Borrow-A-Bridesmaid (15 page)

Seventeen

W
hy am I wearing a wrinkled button-down shirt? I look like a bad impression of a yuppie. Lin was out with Steve when I was getting dressed, that's why. He would have saved me from this disaster of an outfit. I close my eyes and remember that I was reading one of Alex's women's magazines at lunch: “Got a hot date? Wear a V-neck or button-down shirt to make him think about how he wants to undress you.”

For someone who's smooth—Alex, for example—this could have been well executed. I tore apart the closet to find the only button-down I own, a hand-me-down number from my cousin Mathilda. It's white with black stripes, ergo, I look like a zebra. One should never wear hand-me-downs from one's cousin Mathilda. But I was lured in by the Siren's call that
stripes are slimming.

“You okay? You look like you're somewhere else completely.” Kalil has a shy smile on his face. He's wearing a button-down shirt, too. Dark blue. Unbuttoned just enough to reveal a peek of toned chest. He's pulling off the button-down much better than I am.

I flush. “Sure, sorry. Just a little tired from work.”

He swings his car into a parking spot at Maggiano's and rushes around the side of the car door to open it for me. With our shared context of the airport gone, an almost tangible awkwardness settles between us. I think about him leaning toward me outside the bar that night last week. The soft touch of his lips on mine hardly seems real. Could that have happened?

He looks different in dress clothes. I mean, I was attracted to him when he was wearing a bright yellow parka. And now he looks positively delicious. His sleeves are rolled up mid-forearm, revealing a leather cuff around his left wrist. I get a sudden urge to slide it off and run my forefinger and middle finger down the inside of his naked wrist. These are the parts I love on men: the soft parts. Earlobes. Insides of wrists. Elbow creases.

The high-ponytailed hostess seats us at a romantic table for two in the corner, tea lights flickering between us. In lieu of conversation, we examine paintings of Venetian and Florentine scenes on the walls. They look like hotel room art, but I feign fascination. In one of the Venetian scenes, a man in a striped shirt paddles a couple down the canal. I look more like the gondolier than the
ragazza
in the red dress. Her lover is ignoring the Venetian canalscape—he's got eyes only for her. What's her secret? Aha! She's wearing a V-neck. Totally should have gone with a V-neck.

I fumble through the wine order, and when our drinks finally arrive, we stare at each other over the tops of our glasses. An Italian tenor serenades us over the speakers.

I take a sip of wine. “So, um, I'm really sorry about canceling on you the other night, my friend kind of really needed someone, and—”

Kalil shrugs. “Don't worry about it. I understand.”

I twirl my wineglass between my thumb and pointer finger.

“How's he doing?” Kalil asks.

“He's fine now. Just a blast-from-the-past sort of thing. A relationship of his that ended badly.”

Kalil nods. The awkwardness is precipitating in the air: Little dust particles of it shower us, and I can see some landing about the breadbasket. Great conversation topic I've started here: failed relationships. Blimey! The more I try to think of things to say, the blanker my mind becomes. A giant scanner is all I've got up there, running its light back and forth across fading pages.

“Holy shit!” Kalil jumps up, his chair skidding backward and nearly toppling over.

“Huh?” I look him up and down, confused.

“Oh my God, oh my God!” he says, pointing at his wineglass with the leather-cuffed hand.

“What?” I lean forward to examine the glass.

“Don't touch it!”

I squint—it's hard to see much detail in the relative dark. But as I focus on the spot where he's pointing, the flickering tea light reveals a dime-sized shape scampering across the base of his wineglass. A closer look reveals spindly legs emerging from the body. A cockroach. I push my chair back. “Gross!”

We watch in silence as the thing changes direction, its little roachy legs ambling toward the center of the table. I gasp. “It's going for the breadbasket!” I whisk the basket out of the roach's path and clutch it to my chest.

“Nice one!” Kalil nods in approval at my heroism. I grin, and our eyes lock. A moment passes, and we start laughing. The roach is now halfway up the stem of Kalil's glass, about to baptize itself in tannins. I'm still holding the breadbasket, and tears are starting to form in my eyes, I'm laughing so hard. Kalil is doubled over on the other side of the table, one arm grasping the back of his chair for support, the other wrapped around his stomach.

