We Can't Keep Meeting Like This

by Rachel Lynn Solomon

  “You’re talking to the girl going to art school,” Julia says. “So… no.”

  “I can’t imagine studying something I’m not passionate about,” Noelle puts in. “There’s basically no guarantee of a job in any field these days, so why not spend all that time and all that money studying something that actually makes you happy?”

  I steal a piece of pesto pastry from Julia. “What a novel concept.”

  “I took piano lessons for… eleven years?” Noelle continues. “Last year my teacher assigned me all these pieces for a recital because I’d been too busy to pick them myself, and then I was too busy to practice. And I realized that if it was something that mattered to me, I would have made time for it.”

  “If only I could quit,” I say with a sigh. “But the harp isn’t the problem, really. Harps aren’t exactly in high demand. What my parents have always wanted is for my sister and me to join the business so they can expand it. And that’s what my sister did, but I don’t know how to tell them it isn’t what I want. I know it sounds privileged, not wanting this ready-made career they’re going to hand to me, but…”

  “It’s not your passion,” Noelle finishes. “I get it.”

  We sip cups of cider and eat our fruit and bread and cheese in silence for a while, until Julia, who’s been gazing at Noelle with doe eyes, blurts out, “So what do you think about Kristen Stewart?”

  I choke on my cider. Julia throws me a panicked look, like she can’t believe what she said either.

  Noelle’s brow furrows, like she’s seriously considering the question. “Love her transformation. Respect her artistic choices.”

  “And she has great hair,” I put in, trying to be helpful, and Julia kicks me under the table.

  “She does.” Noelle looks right at Julia. “Although your hair is pretty great too.”

  Julia looks like she might combust. “Mm-hmm,” she squeaks out, and it’s impossible for me to miss the subtle way they lean closer in their chairs.

  This is what summer is supposed to feel like, and with a tug of my heart, I realize I’m not sure how many more days I’ll have like this. How many more days I haven’t already promised to my parents.

  We spend another hour at the market before Noelle has to go to work. “So,” she says as we sort our trash into the proper receptacles: compost, recycling, landfill. If you don’t have all three, are you even in Seattle? “Do you guys want to do something like this again next week? I mean—I don’t want to intrude if you already have plans, or—”

  “Noelle, stop.” I nudge her with my shoulder. “You are a fucking delight. Of course we want you here.”

  “What Quinn said,” Julia adds.

  She visibly exhales. “Okay. Excellent. Sorry. I have really bad social anxiety. Like… do you ever get home from hanging out with people and immediately start analyzing everything you did and convincing yourself all of it was completely wrong? I’m positive at any given time that eighty percent of my friends don’t actually like me.”

  “Try ninety percent,” I counter, and she laughs. “I have anxiety too. I take medication for it, actually, and I’ve been in therapy, too. I don’t go as often anymore, but it helps.”

  Noelle nods like talking about therapy is the most normal thing in the world, and it should be. “Me too!” And she holds her hand out for a therapy high five. “I’m not even going to stress about how dorky it was to do a therapy high five.”

  “You’re also not allowed to stress about whether we like you or not,” Julia says. “That… should be pretty obvious.”

  “Not gonna lie, that’s a huge relief. So I’ll see you both next week?”

  “Absolutely,” Julia says.

  When Noelle leaves, Julia lets out this long-suffering sigh and drops her head to my shoulder. I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing and reach over to rub her back. The market is alive now, bustling with shoppers, local businesses propping up their doors to entice customers inside with the promise of air-conditioning.

  “I really like her,” Julia says softly. “It’s not just that I want to hold her hand or make out with her, which I do. It’s that I want to have long conversations with her and collect eggs from our chickens with her and go to fucking brunch with her. I don’t even like brunch. Why is this so hard?”

  “Julia Elizabeth Kirschbaum.” I pull her forward so I can place two firm hands on her shoulders. “This is bad if you’re bringing the chickens into it.”

  “She’d be so good with them. I can just tell.” She shakes her head. “It’s pointless, though. We’re not going to be living in the same place in a few months. We’d have eight nice weeks of brunch, and then we’d go our separate ways. Fate is a cruel mistress.”

  “You’re sabotaging yourself,” I say. “Don’t think about her leaving.”

  “I should have said something to her sooner,” she says, “but school was always so busy. How does anyone manage to successfully date in high school?”

  “No idea. All my dating took place in a car or on a couch without anyone’s parents home.”

  Julia snorts. “So classy. That’s my favorite thing about you. How classy you are.”

  “Classy like this?” I say, lifting a strand of her hair that’s fallen out of its braid and making it into a mustache on my face.

  “Yes, exactly like that. How am I going to survive without this level of sophistication next year?”

  Her question wipes the smile off my face. I drop her hair, feeling like I’ve shrunk a good five inches.

  “I can’t even think about that right now,” I say quietly.

  Julia’s expression turns serious too. “Whatever happens or doesn’t happen with her… I’m glad you’re here. I don’t know if I could do any of this on my own.”

  “Funny,” I say. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

  8

  The zipper is stuck.

  My zipper this time. I twist around to see it in the mirror, but I can’t tug it loose. Regrets: I have them.

