The Thing I Didn't Know I Didn't Know (Russel Middlebrook: The Futon Years Book 1) (12 page)

"Then my job gets a whole lot easier."

I guess technically we were back to flirting. But I'd never flirted so brazenly before in my life. We might as well have been lubing each other up.

Then we were kissing, still on the seat, the green neon turning to blue then purple. He tasted minty, which made me wonder when he'd had a chance to slip in a breath mint without me looking. Or who knows? Maybe he was just so perfect that his mouth always tasted that way.

Things could have gone further, but let's face it: we were in a glass Ferris wheel car, and that just seemed tacky.

When the ride was over, I said, "Where now?"

As if I didn't already know we were heading back to his apartment.

*   *   *

Just so you know, this wasn't something I usually did—sex on a first date. Although you could argue that dinner at Vernie's was a date-of-sorts, so this was technically a "second" date. Even so, I had a firm four-dates-before-any-sex policy with guys.

Okay, maybe it wasn't all that firm. Maybe it was more of a general guideline. But I had sometimes stuck to it before.

I know what you're thinking: how can he have even a vague, sporadically-enforced four-dates-before-sex policy if he's also done random online hook-ups?

Remember what I said about fuck buddies—that the point was just sex and not romance or a relationship, and there usually wasn't any overlap between the two? That was true of hook-ups too. Just get in and get out, pun partially intended.

But actual "dates" are something very different. That's when you're talking about a guy where you think there might actually be the potential for a relationship, for romance. And I think it's totally true that too-early sex can really ruin that potential. It puts it in a different category—something casual, something unimportant. If nothing else, it lessens that fantastic sense of mystery and suspense in those first few weeks of dating.

I'm sorry if this sounds confusing, but it's really not.

Anyway, my night out with Felicks definitely
was
a date, and I was totally opting to violate my four-dates-before-sex rule. Why?

I had no choice: the bivalves had spoken.

*   *   *

Felicks lived on First Hill, just above downtown. He had a roommate, but he was out at the moment. (I couldn't help but wonder if he was
deliberately
out. I hadn't seen Felicks text anyone, but maybe he'd done it when I hadn't been looking, or maybe they'd planned it all out in advance. I wasn't sure whether to be flattered or insulted by this possibility.)

The apartment was nicer than Boston's—Pier One, maybe, not Ikea. But it wasn't so nice that I felt like Felicks and I were in wildly different categories of success. He didn't seem to be a neat-freak either. I couldn't help but think:
Oh! We're compatible in the cleanliness regard too.

Then I noticed a strange smell. It had been so long since I'd smelled it that it took me a second to place it.

Cigarette smoke.

Felicks noticed me noticing the smell. "My roommate smokes."

"Ah," I said, nodding sympathetically.

"Can I get you a drink?" he said.

"Sure," I said. "Whatever you have." This was still a date, after all. It's not like we were going to throw off our clothes then and there.

Felicks brought me Coke in a glass with ice cubes.

"Sorry," he said. "Turns out we don't have any alcohol."

That made me feel better. It meant this whole thing hadn't been planned after all. Plus, it at least confirmed that he wasn't an alcoholic—something good to know about a potential husband. (Yes, yes, I was getting waaaay ahead of myself.)

We sat on the couch sipping our Cokes for a second. Then he said, "Oh, hell, it's me."

"What's you?" I said.

"I'm the smoker."

"Oh."

"I don't know why I lied," Felicks said. "I guess I was nervous. I figured it might turn you off."

"No, it's okay." I wasn't crazy about the fact that he smoked, but at least he'd 'fessed up. And everyone has his vice (mine is Pez). Anyway, now I knew why he'd slipped in a breath mint before we'd taken that ride on the Great Wheel—it had been pretty clear we were going to kiss.

"Do you mind if I have one?" Felicks said. "I'm kinda crazy for it. I'll smoke it out on the porch, okay?"

"Yeah, sure, whatever," I said.

