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“Oh, because you know me so well from all of the time we have spent together?”
“Maybe,” I say shrugging. I'm admittedly not an expert in interpersonal relations, but I think people aren’t that hard to read if you take the time to try. Jake doesn’t really strike me as the type of person to be riddled with mystery or some secret dark pain.
“Alright. Tell me more about myself,” he says.
“You work for your dad’s law firm,” I say.
“Accounting firm,” he laughs. “But nice try. What else?”
“Fun game. Okay. Let’s see. You wear khakis shorts. You probably have crew sock tan lines.”
“Oh my god…”
“You watch Tosh.0.” I add.
“Come on, Tosh is funny,” he says.
“Tosh is definitely not funny,” I say emphatically. He shrugs and I continue, “You send your food back at restaurants. All your friends have one-syllable names, too. Like Tad. And Chad. And Mike. You guys like to golf. And not like…drink and ride around on a cart. Like you keep score and you have a caddy, and someone places coins or chips down or whatever where your ball lands for you.”
He’s laughing and so I can’t help but laugh too. I’ve either misjudged him or he is a good sport—possibly both.
“That is so terrible. I’m so, so disappointed in you. Send my food back at restaurants, really?” he laughs. “Is this really what I’m putting out to the world? I guess that’s my problem then.” But he doesn’t strike me as someone that has a lot of problems. He shakes his head and takes a long drink from a glass that I’m pretty sure is all scotch, and I’m a professional.
“What about you?” he asks.
“I mean, I don’t know. I’m just a regular person. A ‘get through the day mostly undetected’ kind of person, trying to make it out of this life as unscathed as possible.” I don’t add that I am already pretty fucking scathed.
“No way,” he says, throwing back whatever is left in his glass. I remember that I have a drink too—a vodka soda. He must have been watching me more than he let on at the club earlier to know my order.
“No way? To what part?” I ask.
“No way that you move through life…virtually undetected or whatever. Everything about you is loud. Your clothes are loud, your hair is loud. Your eyes are loud. Your‘don’t fuck with me'attitude is hella loud.”
“And yet, here you are, fucking with me,” I say.
He goes on like he didn’t hear me, “Oh and you know a lot about golf. An unnatural amount. You wait all year for the Masters and you probably learned it from…Tad and Chad,” he manages to choke out through his laughter. Once again, it’s contagious, and I don’t even know why. Is it even that funny, or is there just something funny about being here with him? What would Olivia say?
I catch my breath and take note of my surroundings, the person I’m sharing them with, and myself. None of it meshes. But I must admit, I am having a good time. Icanhear myself think, and wearehaving a conversation, even if we are just ripping on each other. We go back and forth like that for a while, then my attention is drawn back to the woman with the cello. She’s still playing. The raw emotion, once again, makes me uncomfortable, breaks my heart, and sets me on fire.
“Cool, right?” he says.
“She’s fucking excellent,” I reply. “Who even does this? How are there people out there that can do things like this while I’m over here, just…eating, sleeping, and barely existing?”
“Once again, I doubt youbarely exist, but that’s very telling. But I know, better than I’d like to admit, what you mean.”
We sit there, going back and forth between innocuous conversation, witty banter, and watching in silence for a while. Then, the cello player starts to pack up and all the sudden almost two hours have passed since I left the club with this man, and the city is closing down for the night.
“So what now?” I ask. “Heading home?”
“I guess so,” he says.
“Want some company?” I ask. He says that he does, grabbing my hand, and we head back out into the night. He says his place isn’t far, but it was most definitely far. The time goes by quickly and we chat about the most mundane things, like our jobs and where we went to school and random anecdotes that won’t be remembered, I hope, because this is taking longer than I’d anticipated and I’m running out of things to say.
We enter the building through a parking garage and from there, head straight into an elevator. He hits the number 6, or maybe it was 7; I can’t really remember. I do remember how he tilted my chin and kissed me on the way up, and then making our way down a brightly lit hallway and stumbling into the darkness of his apartment.
“Would you like a tour?” he asks. This is always the awkward part.
“No,” I tell him. I pull him into me and kiss him hard before he can hit the light switch. I’m not really interested in any of that.
