We Can't Keep Meeting Like This

by Rachel Lynn Solomon

  “So thoughtful of you,” I say after they’re gone. “Closing up for your parents.”

  “I’m a good kid,” he says, untying his apron and inching closer to where I’m leaning against the kitchen island. The temperature seems to jump a full fifteen degrees. “That’s the only reason I did it.”

  I pull his face down to mine, kissing him for the first time today. I breathe him in, his laundry-fresh scent and the spices from the food.

  “Are the dogs on your dress wearing hats?” he asks against my mouth, biting at my lower lip.

  “Yes. They’re very sophisticated.”

  “Believe it or not, I did have an ulterior motive for asking them to leave. But it’s not what you think.” I lift my eyebrows at the way he’s pinning me against the counter. “Okay, it’s half what you think. But—” He pushes off the island, goes over to the stack of books and binders in neat shelves on the other side of the kitchen. He extracts a sheet of paper with something handwritten on it. “I’ve been trying to get this recipe right. I grew up watching my mom make it, and her mom used to make it for her, and her mom’s mom made it back in Egypt… but the recipe was never written down. I’ve tried a few online recipes, but nothing’s quite the same as when she makes it. I eventually had to ask her to make it very slowly so I could write down each step, but she doesn’t measure anything, so it can be tough to get the ratios right.”

  “What is it?”

  When he slides the piece of paper over to me on the counter, I realize I’ve never seen his handwriting. The letters are cramped, fighting for space, a few stray scratches and crossed-out measurements. “They have a few different names, but my mom always called them zalabya. I’ve only been a couple times, but they’re a pretty popular street food in Egypt. They’re like…” He waves a hand in the air, as though struggling to describe with words something he’s only experienced through taste. “Little fried dough balls, and you can soak them in simple syrup or dust them with sugar or cinnamon, or any variety of other things. So I thought that might be… fun? If you wanted to, I don’t know, hang out for a while.”

  He’s sheepish as he says this last part, and if the promise of fried dessert weren’t already tempting, the sweetness in his expression does me in.

  “I could hang out for a while.”

  That’s all it is: two friends hanging out. With some occasional kissing. I’m not about to deny myself that serotonin boost after the summer I’ve had.

  Before he touches any of the ingredients, he swipes at his phone to play music from the room’s speakers.

  “I listened to that Cat Power song, by the way,” I say, hoisting myself up onto the kitchen island. In my mind, it’s a sexy, effortless move. In reality, there’s some grunting, some awkward leg flails. Thank god his back is turned. “ ‘The Greatest.’ I liked it. Not as much as ‘Sea of Love,’ but it was a refreshing reception song. And then you were wearing a Sharon Van Etten shirt a while back—you seem to have a thing for female singer-songwriters.”

  “You caught me. The moodier, the better. What kind of music are you usually into? That feels like something we should know about each other, but I guess I only know what you play on the harp.”

  “Moody female singer-songwriters,” I say, and he laughs. “Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of St. Vincent, Phoebe Bridgers, Courtney Barnett.”

  A moment later, a St. Vincent song starts playing. Then he turns toward me on the kitchen island. “You look absurdly cute up there,” he says, placing one hand on either side of my legs.

  I kiss him once, quickly, before patting the center of his chest. “Go. Bake for me.”

  Tarek looks so natural in the kitchen that it’s impossible not to enjoy watching him. It’s not just the roll of his shoulder blades beneath his T-shirt as he grabs a baking sheet or the adorable way he squints as he scans the containers of flour in the pantry. It’s the ease of those movements, something that might have made me jealous earlier this summer. Now I’m just glad he has something he loves this much.

  “I used to want to be a baker,” I say, tapping my feet to St. Vincent as he works. “For a solid few months when I was seven years old. For Hanukkah that year, I begged my parents for a doughnut hole maker.”

  “What the hell is a doughnut hole maker?”

  “It’s one of those kitchen gadgets that only serves a single purpose, like an avocado slicer or pizza scissors.”

  “If I ever start a band, I’m calling it Pizza Scissors.”

  “I’ll play harp for you.”

  “Pizza Scissors has the best harpist,” he says. Then he makes a horrified expression. “I can’t get over this doughnut hole maker. That’s not real baking.”

  “Try telling my seven-year-old self that. Anyway, I was devastated when I didn’t get it, and it crushed my career dreams and set me on a path of… well, not that.” Since I can’t exactly finish that sentence, I forge ahead. “Have you always loved it? Baking? I’m not sure I’ve ever heard about how you got into it.”

  “Ah, yes, it’s the thrilling tale of a boy, his favorite cousin, and a food allergy.”

  “Harun?”