The waiter comes dashing over, his eyebrows furrowed. “Is there a problem?” He follows my gaze to the table, and when he sees the roach, his entire face turns the color of the peppers on the shelf behind his head. He apologizes in Italian and English while ushering us to another table.

“On the house,” he says as he places new wineglasses in front of us. I set down the breadbasket at our new table as we catch our breath.

“Holy crap,” Kalil says, one hand still wrapped around his stomach. “I guess you know one of my phobias now. That's embarrassing.”

“It's cool. I'm lucky; my roommate kills all the bugs in our apartment.” I make a face. “There's this vent right above my bed, and the other night this jumpy spider cricket thing fell out of it onto—”

Kalil looks like he's going to throw up.

“Sorry. We can change the subject now. So tell me how you've been! What's new at the airport?”

He begins talking about last week's rain and delays—“a bona fide suckfest”—and we click back into our familiar rhythm. I fill him in on the Mad Hatter accountants and my latest bride client.

We sip our wine: It's doing the trick. The day's tension has loosened from my neck and shoulders, and I lean forward on the table, propping my chin in one hand. He starts looking at me meaningfully. By the time we're walking out of the restaurant, he's linking his arm through mine and leaning against me. Memories of Charlie keep playing on a shadow screen at the back of my mind, muted by alcohol.

“Oh my God, I'm still thinking of you going for the breadbasket,” Kalil is saying. “Those are some lightning reflexes.” We laugh, and he gets that look again. As we approach his car, he faces me, pushing me lightly against his car door.

“I'm not ready for the night to be over yet,” I whisper, nearly wincing as I realize that a few weeks ago, Charlie said the exact same thing to me. I focus on Kalil's face, noticing anew the way his long eyelashes graze the tops of his cheeks when he blinks. His pupils look huge as he gazes down at me. All I want is to lean in to him and kiss him, let the general confusion of my life melt away. I want to be in my body and not my mind, to let go of the stress of scanning documents and shopping for brides and pining for Charlie.

Kalil loops an arm around me, pulling me to him. “That can be arranged. My place?”

I nod, putty in his hands. He walks me to the passenger side of the car and opens the door. Before he starts the engine, we kiss to the soundtrack of the summer rain hitting the sunroof. I'm time-traveling to when we're alone at his place.

As he navigates through dark, rainy streets, he reaches over and takes my hand. “The airport's not the same without you.”

I squeeze his hand. “In some ways—and I never thought I'd say this—I wish I were still there. I mean, there's no one to chat with at the accounting office except Alex, but she's super-busy. Mostly I'm by myself all day at the scanner, standing in the hallway like a total douche canoe.”

“Poor thing. But I don't quite feel sorry for you. Now, if the scanner were outside in the rain, and you had to dodge the lightning, then I could relate.”

He pulls up to an apartment complex, parks, and comes around to my side of the car with an umbrella.

“So chivalrous,” I say, and he bows.

We head up the stairs to the second-floor unit he shares with his brother, Aamir. “I don't think he'll be here. It's poker night.”

“And you skipped that? For me?”

“Why play cards when I can be with the Queen of Hearts?”

“You know you're a total cheeseball, right?”

“Is it working?”

I nod slowly. Up-down, up-down. The world orbiting my head. I'm at that perfect point between tipsy and drunk where I'm alert enough to enjoy the moment and relaxed enough to toss a pillow over the yapping mouths of the Greek chorus of doom in my head.

He leads me into the dark apartment, our fingers interlaced. Before he turns on the light, I fall in to him, planting kisses indiscriminately across any piece of flesh I can reach. I snap off the leather cuff and hold the inside of his wrist to my mouth, feeling his pulse against my lips.

“Whoa, there. You want a drink or anything?”

I make a noise that, while being totally indistinguishable as a real word, somehow indicates
Nope, I'm ready, take me now.
We start kissing again and slowly move together down the hallway. He has to hunch down to kiss me, and I feel as if I'm pulling down a high branch for a succulent piece of fruit. Plucking temptation right off the tree—mine, all mine. Maybe I'm descending into Dante's second circle, but I don't care. He guides me into his room and we stumble across the debris on his floor, dancing over shoes and discarded clothes until we tip backward onto his bed.

