Beauty and the Mustache (18 page)

With these instructions, I
found the bathroom easily. He was right. Cletus had packed me a
bag. It contained exactly two pairs of underwear and three sets of
tank top pajamas. Unfortunately, he’d neglected to include anything
else, like appropriate clothes, a bra, or toiletries.

I leaned out the bathroom door and hollered
to Drew, “Can I use your soap?”

There was a brief moment
of silence before he called back, “Yeah, sure. Use whatever you
need.”

I surveyed the shower-tub
combo, found soap and shampoo. I also found his razor by the sink
and shaving cream. For no good reason other than the satisfaction I
would get by dulling his razor, I decided to shave my legs.
Besides, what did he need a razor for? Didn’t Vikings manscape
using knives?

I snooped around the
cabinet looking for conditioner. I was pretty sure he used
conditioner. His blond hair was long and wavy and lustrous. It
looked soft to the touch….

These thoughts made me
mentally facepalm, because I shouldn’t be thinking about Drew’s
lustrous locks when I was about to get naked in his house. In fact,
I made a mental note to
never
think about Drew’s lustrous locks.

I was about to shut the
cabinet when several bottles of dark brown glass caught my eye. I
picked one up and read the label.

“
Ketamine….” I whispered
to the bathroom. I glanced up at the mirror and saw that my eyes
were large and wide. Ketamine was a controlled substance and was
used as an anesthetic. The fact that he had multiple glass bottles
of it stocked in his bathroom cabinet only served to solidify his
image in my mind’s eye as a marauding man of mystery.

I wasn’t exactly made
anxious by the discovery; more like creeped out and uneasy. Not
helping matters, an owl chose that exact moment to hoot. It gave me
a shiver and an intense sensation of hootiedoom.

I fought another shiver, telling my
overactive imagination to hush, and abandoned my search for
conditioner.

Stripping naked, I jumped
into the shower. I soaped and rinsed twice. I washed my hair twice.
Then I shaved my legs. When I was finished, the faucet was running
cold. I had used all the hot water.

It felt good to be clean.

I frowned at this thought
because my shower earlier in the day hadn’t felt nearly as
cleansing or necessary. Even though, one could argue, I was dirtier
this morning after a showerless week than I had been after a rabid
raccoon attack.

I dressed in my
pajamas—similar to the ones Drew had seen me in when we’d first met
and I’d twisted his nipple—and made my way back to the kitchen
using his comb to brush my hair. Drew was just placing bowls of hot
soup on the table. I noted that two slices of homemade bread were
also at each place.

“
Where do you keep your
utensils?” I walked to the drawer closest to the dishwasher and
opened it, searching for spoons.

“
On the end, top
drawer….”

Something about the way he
said
drawer
made
me stop and look up. He was frowning at me.

“
What are you
wearing?”

I glanced down at myself
then back at him. “My pajamas.”

“
Are you staying the
night?” His voice was tight.

I shrugged, growing
irritated, my neck heating. “How am I supposed to know? I didn’t
know I was going to be eating here either. This is all Cletus
packed. It’s a bag full of pajamas and no bras.”

He did that
slow-eye-closing thing again and his chin dropped to his chest.
When he spoke next, he spoke to the floor. “Would you feel more
comfortable in one of my T-shirts?”

I studied him for a beat,
a bit taken aback by his reaction to me in my PJs. I noted the
tension in his shoulders, the way his hands were balled into fists.
Sandra’s words of warning echoed in my head while I tried to bat
them away with facts.

Fact One: His perpetual
grumpy face whenever I was around.

Fact Two: If he were
interested in me, then why had he disappeared and avoided eye
contact for the last two weeks?

Fact Three:
Fiction-handsome meant vessel of Satan.

I knew I wasn’t making any
sense. I had no idea in that moment what I thought—about Sandra’s
prediction or anything else—other than food smelled really, really
good for the first time in almost three weeks, and I was going to
eat it and like it. I’d just flashed a bear Mardi Gras style and
fought off a rabid raccoon. I was starving.

Drew might be attracted to
me. As well, he might find me crass, trashy, repugnant, and
annoying—a nice piece of ass, a pretty face, with a low class
accent. His propensity to avoid looking at me could mean either of
those things, especially since we were about to eat.

Because I found the former
theory (attracted to me) inconvenient and outside the realm of my
comfortable reality, I decided to embrace the latter (annoyed by
me) instead.

I rationalized it this
way: better to be oblivious to a flirtation than mistake kindness
for flirting. One made you clueless; the other made you
pathetic.

And none of this mattered,
because he lived in Tennessee and I lived in Chicago, and nary the
twain shall meet.

Therefore, I asked, “Would
you feel more comfortable if I were wearing one of your
T-shirts?”

His eyes lifted to mine,
his mouth a firm line. He looked both bothered and hot…or maybe hot
and bothered. I couldn’t tell which. Drew nodded.

“
Fine.” I crossed my arms
over my chest and glanced at the stove, feeling tremendously
self-conscious. “Go get me a T-shirt. I’ll grab the
spoons.”

***

I wore one
of his clean T-shirts—extra-large, black—and again
I was swimming in it.

We ate in silence until
Drew volunteered—after my second helping of chicken soup—that we
weren’t eating chicken soup. It was pheasant soup, not to be
confused with peasant soup, which is what I thought he’d said at
first.

This conjured images of
Drew the Viking chopping up serfs for dinner.

“
Many of the local hunters
like to leave gifts of game for the rangers and
wardens.”

“
Well, either way—peasant
or pheasant—it tastes like chicken. My patients bring me gifts too.
Things like gift cards…and viruses.”

