Hot Little Hands (13 page)

Inside the café Luke is steaming milk. “Hey,” I say. “Those street canvassers are so annoying.”

“Yeah,” he says, but he has other things on his mind. “I can't work out if I want to get rid of sugar altogether, or just charge people extra for it. Coffee's a fruit. It should taste sweet enough on its own.”

“Uh-huh,” I say. “Can I ask you the most inappropriate favor since the time I told you to make out with that French guy in front of me?”

“Did I do that?” he asks.

“No. You called him ‘freedom douche' and you didn't speak to me for three days. But can I talk to you about the boy I like?”

“Claire Claire Claire,” he says. But he listens as I describe the guy, as do Jackie at the register and Alex, who's pulling the shots.

“Is it tall americano?” asks Jackie.

“I think it's double macchiato,” Luke says. I tell them about the scar on his forearm, and they all agree he gets pour-overs to go.

“So what do I do?” I ask. “You hospitality people are so lucky. You stand here all day while a parade of cute people come in to flirt with you. The rest of us have to schlep around town just to get a little noticed.”

“Speaking of,” Luke says, looking over at a girl waiting in line, wearing leggings and a purple hoodie. “It's yoga girl.”

“Hey, that's not fair,” I tell him. “You can't date anyone before I do. You have to stay obsessively in love with me until I move on and feel secure with somebody else.”

“You better ask this guy out, then,” Luke says, handing me the other half of a shot to taste. “They say it takes a week for every month you dated someone to get over them. According to that schedule, I'll be done with you by August.”

I go to the Make Out Room before open. “Hey,” I say. He's sweeping the floor behind the bar and I wonder what it says in that little notebook in his pocket. He never seems to carry a pen.

“Hey.” He leans the broom against the sink and comes over.

“My name's Claire,” I say. “I've been taking a poll in the neighborhood and an overwhelming majority of respondents think you should ask me out.”

He looks down at his hands and I think he's embarrassed, but then he looks right up at me and says, “Why don't you just ask me out?”

“Because you're the guy,” I say.

“But you're older than me,” he says.

“But you're the pretty one.” We're at an impasse. He picks up the broom and starts sweeping again.

“Fine,” he says, when he gets to the end of the bar. “Would you, Claire, like to go on a date with me sometime, and
not
drink alcohol, and
not
go for ice cream, and maybe even get out of the neighborhood and go somewhere else?”

“Why, I'd love to,” I say. “Let's meet at the bar across the street tomorrow at eight.”

So we go drinking. Well, I go drinking, and he sits next to me and watches. It turns out he does drink on occasion, but right now he's on a cleansing diet. All he's allowed to ingest is a mixture of lemon juice, water, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper. He pulls a jar of it out of his messenger bag, twists the lid off, and takes a gulp. He hands it to me to try.

“This'd be better with tequila,” I say. “Should I get us some shots?”

“No,” he says, hugging the jar to his chest. “Don't corrupt me.”

After I've had two whiskeys with beer backs he says he thinks I should stop drinking for the night.

“But we're having fun,” I tell him.

“I know,” he says. “But we're getting to know each other and I don't want you to do anything you'd regret.” (This reminds me of the time I saw Beirut play at the Great American Music Hall. It was their first tour, they were all still teenagers, and afterward I saw the guitarist having a smoke out front. “That was amazing,” I said. “It made me wanna run away and join a gypsy band.” “Hey, man, be careful,” he said. “Don't run away from your problems.”)

“Wow,” says Sy. “You saw Beirut on their first tour ever?”

We walk over to my place on Shotwell, and we sit on the front steps while I smoke a cigarette. “You shouldn't smoke so much,” he says. I'm kind of annoyed by all the paternal advice, but then I get this horrid thought that maybe he's thinking about the future, and our children, and how sad they'd all be if I got lung cancer and died. And then the second horrid thought comes: This idea of a future together pleases me. I butt the thing out and we sit there looking at each other. Then he puts his finger on my lips. “I really want to kiss you,” he says. I look at him. I can't stop looking at him. “But I also wanna save it.”