  Last night, my parents got a call from one of the grooms after the rehearsal dinner. We were all watching Perfect Match in the living room and playing a game I made up during Bachelor marathons with Julia: I assigned each of us a popular phrase from the show, and we kept track of every time someone said it. So far Mom was winning with “this is an amazing journey,” but I was close behind with “I could really see myself falling for him.”

  When Dad disappeared into the kitchen, I joked to Mom that it was because his phrase, “I know my husband is in this room,” was losing, and she laughed and told me how much she was starting to love this game.

  “That may or may not be because I’m winning,” she said, tapping her nose like we were in on a secret.

  This was my favorite version of my parents, open and natural and fun, something it seemed like they were often too stressed to have. I wanted to linger in it as long as I could.

  Dad returned with a grim look on his face. A bridesmaid and groomsman had had too much to drink at dinner, and the grooms were worried about potentially having an odd number of couples in the bridal party.

  “I did my best to assure Josh that there are plenty of ways the photographer can stage everyone, but he was adamant,” Dad said.

  Mom paused the TV. “Do they have anyone who can fill in?”

  “I don’t think we need to jump to that quite yet.” Dad sank back down onto the couch. “I told him no one’s going to be paying attention to how many bridesmaids and groomsmen are up there during the ceremony. And I was going to send them some photos of uneven wedding parties, but—”

  “Is that really what they need to look at the night before their wedding?” Mom said. “If Josh wants an even number, we should be doing whatever we can to make that happen.”

  And just like that, the natural-fun feeling vanished. Edith jumped onto the couch next to me, as though sensing my anxiety spike.

  “I’ll do it!” I yelled, a little too loudly. Edith was so startled
, she leaped right off the couch. “I mean, if they’re still sick tomorrow and they can’t find anyone else. I could fill in.”

  “Then I guess it’s settled,” Mom said, and I tried not to think about how quiet they were for the rest of the episode.

  The bridesmaid and groomsman were only worse this morning. I believe “hungover AF” is the proper medical terminology. Josh and Graham were relieved when Mom presented me as the backup plan.

  “We’ve taught you well. This is just what wedding planners have to do sometimes,” Mom said as she handed me the dress, a taffeta A-line in a shade of lime that could not possibly be flattering on anyone. “We improvise.”

  And then she improvised herself into the kitchen, where she discovered Tarek was precisely the size of the missing groomsman.

  Whoever I was in a past life really fucked things up for me.

  It was perhaps not my most well-thought-out idea. Anything to stop them from arguing, I thought in the moment. I twist a little more, not enough to tear the dress, trying to grasp the teeth of the zipper, but it’s no use. The grooms are outside, taking photos on the grounds of this weekend’s winery, and the rest of the bridal party is waiting nearby. Tarek and I are supposed to join them as soon as we’re done getting ready in our respective suites.

  Meaning I have only one option for help.

  I gather the skirt of the dress, clutching it to my chest to make sure I’m not in danger of losing a boob. I head out of my changing room, pausing in front of his. “Tarek?” I call out, knocking twice on the door.

  “It’s open,” he calls back, so I turn the handle and step inside.

  “Hey, could you help me zip—”

  A shirtless Tarek is standing in the middle of the room, facing a mirror, his back to me.

  He’s wearing pants, thank god, but his back is all bronze skin and muscles that flex as he reaches to pull a crisp white shirt off a hanger. All I can focus on is the way his hair curls against the back of his neck, a patch of rough reddish skin beneath it. The curve of his spine. The dip of his lower back.

  Then he turns around, and I have the briefest glimpse of his chest before I snap my gaze to the ceiling.

  He did not look like this when we were in middle school.

  “Shit shit shit I’m sorry!” I say, stumbling backward. My legs tangle in the skirt of the dress, and for a moment my life flashes before my eyes. I’ve had a good run, I suppose. There are worse ways to go than death by embarrassment at age eighteen. But by some miracle, I manage to neither drop the dress nor tear the fabric, though it’s hanging dangerously low on my chest. “I thought ‘it’s open’ meant you were decent!”

  “Am I not?” His arms are through the sleeves now, but the shirt is still unbuttoned, leaving a long thin rectangle of skin for me to definitely not ogle. And yet he doesn’t look embarrassed. There’s the faintest smile nestled in one corner of his mouth, like he finds all of this amusing.

  “Please avert your eyes while I get this dress back up and talk myself out of walking into Puget Sound.”

  He muffles a laugh as he turns around, giving me a chance to readjust.

  “It’s not funny,” I insist.

  “Okay, but it kind of is,” he says, and fine, he’s not wrong.

  “Can you please just help me zip it up? That’s why I came in here, for help with the zipper from hell.”

  “Sure.” He walks over to stand behind me with his unbuttoned shirt, like we are two people casually getting ready for an event we did not learn we’d be part of only twenty minutes ago. “Oh—it’s caught on the lace back here. Just a sec.”

  Then I feel the gentlest press of his fingertips on my back as he works at the zipper. That’s the only part of him touching me, those few fingertips, and yet I am suddenly intensely aware of how close his body is to mine. We haven’t been this physically close in a long time. I’ve never felt the heat of him like this, the warmth of his hands as he rests a palm and then a wrist an inch from my spine to steady his grip.