So Felicks went out on the porch to light up, and I followed him. How had I not noticed before how jittery he was? Or maybe he hadn't been jittery until just now.

Out on the porch, I asked Felicks, "Do you like living on First Hill?"

He blew a blue cloud away from me. "Well, it's close to downtown."

"And the library," I said.

"You're a reader, huh?"

I nodded. "It's funny though. There are two things about Seattle that I think are totally overrated. The downtown library and the sculpture park."

"Oh, yeah. With some of those sculptures, I feel like we're being
Punk'd.
I mean, what the hell is that big orange thing? If looking at it is supposed to make me think, all I ever think is, 'Why did they make it so ugly?'"

"And the big 'and' sign? Really? And I totally feel like a prude saying this, but the one with the naked man reaching out for the naked boy, and they're surrounded by all that water—that's just creepy."

Felicks laughed, and I felt the same connection I'd felt with him earlier. I was starting to relax again.

Felicks finished his cigarette, and we headed back inside.

We took seats on the couch again, but this time I happened to glance at the shelf underneath the coffee table. There were comic books, and old TV remotes, and something else—something confusing. Once again, it took a second for my mind to register what it was.

A handgun. It was black and sleek. The handle was all one big rubber grip

But even after I realized what it was, I thought:
That must be a toy. Or maybe a lighter.

It didn't look like a toy. Not at all.

Felicks has a handgun?
I thought. And he'd left it out in the open? He
really
hadn't expected me to come over to his apartment, had he?

Once again, Felicks noticed me noticing.

"That's my roommate's," he said quickly.

The words hung in the air as if on strings, like pieces of a mobile. I think we both realized at the same time that this was exactly what he'd said before, about the cigarette smoke. And he'd been lying. It was pretty clear he was lying this time too.

"No, really," Felicks said. "He's kind of paranoid." Once again, he'd said it just a touch too quickly.

We fell silent. I clutched my Coke. There was cold condensation on the glass, making it feel slick in my hand. It was numbing my fingers too. I worried I might drop it.

"Seriously," Felicks said. "He was gay-bashed a couple of years ago."

"It's cool," I said. "It's none of my business." I wasn't sure what else to say. It was weird to go over to someone's apartment and find a handgun lying under the coffee table, right? Maybe not in Arkansas, but in Seattle. I sort of expected him to say, "It's not even loaded." But he didn't. Which I guess meant it
was
loaded.

I'm sitting three feet from a loaded gun
, I thought. The idea made me perspire.

Desperate to change the subject, I looked over at Felicks' bookshelf. He didn't have very many books—it was mostly games and DVDs. But one of the book titles caught my eye right away.
The Tea Party Goes to Washington
by Rand Paul.

"The Tea Party, huh?" I said. "I hope to hell
that's
your roommate's." Then I laughed, because I was certain it was.

But Felicks didn't laugh. He just meekly sipped his drink.

"What?" I said.

"Uh, that really is mine," he said at last.

"Wait," I said. "Go back. You're a Rand Paul supporter?"

He shrugged, and the ice cubes tinkled in his glass. "Sort of, yeah."

"But you're gay," I said.
And a person of color,
I thought.
And not a total idiot.

"What does that have to do with anything?" Felicks said. "The two-party system is completely broken."

"Yeah," I muttered. "Thanks to people like Rand Paul whose whole strategy is to blow everything up, and then try to blame all the chaos on Obama."

Once again, we both sat in silence for a second. Now our ice cubes weren't even tinkling. Felicks was really a libertarian? Suddenly the loaded handgun made more sense. In a way, so did the cigarette smoking.

"Well," Felicks said. "This got weird fast."

It
had
gotten weird. I guess political compatibility was yet another reason to stick to the four-dates-before-sex rule.

"It's funny," he said. "At dinner, I was already merging our iTunes accounts."

