SUE’S ELOPING WAS a bummer for many reasons.
One, I’d be missing my best friend’s wedding.
Two, all the stuff I was about to do to Joe was nerve-racking to say the least. He had no idea what he was in for.
And three, Sue had promised to be my date to the art show. Which was the worst bummer of all.
Because when you have to do something genuinely scary, it’s nice to have a friend.
I’d be all alone. Just standing straight and brittle with crazy eyes and a quavery smile all night while I waited for a bunch of portrait critics in tortoiseshell glasses to render judgment on my talent, my value as a human being, and my entire future.
So, yeah. Was eloping to Canada really more important than keeping me from dying of misery?
I could see both sides.
Anyway, Sue had been fully on board to help me survive it all. Until she got kidnapped, that is.
I suppose it was possible I’d astonish us all and win this art show. But I didn’t love my odds.
That said—I had just enough hope to keep going.
That’s the dark underbelly of hope that nobody ever talks about. How it can skew your perspective. How it can keep you in long past when any reasonable person would’ve been out. How it can land you in your own apartment on a random Tuesday night—annotating your downstairs neighbor’s nose-to-lip dimensions with a tape measure.
“You don’t have to hold your breath,” I kept telling Joe.
“Right. Got it.”
He was more nervous than he’d expected to be. I could tell from his posture. And how very scrubbed clean he was—like maybe he’d taken a shower and a half. Even from the cautious way he’d walked across the rooftop toward my door. Almost like he had half a mind to turn around.
“It’s harder than it seems, huh?” I said.
“Trigonometry is hard. Climbing El Capitan is hard. Landing on the beaches of Normandy is hard. This is just … sitting here.”
“Sitting here while a total stranger measures every square inch of your face.”
“You’re not a total stranger.”
“You’re right. I’m worse. You know me just enough for this to be super awkward.”
“I don’t feel awkward,” Joe said. “Yeah, you do.”
I’d made a graph on a canvas and I was dividing his face into one-inch sections, trying to treat each square as a different landscape. Maybe if my brain didn’t know it was a face, it wouldn’t cause trouble.
I worked my way from top to bottom. So far I had the hair, the hairline, the forehead, and the eyebrows. It had gone pretty well, but now we were coming to the eyes, and for some reason I didn’t understand, ever since the start of the face blindness, the eyes were my hardest thing to look at.
But these weren’t eyes, I told myself. These were dots and lines and color. I just had to think about it that way, and I’d be fine. Maybe that was the trick to it all. Abstract it out. Make the face not a face.
Easy.
But of course Joe didn’t know his face wasn’t a face. He kept rubbing his eyes and sneezing and looking back at me. Every time his eyes met mine, I got a jolt of something physical, like I was looking into a bright light.
“You can look down,” I kept saying. “Sorry,” he’d say.
Mostly, though, he sat still. Mostly, the problem was me.
This just wasn’t how I was used to working.
I’d been painting portraits since high school. I’d patterned my techniques and methods into my brain like deep grooves.
This felt like trying to read a book upside down. In another language.
At no point did I ever just get caught up in the flow—the way I always had before when I was painting. There was no flow. There was no getting lost in the moment. The math and the struggle and the shockingly close presence of Joe’s actual live human body just right there, inches away from me—breathing and generating heat and leaning in whenever I got close— kept me anchored to reality.
I blame Joe.
And that torso of his.
And don’t even get me started on the imaginary judges I kept hearing in my head: “Did she use a grid for this? What is this, paint by numbers?”
I could feel myself losing. In advance.
I had a bad feeling. I took a picture of the portrait so far and texted it to Sue for her professional opinion.
Her reply was immediate: Nope. Creepy. Salvageable? I texted back.
Not a chance.
“I don’t think the grid is working,” I said to Joe. Joe shrugged. “Okay. What’s next?”
I consulted my list of ideas. “Let’s turn you upside down.”
So that was our next attempt. Joe lay on the sofa, hanging his head backward over the arm, and I turned the canvas upside down and tried to sketch him like that.
Sue’s response to this one was a simple two words: Police sketch.
So we moved down the list. I tried having him describe his face to me and painting with my back to him.
Maybe the third time would be the charm. But no.
Sue’s final response was the worst of all: Serial killer. Okay.
We were done here.
I set my brush down and took a second to rub the kinks out of my hand.
Had I ever cramped up while painting before?
Never.
Joe must have been cramping up, too, somehow. Because he watched me working on my hands for a minute, then looked up decisively and said, “I think I need a break.”
We’d been at it since five o’clock, and now it was ten. “Oh,” I said. “Sure. Of course.”
He started walking toward my door, and when I didn’t follow, he turned back to wave me in his direction.
By break, I thought he meant, you know, a turn about the room or something. “Are we … going somewhere?”
“We need to get some air.”
 |
OUTSIDE, WE STROLLED for a bit.
Then Joe asked, “Who have you been texting all night?”
Was there any way in hell I’d be telling Joe that I had no ability to judge if my own portraits were any good?