The wine massages my nerves, which otherwise would be sending off fireworks of anxiety. One little worry spark persists: I haven't been with anyone since Scott. But Kalil snuffs out the worry spark with his fingers and lips; the former are unbuttoning my shirt, the latter kissing each new piece of flesh that's revealed.

Button-down shirt, you came through for me after all. Soon I'll be a naked zebra.

I reach for the bottom of his shirt and yank it over his head, admiring the tousled look of his hair, then letting my eyes take in his bare chest. He grins down at me, and I rest my hands on his waist, grinning back at him. We pause, admiring the plating of a delicious dish before diving in.

At that exact moment, the front door to the apartment opens. The sound of two distinct voices—one male, one female—floats down the hallway. Kalil tenses immediately, his smile gone. The male voice sounds like a deeper modulation of Kalil's; the female voice is raspy with age.

“Shit!” he whispers. “You have to go.”

“What?” I clutch the halves of my shirt together. “You drove me here!”

He closes his eyes, opens them again. “Okay, well—get in the closet, then.” He looks exasperated.

“Not until you tell me what the hell is going on!” I try to keep my voice low, but my blood is boiling, and not in the good way anymore.

“That's my mom out there,” he says in a rush. “I had no idea she was coming over. She'll kill me if she knows I have a girl over.”

I grope around on the floor and grab my purse strap with one hand, still clutching my shirt together with the other. “Seriously?”

He drops his head a little. “Yeah.”

I tiptoe toward the closet, and he gives me an apologetic look before closing the doors in my face.

Eighteen

M
y life has officially reached a new low.

Surrounded by darkness, I strain to hear what's going on outside the closet doors. Kalil joined his mother and brother in the living room—after putting his shirt back on, I'm sure—but all I can make out is the muffled rise and fall of their voices, the words indiscriminate. The rain picks up outside, accompanied by a driving wind. I try not to think about how long I might be stuck in his closet. Thank God I peed at the restaurant. I consider urinating anyway. A revenge piss.

My Stoicism has officially cracked. The desires are piling up now. 1) Learn kung fu. 2) Become a lesbian. 3) Write and subsequently publish stories that mock and shame certain people in a thinly veiled way.

As quietly as I can, I settle into a cross-legged position on the floor. It's a small closet, so I have to keep pushing the wrists of his shirts away from my face. Like I'm being slapped again and again. I fumble around inside my purse and sigh with relief when my hands close over the rectangular shape of my phone.

I text Lin:
Help! I'
m trapped in Kalil's closet!

He texts right back.
OMG. Should I come get you?

Closing my eyes, I draw up a visual map of his apartment, or what I could see of it when we stumbled in. Was there a back door? A fire escape? Can I open the closet doors without being heard? And why do I even care if his mom hears me? Serves him right.

Okay, focus.
On the way to his room, I do remember seeing a glass-paneled sliding balcony door at the back of the apartment. I glimpsed it between kisses and imagined us sitting out there circa two
a.m.,
sipping wine and watching the rain drip off the balcony in a cloud of postcoital bliss. How could I have been so wrong?

Focus!
It's only the second floor, so a balcony escape might actually work. The hallway to his room is out of the den sight line, so I could get to the balcony door without being seen. Being heard could be a different matter.

I text Lin back:
Not sure yet. Hiding from his mom.
I decide that if I'm still in here in half an hour, that's where I draw the line. Part of me thinks Kalil might yet emerge and invite me out to meet her. That he just needed to set the scene and mentally prep her. In which case the closet bit was unnecessary, but I'd like to give him and his beautiful, beautiful body the benefit of the doubt. He's still in the possibility-of-redemption zone. T minus 30.

At one point someone walks down the hallway, but it turns out to be one of them going to the bathroom. A flush, and then the voices resume talking. I close my eyes and the thoughts rush in on me. Man, was I suckered. I knew it was too good to be true, a sexy philosopher interested in me, showing up just in time to distract me from Charlie's disappearance.

