“Someone has to,” I insisted, wondering just how we’d gotten to this point in the conversation, but realizing it was probably my fault.
“Let’s focus on Hurricane Paul for a second,” he said.
I looked at him, horrified. “Are you saying I should suck and blow him?”
Sandy looked startled for a moment. “Paul Auster,” he said, chuckling. “Just when I think I know you completely, you can still say shit that surprises me.”
This pleased me for some reason, but I ignored it. Instead, I frowned.
He reached over to pat my ha
nd before diving back into his salad. I looked down at my own. I guarantee you there has never been a single person in the world who ate a salad and said, “Gee, I am so full now. Thank God I just had that.” It’s just not possible. My body needed bacon to live.
“Next time we come here, I’m bringing my own Bacon Bits,” I threatened Sandy. “You may have your girlish figure to maintain, but I’m a man. I need steak.”
He snorted into his radicchio, which I admired because it was a pretty purple. The radicchio was purple, not his snort. Just in case you got confused there. I don’t think it’s possible for people to snort colors. We’re not unicorns, after all. “You’re all man,” he agreed. “So, I had to go to a meeting. What happened with your boyfriend?”
I blushed and mumbled threats at his person.
“What was that?” he asked. “Couldn’t quite hear you.”
“I said I’m going to cut you.”
“Ah. That’s what I thought you said. So what happened?”
“God hates me,” I said again. And he did. I don’t know what I ever did to God (maybe the Christian Reich was correct and God did hate homosexuals; that could be the only possible explanation as to why he was torturing me so).
I couldn’t tell Sandy what had happened when Vince arrived because I didn’t know. Everything from the moment I saw him until the moment Sandy snapped his fingers in front of my face, asking me to go to lunch, was a haze. A deep, murky haze, punctuated with little flashes of light, like the moment Vince sat down next to me and extended his hand to shake mine, his grip calloused and warm. This was followed by words he said to me with a grin: “Quite a small world.” Then, everything went dark for a bit until there was another flash of light when he leaned forward and said in a low voice, “Not a whiskey drinker, eh?” The haze descended again until my phone rang and I picked it up, hyperaware of just how close he was sitting next to me, his knee accidentally brushing against mine. I don’t remember the phone call in the slightest, and I don’t know if I told the person on the other end that I’d give them a million dollars to go fuck themselves or not. I heard Vince chuckling next to me, and I didn’t know what was so damn funny, but it didn’t matter, because his laugh was a low, throaty thing that sort of rumbled out of him as if it’d crawled from the depths of his stomach.
After that, it was white, white bliss until Sandy started trying to get my attention. I didn’t even remember Vince leaving or where he went.
“Oh, Lord,” Sandy said when I admitted this all to him. “You’ve got it bad.”
“I do not,” I said defensively. “Got what?”
“You’re crushing on him.”
“What? I am not!”
“You so are.”
“You shut your mouth, you bitter queen.”
“You loooooove him.”
I scowled at Sandy. “What are we, twelve? You act like I want to get his picture and put it on my Trapper Keeper.”
Sandy squealed. “And then you could write all over it with things like Mrs. Paul Taylor over and over again like you did with Zack Morris from Saved By The Bell when we were in the sixth grade.”
“Oh, Zack,” I sighed. “You were too good for Kelly Kapowski. She was a stupid bitch and I hated her face and her bangs and the fact that she was alive.”
“I really thought it was going to work out between the two of you,” Sandy mused. “You sent him all those fan letters and everything.”
“And he never wrote me back,” I said sadly. “Then they had to do the college-years series and ruin everything about Saved By The Bell that made it wonderful. It was like watching someone you know and love get hooked on heroin and you can’t stop them.”
We gave a moment of silence for Saved By The Bell. Rest in peace, Zack Morris.
“Anyway,” Sandy said as I bit into a crouton. “You love him, and he obviously wants to bone you, so why not go for it.”