Finally, Drew cracked a
smile, his eyes losing some of their wariness. I was relieved that
my comment seemed to break the weird tension that had plagued the
evening since I’d walked into the kitchen wearing my pajamas.
Eating in shared silence usually gave me heartburn.

He surprised me by asking,
“So, you like poetry?”

I paused, my spoon halfway
between the bowl and my mouth. I didn’t know Drew well enough to
know why he’d asked the question or where we were going with it, so
I decided to say, “Yes, I like poetry.”

He nodded, stuffed a piece of bread in his
mouth.

“
Do you?” I prompted,
trying to encourage discussion. “Like poetry, that is. Do you like
poetry?”

He didn’t answer right
away, opting instead to chew slowly and drink his beer. At length
he responded with a dodgy, “Yeah.” Then silence.

I waited for him to
continue, since—after all—he’d been the one to broach the subject.
But he didn’t. He just looked at his food like it was the most
interesting thing in the room. Maybe to him it was.

Tired of the silence, I
said a little too loudly, “Well, that’s good. Look at all the
things we have in common, Drew! Poetry and…T-shirts.” His eyes
flickered to mine then back to his soup. If I was reading the
sparkle in them correctly, he was amused.

Amusement was preferable
to soundless stoicism, so I carried on. “We even use the same
soap—at least today we did. I bet we even use the same brand of
razor. So tell me more about yourself.”

“
What do you want to
know?” He said this without looking up.

“
Anything I guess. Where
are you from?”

“
Texas.”

“
And where did you go to
school?”

“
Texas A & M for
undergrad; Baylor for postgrad.” Drew stood, grabbed my empty bowl,
and put it in his. He stacked all the dinner dishes into a tidy
pile and carried them to the sink.

“
Any hobbies?” I called
after him.

He grabbed two new plates
from the cupboard. Like before, I watched him walk around his
kitchen. His movements were graceful and unhurried, paradoxically
lazy and efficient. It struck me that so many things about Drew
were contradictory.

Earlier today, he’d
stroked my hair, called me sugar, rubbed my back; then, a few
minutes ago, he’d glared at me with heated irritation when I walked
in wearing pajamas. The last few weeks he’d been avoiding me, not
making eye contact; then today, he covered me with a blanket while
I slept. When he yelled at me for spending too much time in the
den, and he sent Cletus out with fried chicken and
potatoes.

He held my mother’s power
of attorney and was the executor of her will, but he paid our house
bills out of his own pocket. I couldn’t figure him out.

Drew returned to the table
carrying two dessert plates, a knife, two forks, and the
pie.

Once settled in his seat,
he cut into a lovely pecan pie, one of my favorites, my absolute
favorite being lemon meringue pie made by my mother.

At last he responded,
though I was so focused on the pie that I almost forgot I’d asked a
question.

“
I like to cook…and
read.”

Finally, something!

“
Me too.” I accepted the
generous slice of pie and immediately took a bite. It was really,
really good. I pointed to him with my fork and said, “Well, I like
to eat, which is like cooking. This is good pie. I do like to read.
See, that’s another thing we have in common—pie and books. So, what
are you reading now?”

“
Nikola Tesla’s
biography.”

“
I haven’t read that. What
about fiction? What’s the last good novel you read?” I ate two more
bites of pie.

His subtle smile flattened
and his eyes finally lifted to mine and held. “I don’t like
fiction.”

I blinked at him, and I’m
sure my eyebrows were doing an interpretive dance of what was going
on inside my brain. “You don’t like fiction?”

“
No. Never cared for
it.”

“
Any fiction?” I chewed on
a pecan as I considered him. “You’ve never enjoyed any fiction? How
come you’re always reading fiction to my mom?”

He shrugged. “Because she
likes it.”

“
What about
movies?”

“
I’m not really
interested.”

I gathered a slow, deep
breath and studied his face. This explained a lot about him, why he
was so joyless. A perfect vessel for Satan. Also, I’d finished my
pie. So my expression of disappointment was two-fold.

“
Do you like fiction?” he
asked.

I nodded vigorously. “Oh,
yes. I love novels. I love getting lost in someone else’s story,
thinking about life from their perspective, living their
experiences.”

“
Why don’t you live your
own experiences?”

I wrinkled my nose at this
question. “Why would I do that when I can be a hundred different
people a year? Live a hundred different lives. Love a hundred times
without worrying about danger or risk. And all from the comfort of
my reading chair.”

Drew’s frown was severe
and, unlike the other times he’d recited Nietzsche, he sounded a
fair bit impassioned as he quoted, “‘There is not enough love and
goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary
beings.’”

I stared at him, his
serious face, and his serious silvery eyes.

Drew was an odd
possum.

“
Okay,” I said, twisting
my mouth to the side. “Well, I guess we’ve found something we don’t
have in common. And for the record, I dislike
Nietzsche.”

“
You’re changing the
subject.”

“
Maybe.”

“
Why? Does it make you
uncomfortable when someone challenges you?”

I could feel my blood
pressure rising, mostly because Drew looked as though he was
enjoying himself, my pie was all gone, and he hadn’t yet touched
his own.

Who makes a pecan pie then
ignores his own slice? And this was a truly remarkable pie. I’d
scarfed mine down and was hoping for another piece. I hated that he
had such a firm grasp on his self-control.

I didn’t respond right
away, and maybe I waited too long, because he said, “Perhaps if you
spent more time with real people instead of fictional people,
honest discussions wouldn’t be so uncomfortable for
you.”

“
I spend plenty of time
with real people. You’ve met my friends Sandra and Elizabeth. Do
you think I spend Tuesday nights with them discussing the weather?
And I have a lot more friends besides.”

“
Is that where you would
be now if you were in Chicago?”