Kalil has disappeared now, too, out of my reach. It turns out that all his lovely theories were just a philosophy of avoidance: Don't get another job, don't share your writing with the world, don't introduce the girl you like to your mother. It's an immaculately wrapped philosophy, sheer paper topped with a silver bow. But there's a puppy inside the box, and it's trapped. It's going to die in there if no one lets it out. Thing is, if you let the puppy out, you have to potty-train it, clean up after it, feed it so it grows. The philosophy of avoidance doesn't allow for life's messiness.

And that's when I realize: I want it to grow, my puppy in a box. Sure, it doesn't know anything about the big wide world. And sure, maybe I can't afford dog food. But I have to let it out. And I have to get out of this closet.

I open my eyes and grab my phone. It's time to notify my getaway driver. The apartment is at the intersection of two main roads in Fairfax, so he should be able to find it. I didn't catch the building number, but it's close to a patch of woods, so there's at least a landmark. I text Lin the relevant info.

Once enough time has passed, I stand up, looping my purse over my head and one arm. Pushing the shirts out of my way, I stand in front of the vertical line of light between the closet doors. I can hear better from here. His mother is talking in what sounds like a stern tone, saying something about alcohol in the apartment. That's the part I can understand, anyway. The rest is in Urdu.

While I'm buttoning up my shirt, I allow myself the luxury of inhaling the nuanced scent of his closet. It smells like dryer sheets and cologne with a hint of sweat. I inhale and let out a silent sigh, my body tense. Inside the anger shell, there's a soft center of me that's still melting from his kisses.

I don't have too much time to dwell on all that, and it's probably for the best. I open my eyes. By now, Lin is waiting for me outside in his Audi. It's time for action.
I can do this
. I am one of Charlie's Angels. I am a ninja.

With a swell of confidence and fury mixed together, I give the closet door a gentle but firm push, and it opens without a sound. Tiptoeing to the door, I peek out. A quick glance confirms the back door is indeed where I remembered. The hallway light is off, and I'm sure I won't be seen as long as no one gets up from the couch. I make my way to the back door, getting more confident with each step, putting one foot in front of the other as if on a balance beam. I can hear Mr. Smiley saying, “Walk on your high toe!” I am a jungle cat! I am stealth embodied!

I take hold of the balcony door handle, turn it, and slide it open. It squeaks softly, and my breath catches.
Shit!

The conversation stops in the other room. I'm frozen.

“What was that?” his mom asks.

Shit! Shit! Shit!

There's no option now but to move ahead with my plan. Without opening the balcony door any farther, I slide outside and close it as softly as I can. It squeaks again.

The rain is coming down hard now. I dash to the railing to find I'm quite a bit higher up than I was hoping, but there's an ample bush below. Remembering my third-grade fire plan, I swing one leg and then the other over the railing. I grasp it firmly and let my feet drop so I'm dangling by my hands. Rain begins to soak my backside.

Before I can release my hands, the balcony door flies open and an older version of Kalil appears. He slips out and dashes to the edge, looking down at me. His eyes widen, and I realize that the top couple of buttons on my shirt have come undone and are flapping in the wind. So maybe I have a bit of work to do on the stealthiness thing.

Our eyes stay locked. His seem to say,
Get out while you can!
Over the sound of the rain, I can barely hear more footsteps coming down the hallway, along with Kalil's anxious voice.

His brother raises his eyebrows at me, and I nod. It's time. I release my hands from the railing and let myself fall. For one or two seconds, my stomach lurches as I drop. It's only two stories, but it feels like a small eternity before I land with a
thud
in the bush, sprawled out hammock-style. It takes me a second to regain my senses. I throw my leg over one side of the bush. It lands in a giant mud puddle, but I have to keep moving. I hoist my other leg out of the bush.

Holding the top of my shirt together with one hand, I make a break for the parking lot. I allow myself one glance backward and see that Kalil's brother is the only one on the balcony. I made it!

I turn to find Lin, mouth hanging open, waiting for me in his Audi. I climb inside. “Oh, dear Lord,” he says when I've closed the door. I look down at myself: Leaves are plastered all over my new jeans; my left leg is covered in mud up to my midcalf. I'm generally soaked; wet strands of hair cling in limp clumps to the sides of my face. I follow Lin's eyes to my chest, where a few more leaves lurk in my cleavage.