A week later, his cleanse is over. I go to his house on Bryant and we sit out on the fire escape and drink vodka with homemade lemonade and mint. His roommates go in and out of the kitchen, I can see them through the window. When they finally turn the light off, I tilt over until my cheek touches his shoulder. I feel him tense up, and I wonder if he's changed his mind about me, but then he reaches over and takes my hand.

He looks down into the darkness. “It's hard to see it right now, but there's a whole garden down there.”

“Really?” I lean forward, stick my face through the bars, and try to see something.

“Yeah, there are succulents and lavender and the most amazing bougainvillea. Plus a whole vegetable patch. Spinach, beets, cucumbers. All kinds of herbs.”

“Did you plant it?”

“A lot of it. My parents own a nursery in Amherst. When I moved out here, I drove across the country with a suitcase in the trunk, and a backseat full of cuttings and seeds and bulbs. I had to drive super fast so things wouldn't wilt or die on the way. Then I had to search Craigslist for a place with a backyard.”

Should it be like this? Should I feel intimidated by a nineteen-year-old? Shouldn't I be thinking about what's going to happen next: whether or not we're going to kiss this time, whether he likes me as much as I like him, whether or not the fog is doing crimpy things to my hair? Right now I don't care about any of that. I close my eyes and push my nose into his neck and he doesn't complain about it being cold. He squeezes my fingers between his and says, “I have no idea why you're in California and not in England, but I'm really glad you're here.”

We stay out there for a while. We must get pretty drunk because by the time we go to his room, we both fall into his bed in our clothes and pass out. When I wake up later, we're kissing. He puts his hand on my lower back and pulls me against him. We kiss some more. I roll on top of him, then he rolls on top of me. Then I take off all my clothes and he pulls off his T-shirt. His body is long and skinny with no hair on his chest. There's a tattoo over his heart but it's too dark in the room to make out what it is. When I go to put my hand inside his jeans, he pulls it away and puts it, palm flat, over his face.

“Let me guess,” I whisper, “you want to save it.”

“No,” he whispers back. “I just have my period.” He laughs and scrapes his teeth against my palm.

I roll away, onto my back, and try to slow my breath. After a few minutes he asks if I'm okay.

“I'm fine,” I say. “My body's just going crazy right now. I'm trying to calm it. Maybe I should think about something else. The new Arsenal away uniform? Or my nanna?”

“Just pretend you're a little kid and you don't know about physical things yet,” he suggests.

“Wait a second.” I sit straight up and look at him. “Are you that kid? Are you still—a virgin?”

He props himself up on his elbows. “No,” he says. “I'm nineteen.”

“You kids today,” I say. “Starting so young. Was it at a rainbow party? Or were you just sexting at recess?”

“Where did you meet your first boyfriend?” he asks. “In an IRC chat room? What was his A/S/L?”

The boy can hustle.

“Come on,” he says now, tugging my arm.

“Where are we going?”

“To brush our teeth.”

“No way.” I flop down and push my face into the pillow. “I'm too tired.”

“Come on. You'll be happy in the morning that you did it.”

“Don't you know you get a free pass on brushing your teeth when you're drunk? Same as washing off your makeup. And, anyway, I don't have my toothbrush here.”

“Don't worry about that,” he says. “You can use mine.”

He leans over and kisses me on the mouth, and I slowly get to my feet.

We're hanging out. Which comes before dating, which comes before seeing each other, which comes before being in a relationship. But I'm pretty sure it's happening. Every few nights we meet up and talk about going to see a band or catching a movie downtown or cooking something at one of our houses or introducing each other to our friends. Then we go drinking. And because he's pretty and I actually like him, I drink to get drunk.

“Don't you want to remember this beginning bit clearly?” my friend James asks me one day on campus, when I meet him for lunch wearing big hangover sunglasses to block out the Berkeley light. “You're getting to know him, you're learning about each other. Don't you want to have the memory of that later on?”

“He makes me too nervous,” I say. “The only way I can talk to him at all is by getting totally drunkified.”