I smiled. "Yeah, me too. But..." Cigarette smoking and little white lies were one thing. And maybe there really was a good explanation for that handgun under the coffee table. But Felicks being a Tea Partier? Give me a fucking break. Trying to see the world from the point of view of other people didn't necessarily mean
dating
them—not if they stood for just about everything you thought was wrong in the world. Just like with Boston, this relationship was doomed before it even started.

"Yeah," Felicks said, nodding.

I stood up to go.

"'Course that doesn't mean we couldn't still fool around," he said.

I looked back at him, at his smooth brown skin, his shiny black hair, perfectly gelled. I could even smell him over the cigarette smoke, the scent of something musky and mysterious. He was a handgun-wielding libertarian, but Felicks was still a hottie.

I considered for a second. "I guess I could stay a little while longer." Just because the date was officially over, it might not be the end of the world if the evening segued into something more like a hook-up.

Hey, I never said I was a perfect person, okay?

CHAPTER NINE

So it was the Fourth of July, but I didn't feel like I had much to celebrate. In case you've forgotten, I'll recap with bullet-points:

* I'd just gone on a pretty disastrous date with Felicks, one made all the more terrible because it had started out so well.

* I had two jobs I totally hated.

* I had a roommate, Gunnar, who was a lunatic.

* I didn't have Kevin.

And speaking of jobs I hated, of course I had to work at Green Lake all day on the Fourth of July, until seven p.m. When I finally got home around eight, Min and her Min-ions were up on the rooftop deck. Every year, the city puts on a fireworks show over Lake Union, and lots of people gather in their boats in the middle of the lake to watch it. The problem is, there are a lot of boats in Seattle, and Lake Union just isn't that big a lake. So it's like this insane boat traffic jam all day long, with people shouting and boats knocking and music blaring, and it doesn't quite make sense because sailboats usually seem so peaceful.

"There's lots of food in the fridge," Min said. "We barbecued."

I wasn't surprised they hadn't waited on me for dinner, but I was a little surprised that Gunnar was with them. Lately, he'd been pretty wrapped up in his Bigfoot research.

I went down and loaded up a plate for dinner. They'd made roasted vegetables and barbecued polenta, which made sense since Min and the Min-ions were all vegetarian. (And as much as I'd like to use this occasion as another opportunity to bash Trai and Lena, the food was
amazing
. They had grilled carrots and zucchini and onions and portabella mushrooms. They'd actually made this barbecue sauce for the polenta—with peaches, I think. People who say that vegetarian food is lousy or tasteless have clearly never been to Seattle.)

Then I went back up to the deck again to wait for the fireworks show.

Trai was explaining some idea he had. "Data encryption is usually based on mathematical algorithms," he was saying. "Which means they're reversible, to physical quanta. The code can always be cracked, if you're patient and you work at it long enough. But our idea is totally different. This is encryption based on quantum properties. It's literally impossible to decode, not unless you figure out a way to violate the laws of physics. We already have a prototype code, and we're meeting with some investors next week. It's just casual, but it could lead to something."

Another start-up?
I thought. This just figured. I was sure it was going to be a huge success, and if Min was involved, she'd probably end up just as rich as Gunnar.

And I'd still be making nine-forty an hour.

"Isolate your intellectual property," Gunnar said. "That's what screwed me up when I set up my first corporation. It's different from the prototype. The prototype might change, but the intellectual property won't, not if you define it right. I can walk you through it if you want."

Now, see, this is exactly the kind of thing that I wouldn't have expected Gunnar to know. Sometimes I forget that his head isn't always in the clouds. He gets obsessed about some pretty crazy things, but he can also be surprisingly practical. In truth, his striking it rich with the
Singing Dog
iPhone app was really no fluke. If that hadn't worked out, he probably would have struck gold some other way. And when his current money runs out, he'll just stumble upon some new fortune. It pays to be intellectually curious—literally.

"What about you?" Trai said. "What do you think?"

"Huh?" I said. Trai was speaking to me?

"Of our business idea."