  Last year’s symptoms come rolling back, a tidal wave that flips my stomach and floods my brain until I’m wondering what would happen if he moved forward, closing the space between us. Or if I leaned back.

  After Boatgate, I didn’t hear from him for a few days. He was getting ready for school, I told myself, but I sensed an iciness in his silence. I didn’t know whether he’d gone on that candlelit cruise by himself or whether Elisa had loved it and they’d been fused at the mouth all week and he didn’t have the time for a goodbye. There was nothing on Instagram, which made the whole thing even more mysterious.

  Still, the crush wouldn’t let me go. I was this horrible combination of angry and heartsick. He’d hurt me, even if he hadn’t meant to, and I’d done the same. And yet I still wanted him. It had gotten to the point where it was all I could focus on, a whirlpool of obsessive thoughts that sank me deep, deep. I had to let them out or they would drown me. Otherwise, if he went off to college and left me alone with those feelings, I’d only obsess more—over his texts, his social media, the constant mental replay of memories.

  I couldn’t do the kind of gesture he was so skilled at, but I could send an email. This was my running through the airport, my “meet me at the top of the Empire State Building,” my kiss at the Eiffel Tower on New Year’s Eve. The way his arm brushed mine when we rummaged through the kitchen for leftovers or the way his eyes sparked when he talked about his parents’ love story, he made me think we could have the thing I’d grown more disillusioned with every summer. I didn’t think I loved him—that word was too heavy. But if I was ever going to have the kind of romance he bundled into his grand gestures, I wanted it with him.

  And he did not.

  “Got it,” he says in a low voice. Finally, and too soon at the same time. Logic intervenes: he ignored you for a year. Then he lifts my hair out of the way and zips the dress so slowly, his other hand anchored on my shoulder blade. “There.”

  “Thank you,” I manage, letting out a long breath I hope will combat the dizziness.

  He returns to the hanger with his jacket and tie. “That green is… a choice,” he says as he loops the tie around his neck, and it lightens the mood a little.

  “Ugh. I know.” I bring my hands to my cheeks, hoping they cool down before the photos. “I’m starting to think your parents don’t value you as part of the Mansour’s operation. They sacrificed you to take me to urgent care after the mango incident, and now this?”

  “Nah. They’ve got plenty of help today, and they love working with your parents. They want the wedding to run just as smoothly as yours do. Shall we?” he says after pinning a boutonniere to his lapel, turning to face the mirror.

  I chance a look at our reflections. We match, the garish green of his tie and my dress. The wave of his hair and the swooshing thing my stomach is doing. “I suppose we shall.”

  I curse last night’s impulsiveness one more time, and then I follow him outside.

  * * *

  The photographer poses us in a variety of ways: standing in a line, looking serious, then pretending to laugh, then walking a few steps before backing up and doing it again. The whole time, I’m radically aware of the guy next to me, my arm hooked through his. I try to ignore how much I don’t dislike the way he looks in a tie. Most people look good in a tie. That’s not exclusively a Tarek thing.

  I’ve never thought of my back as a particularly sensitive area, but now I can’t stop imagining his hands there. It makes me wonder how many girls he’s touched like that. While his dating history is all over his Instagram, the flashiness interspersed with very obviously staged couple photos, I have no idea what he’s done physically and with whom. Our conversations never got that personal. The thought makes me feverish, and I’m relieved when the photographer splits us up to take a few photos with just the bridesmaids, then just the groomsmen.

  “All you have to do is look pretty,” Mom says when she lines us up for the processional. “And smile.” I’ve had ple
nty of practice.

  “I’ll make a weird face if you do,” Tarek whispers to me before it’s our turn.

  “My mom would murder us.”

  “Okay, sure,” he says, “but now you kind of want to do it, don’t you?”

  I pull my arm out of his to give him a gentle shove, but before I can, Mom is cueing us, and then I’m holding in a laugh as we make our way down the aisle. This is the Tarek who I was friends with what feels like ages ago.

  I miss that version of him.

  It’s nerve-racking, everyone watching us as I wonder if the dress is too short or too long or shows off more of my body than I’m comfortable with. When the grooms walk down the aisle together, the guests draw a collective breath, and I can’t deny that I feel some of that energy too. If I wobble during the ceremony, it’s only because my shoes are a half size too large.

  During dinner, we make small talk with the other bridesmaids and groomsmen. They’re all in their thirties, and while I can’t relate to talk of mortgages and day care, I smile and nod when I’m supposed to.

  Elisa’s working this wedding, her first of the summer. I do my best to keep my anxiety at bay when she swings by our table and chats with Tarek about Mansour’s and about her chemistry program at Seattle U. She’s the only one able to make that caterer’s uniform look chic, and her blond pixie cut is so cute, it almost makes me want to chop my hair again.

  “So good to see you!” she says to me, leaning down for a hug, which I am not at all expecting, and I only barely manage to avoid flinging my braised kale salad onto her.

  She and Tarek are friendly, not at all awkward. It makes me even more confused about what happened after I left the marina last year.