We are getting to know each other, sort of. Some nights I'll ask him a question and he'll swear I've asked it before.

“An older sister and a younger brother,” he says. “Remember? You said you have a cousin whose name is Harriet, too.”

“Oh yeah,” I say. “I wonder what she's up to.”

I apply too many layers of lipstick in smudgy bathroom mirrors between rounds, and I feel like I'm being super sharp and funny because he laughs at most things I say. When we leave a place at two, he holds my hand on the walk home, steadying me as I jump between cracks in the sidewalk.

Sleepovers happen at his place because I'm embarrassed about how messy my room is. His bed is always neatly made with its white blanket and gray pillows, and it seems like he does laundry three times a week.

“I hope you can meet my mom sometime,” he says one night when we're looking at photos on his computer. “You guys would get along.”

“I feel like I have already,” I say.

He likes to sleep naked and he likes me to sleep naked. On days when he gets up at five in the morning to go churn the new flavors, I make him turn on the light so I can see what he's wearing. Then I roll over and fall back asleep.

Late mornings, when I get up, always involve a sort of piecing-together of what happened the night before. One day there are soggy tissues on the bedside table.

“Did I cry last night?” I ask him that night over tacos and horchata.

“Yeah, you were missing your family. And then you said you were scared about what's gonna happen after you finish your PhD. And then you cried about your ex, and how horrible the breakup was.”

“Well, I guess we covered all bases in one go,” I say, scraping the jicama to the edge of my plate.

“And you, uh, you told me about the abortion,” he says, looking at me and lowering his voice. “I was sorry to hear about that. I cried a bit then, too.”

“Well—we don't have to worry about that anymore,” I say. “I'm on the pill. It's not gonna happen again.”

Another morning I wake up with a bad taste in my mouth. “You threw up,” he says, pushing the hair out of my eyes. “This might seem forward but I'm getting you a toothbrush to keep here. You puked your little heart out, then wrestled mine from me and insisted on using it.”

“I'm sorry,” I say. I hide my face in his underarm and groan. “I have hangover head.”

“That's the worst,” he says.

“Yeah, wait till you're in your late twenties. It doesn't just disappear at ten
A.M.
It sticks around all day till you hit the bars again that night.”

Another morning I wake up with a clear head but feeling like something terrible happened the night before. He's not next to me in the bed. I find him in the kitchen making breakfast, a bowl of torn-up bread and soft-boiled eggs all mushed together. We eat on the couch in the living room. Then he carries my bike down the stairs and kisses me goodbye at the front door, and I think: I love him.

“Just so you know,” he says. “You told me you love me last night.”

“No, I didn't,” I say, then I get on my bike and ride away.

Halfway home, I stop and get out my phone to text him.
It doesn't count when you're drunk,
I write.
And anyway, I think boys are gross.

It is two excruciating hours before he writes back. I hate dating people with real jobs. The answer, when it comes, says
Uh-huh, whatever you say.

I swear to myself that I won't say it again until he does, but the next night I say it again. The morning after that, I wake up before him and whisper it in French to the croissant tattooed on his chest. After that I say it all the time. I can't stop saying it. We're watching a movie, or we're lying in the park, and it just comes out.

“Oh my God.” I cover my mouth with both hands. “I didn't mean to do that. Why do I keep doing that? Just ignore that.”

“I ignored it last time,” he says. “But this time I'm paying attention.”

I have other thoughts, too—embarrassing thoughts. Like I want to call him my boyfriend, and I want to add him to the “favorites” section in my phone. I want to take him back to the UK to see the house I grew up in, and sleep next to him in my old bedroom. I want to make him, God help me, a mixtape.

He finally says it back to me, on the Fourth of July. We've ridden our bikes to the Embarcadero to see the fireworks above the bay and missed them by a minute. He shouts it to me over the voices of people pushing past us, excited to get to their cars and go home. I'm not sure if he's saying it because he means it, or because I'm bummed about not seeing the fireworks. But at the end of the night, in his room, in his bed, he says it again, all breathless and sleepy.