  He nods, whisking flour, sugar, and a few other things together in a bowl. “That was why my parents moved out here—so my dad could be closer to his brother and their kids. Harun has celiac disease, and when he was younger, it wasn’t as easy to find things he could eat, or they were really expensive. So I started experimenting, playing around in the kitchen with my parents. I loved that I could do this one thing that made him happy, and it kind of snowballed from there.” He adds a cup of yogurt, then another, frowning at the markings on his handwritten recipe. “I always wanted to know why ingredients would interact the way they did and what would happen if you did things a different way. My whole life, I’ve been around food, and I saw how much joy it could bring people. I saw the reactions my parents got from their clients, how food could make you content or nostalgic or any number of other emotions. It’s this perfect blend of art and science. You can make a real connection with someone through your food.”

  “And wedding cakes are probably one of the most intense connections you can make?”

  He lifts a finger as though to say, Yes, exactly. “Now, if only my parents would let me handle one on my own.”

  “Have they tasted your cakes?”

  “Yes, and I think they’re pretty fucking good,” he says. “Someday. I’m gradually wearing them down. It was torture, not being able to cook the way I wanted to in college. I subjected Landon—that’s my roommate—to a lot of experiments.” Then he allows himself a small smile. “Maybe dorm food was the real source of my depression.”

  “Being able to joke about your own mental illness is a big step,” I say. Then I feign a gasp, draping a dramatic hand over my forehead. “Oh god—did you have to eat Top Ramen? Or Annie’s mac and cheese? The horror.”

  “There are a lot of ways you can dress up Annie’s mac and cheese,” he says, because of course there are, and of course he’s done it. He pulses the electric mixer for a few seconds, and when he speaks again, his tone is more serious. “I’ve been getting this feeling lately, and correct me if I’m wrong, if I’m seeing something that isn’t there… but maybe you’re not loving all of this the way you used to?”

  It would be easy to lie the way I have with everyone else. But if we really are friends now—albeit friends who can’t seem to stop kissing—then maybe I can do this. “I… don’t. I’ve felt that way for a while. My parents have always assumed I’ll join B+B once I finish college. When you asked me about UW—it’s not that I’m not excited about college, or grateful that I’m able to go. It’s that they’ve already picked out all my classes. They’ve plotted out the next four years of my life, and I’ve never really gotten a say in it.”

  It’s such a relief to tell someone who isn’t Julia. I’ve kept these words in my head for so long, I didn’t know what they’d sound like when I spoke them aloud. If I spoke them aloud.

>   Tarek is quiet for a few moments. “I’m so sorry. I thought you were burned out or something, but I had no idea it was like this.” We’re going down opposite paths, but he can see the view from mine just as well as his.

  “It would kill them if they knew how little I’m interested in weddings these days. I don’t know how to tell them that I don’t want any of this. It’s always been their thing. And I love that they have it, and they’re good at it, but it’s not mine. I want to work hard for something. To really earn it. I just feel like it’s not going to feel mine until that happens.” A flash of panic, and then I add: “Not that I think that’s what you’re doing!”

  “I didn’t think you meant it that way, don’t worry,” he says. “That’s a lot to deal with, helping out your parents and not feeling like you can talk to them about it. Do you have any idea what you might want to do instead?”

  He sets aside his mixing bowls so he can talk to me, and I don’t know if it’s the kind of baking that needs supervision, but even if it isn’t, it’s almost overwhelming, the amount of attention he’s giving me. I hooked up with more than one guy who was always on his phone, nodding and mm-hmm-ing when I wanted to talk to him about something. I shouldn’t be so surprised by the fact that he cares, and yet I am.

  “Well…” I think about Maxine. “I’m not sure if this is directly future-career-related, but I met this woman at a wedding, actually, who builds harps? I started helping out at her workshop. And it’s pretty amazing, seeing all the steps that go into it.”

  “Yeah? Tell me,” he says, and there’s a look of such genuine interest on his face that makes my heart do something strange and foreign in my chest.

  So I do. I tell him about lever harps versus pedal harps, about the corgi club, about the whir of the machines in the workshop. “The way she plays is like nothing I’ve heard before. She’s loud and unforgiving and raw, and I’m obsessed with it. Obviously harps are beautiful instruments, but seeing the way they come together… Maybe this is cheesy, but it feels kind of special.” I gesture to the kitchen. “Maybe it’s even a little like baking.”

  “You’ll play for me sometime?” he asks.

  “You’ve heard me play plenty.”

  “Uh, excuse me, not on a lever harp.”

  “Okay. I’ll play for you sometime. On the lever harp.”

  As I tell him this, I wonder what it would entail, Tarek coming over to hear me play. It probably won’t happen, even if I don’t hate the way it looks in my imagination.

  * * *

  “You can be honest,” Tarek says as he finishes plating the zalabya. He’s prepared some with simple syrup, some with powdered sugar. “You won’t hurt my fragile male ego.”