I just stared at him stupidly. I didn't know anything about physics
or
business (thus the jobs at Green Lake and Bake). But I wasn't about to let Trai know this.

"It sounds great," I said. And then, in a fiendishly clever attempt to change the topic, I said, "Who made the barbecue sauce for the polenta? Peaches, right? It's fantastic."

Trai smiled. "Yeah. Peaches. Lena's recipe." We all looked over at her, talking with Min off to one side.

And then no one said anything. Trai and Gunnar looked back at me like I was going to say something else.

So much for my brilliant plan to change the topic.

"I had a business idea once," I said. "I may still put it into practice one day."

"Yeah?" Trai said.

"Yeah. Clean airport bathrooms."

"Airports already have bathrooms," Gunnar said.

"Yeah, but they're totally disgusting, because so many people use them. And let's face it, when you're in an airport, sometimes it's late at night or early in the morning, and you have to, you know,
really use the bathroom
. Who wants to do that in an airport bathroom when there's no real privacy? So I figure you could set up a storefront in airports where everyone has their own individual unisex bathroom, and each one is cleaned after each use. It would cost fifteen bucks or something, and you could, like, sell toiletries too—toothbrushes and razors, and maybe have shower stalls. You could just call it Clean Bathrooms. Or maybe something trendy, like Wash or Pipe."

When I finished talking, Trai just stared at me. It wasn't so quiet you could hear a pin drop, because it was Lake Union on the Fourth of July, and there were firecrackers and skyrockets and music blaring from the boats in front of us and the houseboats around us. But Trai was trying to embarrass me. Wasn't he? Maybe it was all in my mind. Maybe it wasn't the greatest business idea in the world, but it wasn't terrible either. Was it?

Finally, Gunnar said, "I love it! I bet you're gonna make a lot of money."

Meanwhile, Trai just sort of turned and drifted over toward Min and Lena, and the three of them started murmuring about something. I wanted to tell Trai to go jump in a lake. As chance would have it, there was one very handy!

I ignored him, turning back to Gunnar.

"So what'd you do all day?" I said.

"Huh?" He looked at me. "Oh, you know. The usual."

I actually
didn't
know. What was a "usual" day for Gunnar, since he didn't have to work anymore and was pretty damn weird to begin with? I still had no idea. Maybe one day I could strap a tiny camera on him and see what he ended up doing, like how they do with cats. The results would probably be really surprising, just like how they always are with cats.

I thought about making this joke with Gunnar, but then I saw the distracted expression on his face, so I decided not to.

"You doing anything interesting this weekend?" I asked. The Fourth of July was on a Friday night this year.

He sort of shrugged. Then he looked down at the railing around the top of the boat. Something about it was suddenly fascinating to him.

"Any new Bigfoot sightings?" I said. I kind of hated to go there, since I still felt a little weirdness from that expedition a few weeks earlier. On the other hand, we had to talk about something.

And sure enough, Gunnar immediately perked up again.

"There was a sighting this week over in Icicle Canyon. But it was Class B, so no one's taking it very seriously."

"Class B?"

"There are three kinds of Bigfoot sightings—Class A, Class B, and Class C. Class C are the worst—second-hand reports and legends and things like that. Class B are a little better, because they're first-hand accounts. But they're not clear—they're sightings from a distance or in low light. Class A are the ones that really matter. They're the ones that are close-up, where you can absolutely rule out it being a different kind of animal. The one we were investigating a couple of weeks ago was Class A. And remember Ben's encounter with the Bigfoot up at Stehekin? That was Class A too."

"Is this like close encounters of the third kind?" I asked. I thought for a second. "Wait. Are there three different kinds of close encounters? I mean, of UFOs? Hold on. A close encounter of the third kind is the best kind, right? Like in the movie? So is it the opposite of Class A, B, and C?"

Gunnar shook his head—showing a little too much annoyance, I thought. "No, that's totally different."

"How?" I said, not knowing how else to keep this conversation going.

