Camila looked crestfallen. “I thought we were early. I really wanted to get a good seat.”
“We are early,” he reassured her. “Plus, you know it’s tiny in there. They’re all good seats.”
This seemed to cheer her up. She casually looped her arm through his and leaned against him.
They’d been texting constantly over the last few days about their favorite episodes of the show. The Shuck-Ups were a quartet of young comedians, two men, two women, and every week they hosted a show that was a mix of celebrity interviews, pop culture commentary, movie recaps, and live stand-up showcases like tonight’s.
In the few days leading up to the show, they’d exhausted comedy as a conversation topic but kept talking about anything and everything. Camila was funny as hell, insightful, surprisingly morbid and cynical under her bubbly exterior. He was really struggling to be as chatty with her in person as over text. It was a problem he’d always had, but it was magnified around her.
They made their way into the venue and found a table near the center of the room with two seats facing the stage. Zach picked up the menu. The Improv had pretty good cocktails, too, but he thought it was kind of rude to keep drinking around Camila now that he’d confirmed her sobriety was a big deal. He didn’t want to make her feel weird.
“Their cocktails are really good,” she said. “You should try this one.”
OK, so maybe she didn’t feel weird. He still felt weird about it. “Nah, I’m driving. Think I’ll stick with Coke the rest of the night.”
She nodded and looked back at the menu, but Zach caught a little smile.
The Shuck-Ups emerged one by one to screams and applause as the emcee announced them: Roger, Melonie, David and Sutton.
Zach couldn’t tell whether he or Camila was shouting louder before the group got the crowd to quiet down. They started with their typical current events banter, woven with inside jokes for anyone who was a longtime listener, before introducing the first performer, a local comedian Zach wasn’t familiar with.
Next, Melonie and Sutton did a bit as their elderly sibling characters, Claudia and Maudia. Zach looked over to see Camila choking on a tortilla chip mid-laughter, and swatted her on the back.
“Sorry,” she mouthed, still laughing. How did she make choking on a chip shard look adorable?
The second performer was Lex Fuentes. Lex was cultivating a following with his depressive intellectual fuckboy persona — he was equal parts self-deprecating and douchey, and it worked. It also helped that he was a babe. Zach enjoyed him aesthetically almost as much as he did his comedy.
“This guy’s such a d-bag,” Camila whispered, and then, appraising him, “He fine, though.”
“Agreed on both counts,” Zach whispered back.
Darcy was the grand finale. Camila looked like she was about to leave her body out of sheer joy of being in the same room with Darcy, a comedian who was known for, in no particular order, her feminism, her incisive commentary about being a Latina in the United States, her penchant for physical, absurd comedy, and being an unabashed cat lady.
Her set was incredible. She told a story about an ill-fated trip to Denver that had the crowd in an uproar. Mid-set, Camila was doubled over in laughter, and placed her hand on Zach’s knee as she gasped for air. He let his hand rest on the small of her back, felt her laughter move through her body. When she regained composure, she pulled her hand away from his knee, and wriggled in a way that made Zach want to take his own hand back for fear of making her uncomfortable.
But then she looped her arm through his again, tighter than earlier.
* * *
After the show, Zach drove Camila home and she told him she’d invite him up, but she was about to fall dead asleep.
“It’s cool,” he offered. “I have to open the shop tomorrow.”
“I had a nice time tonight,” she said, pitching her voice high, and then laughed at herself.
He touched her neck. “I had a nice time, too.”
She looked up at him from the passenger seat with her doe eyes, more polished obsidian in the dark than brown. She leaned into the touch and put her hand over his.
“Am I always going to have to instruct you?” she whispered.
“Maybe I want to be wooed a little, too,” he said.
She gave him a languid smile and unbuckled her seat belt, and the way she slithered across the small space, arching her back, made his pulse race. Camila grabbed his chin and tilted it, somehow making him look up at her even though he was much taller. His lips parted. She leaned in.
Then she tilted his face to the side and gave him a long, soft kiss on the cheek. “See you around,” she said, and left him alone in his car feeling like someone had just twisted his balls.