I lean my head against the seat. “Worst. Date. Ever.”

Half an hour
later I pull on my pajama pants and a T-shirt and walk into the den, relieved to be warm and dry. I toss my cell phone on the coffee table. Lin is reclining on the sofa, flipping through channels.

“Anyway, how was your night?” I sit down next to him, pulling an afghan over both of us.

Lin stops on the Food Network—a Julia Child rerun—and we watch transfixed as she dumps two sticks of butter into a pan.

“Oh, sorry. It was fine.”

“Steve's good?”

Lin gets a melty-butter smile. “Yup.”

I shake my head. “Good for you, sweetie. But could you toss me a lifebuoy from cloud nine? Here I am dangling off of men's balconies in the rain.”

Lin looks away from the screen to meet my eyes. “That has nothing to do with you and everything to do with him being a spineless asshole.”

Right on cue, my phone starts buzzing. Lin snatches it off the coffee table, frowns, then turns it toward me so I can see Kalil's name flashing across the front. “No way are you answering this. No way in hell.”

“No argument here.” I watch the name flash and then disappear. I tilt my head onto Lin's shoulder. “Seriously, I can't even have a decent date.” Outside the radius of Kalil's blinding hotness, my mind clears enough to reveal the real disappointment: I'd been hoping this date could take my mind off Charlie.

Lin seems to sense this—he finds my hand under the afghan.

“I want him on this coast,” I say, and Lin nods.

On that train of thought, Scott rides in, wearing his stupid boat shoes and alligator polo. The night after our first date, I came home to the dorm gushing, “He's a musician!” as Lin smiled up at me from the couch. Scott had taken me back to his room and played his guitar for me. Oh, so painfully cliché, but like a jackass, I'd melted into a girl puddle on his beige carpet. Looking up at him was like being underwater at the pool on a summer day, the sun's light spreading out in rippling waves across the surface of my life, everything intense but also in slow motion.

My memory fast-forwards to that horrible breakup at Calamity Brew. The hurt from Kalil's rejection opens up a portal of echoing pain. Thinking of how close Kalil and I were to doing the deed, I can't help thinking of my first time with Scott. He put on some mood music: the Gaussian Pyramids' EP. There might as well have been a blimp flying overhead bearing the message: “Danger, Will Robinson, danger! You are about to bed a narcissist
.
”

I revisit my flash-card mantras: Scott was a scum bastard. Scott never loved me as much as I deserved. And Lin's favorite: Scott had an alarming amount of earwax. “How can he tell he's even singing in the right key?” Thing is, Scott was my first love. No amount of woolgathering about his imperfections can change that. Not even the travesty that is indie-disco fusion.

The sliding tile puzzle inside me was always in disarray with Scott, but I frowned at the pieces and thought,
Well, maybe that's what love's supposed to look like. Maybe love is like modern art. It's colorful but doesn't make much sense.

Charlie made so much damn sense.

When I met Charlie, it was like a revelation:
This—
this
is what I've been looking for.
Someone sexy, confident, and creative, but also vulnerable. Someone with an open heart who wanted connection, not just abject adoration.

A tear rolls down my cheek, and then, because my face is tilted, it rolls across my nose and onto Lin's shoulder. He hears me sniffle and wraps me in a big hug. “Honey,” he says softly.

“I feel like other people are moving ahead with their lives—getting married, getting real jobs—and I'm stuck. Stuck in a dead-end job. Stuck on a guy who's out of my reach.”

“You've got me, Pipes. You've always got me.”

I smile through my sniffles. “I don't know what I'd do without you.”

“Oh, hush. You're an ironclad woman, you know that? You just got a few layers of mush to work through.”

My phone begins buzzing again, and Lin grabs it. “Arsehole,” he mutters under his breath, and shoves the phone under the couch cushion. The rain keeps pouring down the windows. Lin flips through the channels one more time before settling back on Julia, but I can't focus. Instead, I retrieve Stacey's cheat sheet from my room and bring it back to Lin.