"There are actually five kinds of close encounters with aliens. A close encounter of the first kind is a UFO sighting, close-up. A close encounter of the second kind is feeling physical effects, like heat or shaking. A close encounter of the third kind is seeing the actual alien. The fourth kind is being abducted, and the fifth kind is actual communication. None of this is about how good or clear the encounter is. With that system, either you have an encounter with aliens or you don't. And if you don't, then it's not a 'close' encounter at all. Get it?"

I nodded, even as I thought to myself, defensively,
Well, it's still
kind
of like Class A, Class B, and Class C.
I mean, I wasn't
totally
wrong, even if I'd forgotten there were also close encounters of the fourth and fifth kind.

Then I realized I was debating observational rating systems for aliens and Bigfoot, and decided maybe it was time to change the topic again.

"No, really," I said to Gunnar. "This barbecue sauce is amazing, and it's made with actual peaches."

*   *   *

Later, after I'd managed to finally pull Min aside from her friends, I said to her, "I'm still worried about Gunnar."

She nodded in the dark. "Yeah, me too."

But right then, the fireworks started.

There are firework shows, and then there are fireworks shows that you see from the roof-top deck of a houseboat on Lake Union. It was like being in the middle of an electric jellyfish.

And then, in the midst of all that sparkling beauty, I happened to glance across the deck and see Trai holding Min's hand.

Min and Trai are dating?
I thought.

I did a double-take, but by that time, Min was already pulling her hand away. She looked my way and smiled. She thought she'd gotten away with the subterfuge—she hadn't seen that I'd seen.

I smiled back, but inside I was groaning. Trai? This just figured. Out of all the people in the world—literally, male or female, since Min is bisexual—she had to pick
Trai
? It was even worse that they were friends, that they already knew each other in some sense. That meant it was less likely to be some stupid temporary fling—that there was still a chance she could find out he was a handgun-wielding, Rand Paul-supporting idiot.

The fireworks ended shortly after that. Trai and Lena had to go home, so they said their goodbyes (to Min, without even
offering
to help clean up the kitchen).

As Gunnar, Min, and I tidied up, I couldn't help but wonder why she didn't want me to know about her and Trai. Because she suspected I didn't like him? I knew I should say something, tell her I thought it was okay, but I couldn't find the right words.

Before I knew it, the houseboat was mostly clean, and I was taking a bag of trash out to the dumpster. That meant walking all the way down the dock to the parking lot. In the streets in front of me, and even up on the freeway on the hill, I could hear the huffing of cars—all the people who'd come to Lake Union to watch the fireworks but were now stuck in traffic jams.

I made it to the dumpster and tossed the trash. When I turned around, I saw two figures standing by a car on the other side of the parking lot. It was Trai and Lena.

Kissing.

I couldn't help but stare. They were right under a streetlight, and I was in the shadows, so I didn't think they could see me even if they looked.

But they weren't looking. They were too busy going at it.

Trai is cheating on Min,
I thought. This was even better than him turning out to be a handgun-wielding, Rand Paul-supporting idiot. There was no way Min would stay together with him now.

I tried to contain my glee. I was no fan of Trai's, but Min was still one of my two best friends, and I didn't want to see her hurt.

*   *   *

"Hey, Min," I said, back inside the boat. "Can we talk for a sec?" I'd come to her bedroom, but I stood in the doorway. Her bedroom is bigger than mine, but it still doesn't really have room for two people except in bed. On the back wall, she had a poster of Xena Warrior Princess and her sidekick, Gabrielle.

Min looked up from her iPad. "Sure," she said. "Oh, yeah, you wanted to talk about Gunnar. Do you think we should talk to him? Maybe do a Bigfoot intervention?"

"This isn't about Gunnar."

"What's it about?"

I hemmed and hawed.

"Just say it," she said.

"I just saw Trai and Lena kissing. Out in the parking lot."

Min pondered this, but didn't seem shocked.

"You guys are dating, right? I saw you holding his hand up on the deck."