No.
“Is it your friend who eloped?”
“I’m just getting her opinions,” I said. “On the portraits.” “You’re texting her pictures?”
“Yep.”
“Can I see?” “See what?”
“The portraits.”
I frowned at him, like he was crazy. “Of course not.” We’d already agreed.
Just then, another text came in from Sue. I glanced down to check it— just as Joe leaned over to peek.
“Hey!” I protested, hiding the phone behind my back. But he tried to reach around me, all playful.
“Nope,” I said, race-walking away. He was not seeing those portraits.
Now he was chasing me a little. “Your friend gets to see them, and she abandoned you for Canada.”
“She didn’t abandon me, she was kidnapped,” I said, moving toward a patch of grass.
What was happening here? It goes without saying that Joe trying to steal my phone was much more fun than Parker trying to steal my phone.
But did he really care about seeing the portraits? Or did he just want to blow off some steam and roughhouse? He hadn’t seemed to care at all earlier—but maybe he was just … looking for a reason to run around outside? Flirting, even?
Joe swiped at my phone again, managing to pull me into a hug-like situation as he did—and this time, he grabbed it.
I wasn’t cleared for running, so I knew I couldn’t chase him. Instead, I threw my foot out and tripped him.
He hit the grass with an “oof,” and then, before he could scramble off and run away, I sat on him and started tickling him.
It worked. Joe, despite his claims, was highly ticklish. He started laughing so hard, he fully dropped the phone. And it was so fun to see his reaction that even after I’d grabbed it and stuffed it deep into my pocket, I went back to the tickling.
What a strange thing to do. Had I ever tickled anyone in adult life? Definitely never. But it felt somehow like the only thing to do.
Turns out, it was fun.
“We agreed,” I said, like I had to punish him with tickling now because he’d broken the rules. “You weren’t going to look at the portraits until I was ready. Right?” I tickled some more. “Right?”
“Fine,” Joe finally said, breathless. “Right. I give up! Peace!” I sat back, out of breath, and then he sat up, also out of breath.
We sat companionably side by side for a minute. That whole thing had been a lot more playful than either of us had expected.
And more suggestive.
Joe was just standing to help me up when we heard a woman’s voice say, “You always were ticklish.”
At the sound of the voice, Joe went tight like a wire. Then he turned to stare at the woman with the intensity of a hunting dog on point.
She was standing a few feet away from us, with a man, holding his hand.
Who were they? Were they people I knew? I scanned for clues. She had a black shirtdress and sandals, and he wore khakis and a graph-check button-down.
They could have been anyone. But not to Joe.
Joe knew exactly who they were, and his body tensed up so much, it tightened the air around him. That said, he had some grass in his hair. So I reached up to brush it out.
He didn’t even notice.
“What are you doing here, Skylar?” Joe asked, his voice about as friendly as a knife.
Oh god. It was the ex-wife.
The tip-off was Joe’s voice. Specifically: the fumes of loathing rising up from it.
Yeah. Definitely the ex.
Skylar turned toward the man with her, who gave Joe a little wave like they knew each other.
And this must be the man she’d left Joe for. The Hot Tub Guy.
“We were just getting coffee,” Skylar answered Joe, nodding in the direction of Bean Street, and calibrating her voice to “pleasantries.”
“This isn’t your coffee shop anymore,” Joe said.
Skylar gave a little “sorry, not sorry” shrug. “Still the best in town.” Joe didn’t dignify that with a response.
So Skylar turned toward me. “And who’s this?”
It’s true, I couldn’t make sense of her face. But everything else about her made perfect sense. She was poised. And coiffed. She could walk in heels. She seemed exactly, generically like a woman nice guys might want to marry and spend their nice lives with.
But she was also a cheater.
She had married Joe, and promised to love and cherish and be faithful to him … and then she’d climbed bathing-suit-less into a hotel hot tub with
—I glanced over at the Hot Tub Guy beside her—this dude.
Gross. I could see it in my mind almost like I’d been there. True, my first impression of Joe had been … pretty negative.
If that was all I had to go on, I might even be taking the ex-wife’s side right now.
But every interaction I’d had with him after that first one had been positive. Very positive. I thought about Dr. Nicole saying I couldn’t trust myself, and then I thought about Joe giving me his jacket when I was cold.
And feeding me Italian food. And blow-drying Peanut. And offering to be my model.
Maybe the problem was me.
Maybe I should give this poor guy the benefit of the doubt.
In that second, I could just sense every miserable, conflicting, rejected, angry, hurt, abandoned emotion that Joe had to be feeling.
And in that rush of empathy, I just … wanted to help him.
Maybe it was the fact that he’d helped me tonight without any hesitation. Or maybe it was all the time I’d just spent measuring his face. Or the tickling we’d just done in the grass. But I felt a strong urge to help him out overtake me right then.
And I just didn’t overthink it.
Right there, under the curious gazes of Joe’s ex-wife and Hot Tub Guy, “Who’s this?” still hanging in the air, I slid up next to Joe, hooked my arm around his waist, and tried to create the most sexually suggestive side hug in history.
I felt Skylar take it in: the way my hip rubbed against his, the way my arm tightened around his torso, the impact of my temple as it made its landing on the curve of his shoulder.
That was all she needed. “Ah.” Guess it worked.
It should have been enough. Really, it was plenty. I’d made my point, right?
Joe had rescued me so many times—and now I’d rescued him back.
But it felt better than I would’ve expected. Both the hug itself— touching him, slipping over close and pressing against him in so many places like that, setting off emotional sparks I didn’t see coming—but also the rescue.
The brain system that reads people? It revved right up at that moment. I could feel Joe’s relief at what I was doing. I could feel how grateful he was. It was palpable. His tension eased. His breath slowed. Even the feel of his arm as it came up around me in response was like a grateful caress.
Suddenly we were a team working together to pull off this moment. The two of us against the world. Or—more accurately—against Joe’s ex-wife.
The point is, I didn’t stop at the side hug.
While Skylar and Hot Tub Guy were still taking us in as a couple, I could just feel Joe’s brain replaying the betrayal all over again—almost like I was feeling it with him. And I just couldn’t resist the challenge of trying to take that pain away.
I didn’t think it through, that’s for sure. I didn’t think at all.
Joe wasn’t the only person around here who could be pathologically helpful.
And at that I reached out, grabbed the collar of Joe’s shirt, pulled him down toward me, and kissed him.
By the way, his lips? In that moment? As I went in for the landing? I could see them just fine. Zeroing in on the lips was easier, in fact, than trying to take in a whole face. It felt like a relief.
It was meant to be a peck, but at the moment of impact, I heard Skylar make an astonished little gasp.
And that spurred me to keep going.
To push in closer, in fact. To go bigger. And deeper. And softer.
I shifted my hand up to the back of Joe’s neck to hold him in place—not sure how he’d react to the shock of it all. The odds were fifty-fifty that he’d jump away, like What the hell?
But he didn’t jump away. The opposite, in fact.
In a remarkable feat of surprise improv, as soon as he realized what I was doing, he went with it. He brought his hand to my back, pulled me tighter, softened his mouth, and kissed me right back.
Just like that, it went from fake to … something else. We didn’t even need a hot tub.
I don’t know how long that little kiss lasted. Three seconds? Five? A hundred? All I know is, when it started, we were both entirely focused on the couple standing across from us … and by the time it ended, that focus had shifted.
Skylar and Hot Tub Guy were forgotten.
That is, until Skylar coughed and said, “Okay. Well. Great seeing you.”
It broke the kiss, but nothing else. Joe didn’t even look over or loosen his arm around me or say goodbye. He just stared into my eyes until after
they were gone. And I was too dazed to even mind.
Then, in unison, we snapped out of the trance. We broke eye contact and stepped back.
Next, of course, it was awkward.
Joe coughed. I tucked my hair behind my ears. Joe checked his watch. I looked down at my shoes. Finally—what choice did I have?—I smacked him on the shoulder and said, “Stop trying to peek at the portrait.”
And much to my delight, that made Joe laugh. And that was something.
I looked off in the direction they’d just walked. “Your ex-wife, right?” I said, my eyes on her.
Joe nodded. “Bull’s-eye.” “And Hot Tub Guy?”
Joe nodded again. “Teague Phillips.” “That’s his name? Teague?”
“Yep. Valedictorian of his high school class.” Then Joe added, “It’s weird that I know that.”
“He seems very dull,” I said, maximizing my judgmentalness out of loyalty.
“Thank you,” Joe said then. “My plan was to never, ever accidentally bump into them.”
“How dare they come to our coffee shop?” I said. “No hot tubbers allowed.”
“What you just did was…” Joe started. What? What was it?
“Very kind,” he finished.
Huh. Not sure about kind. Impulsive, maybe. Reckless. Brave. “You really saved me,” Joe said.
I held my fist up for a bump—trying to reestablish equilibrium. “You’ve saved me a few times.”
“Not like that, I haven’t.” He wasn’t wrong.
“That,” he went on, “was a heroic thing to do.” “Do you think it worked?”
“Oh, it worked,” Joe said, like that might be true in more ways than one.
“Glad to be of service,” I told him.
Later, it would occur to me to worry about Dr. Addison. I was of course aware that we weren’t really engaged or even dating—yet. But we had an intention to start dating. What were the rules around kissing someone when you had a plan to start dating someone else?
I hadn’t technically cheated. That much seemed clear.
But what would Dr. Addison think about that moment, if he’d known about it?
I tried to revise the memory into a simple act of altruism. Joe had been in pain, and I’d seen a way to relieve that pain. Unselfishly.
For no personally gratifying reasons of my own. It almost made me a better person, in a way.
Besides. Anyway. If Dr. Oliver Addison, DVM, didn’t want me offering pity kisses to hipster neighbors ambushed by their ex-wives, he should have found a way to make it to our date.