  I don’t tell him that his lack of a fragile male ego is one of my favorite things about him. I take a piece that’s been soaked in syrup, and—“Oh. Holy shit. Holy shit.”

  “What?” he asks, sounding alarmed, taking a piece for himself and chewing slowly.

  “It’s so fucking good,” I say, and he relaxes back onto the kitchen island barstool next to me, rolling his eyes.

  “You’re the worst.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Not quite how my mom makes them,” he says, grabbing another one. “But you’re right. They’re pretty fucking good.”

  Once we’ve polished them off, I check my phone. “Shit, it’s almost eight o’clock.”

  “Your bedtime?”

  “Hey, I’m allowed to stay up until eight thirty in the summer. I just didn’t realize we’d been here for this long.” The thing is, I don’t really want to go home yet. This has been nice. And maybe, evidenced by the fact that he hasn’t said anything to the contrary, Tarek feels the same way. “I guess I could head home. Unless…”

  His whole face changes, his mouth slipping to one side. He has powdered sugar in his hair, and I’m not going to tell him. “Unless?”

  I swat at him. “Oh my god. Are you going to make me say that I like hanging out with you?”

  He catches my hand in his, lifts it to his mouth. When he kisses my knuckles, I have to fight a full-body shiver. Kissing a hand should not be that hot. “I was actually thinking of going to one of those movies in the park down in Fremont tonight. It starts at sundown, so we should still have time to make it.”

  “That sounds like it could be fun.”

  “There’s a catch, though—you’re not going to like the movie.” Grimacing, he holds up his phone. Sleepless in Seattle. “They play it every year,” he says by way of defending himself.

  “So this was a trap!”

  “I swear, it wasn’t!”

  I groan. “Fine. I’ll go. You definitely tricked me, but I’ll go.”

  He excuses himself to change before we leave, and I text my parents that I’m hanging out with Julia, not wanting to answer questions about Tarek. When he reappears, he’s dressed in dark jeans and a graphic tee, scratching at a patch of dry skin on his elbow.

  He looks really nice in normal clothes.

  I clutch my chest. “Are those—are those forearms? I may faint.”

  “Guess it’s been a while since you’ve seen me in short sleeves,” he says, looking only half bashful. “Ready?”

  “I will try to keep my cynicism to myself. Mostly.” I hop off the barstool and shoulder my purse. “Although I’m going to remind you one more time, that kind of grand-gesture movie romance isn’t actually real.”

  With a lift of his eyebrows, he indicates the framed articles about his parents. “I beg to differ.”

  I let my gaze linger on their photographs—his mother’s long hair, contrasted with the prim bun she wears most days, the way his father looks at her like he’s not sure she’s real. The Eiffel Tower in the background, a reenactment of the night they met. How many couples have posed like this in front of the Eiffel Tower? I wonder. How many have this kind of photo hanging in their homes?

  “You really love it,” I say. I’m not trying to pick a fight with him. I just want to understand—to the extent that my hardened heart is able to.

  “It’s the story I grew up with.” He doesn’t miss a beat. Tarek lives for people asking about his parents. “It was the first I learned about love, about romance, and I was just so proud that we had this epic family story. That there was this proof of how much they cared about each other, that they’d gone to such great lengths to find each other again. And now I see what they do and how much they love each other, and I want something like that someday. Simple as that.”

  So everyone else just isn’t trying hard enough? That was what I asked him last year. And he told me yes, asserting that grand gestures were the only way to hold a relationship together when I’ve seen too much evidence of the opposite.

  “Right. As simple as a chance encounter at the Eiffel Tower.”

  He gives me a wry smile. “And sometimes the world is terrible, and love stories… They make it feel less heavy.”

  I think about the times anxiety has felt like the tightest of blankets around me, one I can never fully cast off. “I guess I can’t argue with that,” I say as we head outside, Seattle flirting with dusk. “About wanting something to make the world feel less heavy.”

  18

  A confession: I don’t actually hate the movie.

  Is it a masterful cinematic endeavor? Absolutely not. Is Meg Ryan a frightening woman whose actions—using her journalism job to track down Tom Hanks’s address after hearing him on a radio call-in show, spying on him and his child playing at the beach—should have been reported to the police? One-hundred-percent.

  But the nineties nostalgia is fun, even though I didn’t live through it. No one’s clothing fits. They’re walking around in paper sacks that are vaguely human-shaped. Even playing a stalker, Meg Ryan is adorable, and there are moments that make me laugh. Every time this happens, Tarek turns his head, as though curious whether we find the same things funny.

  We took his car, and I made fun of the stickers on it, which I didn’t fe
el comfortable doing back when he took me to urgent care. After we parked a few blocks away on a darkened Fremont street, we made our way to the movie, where we found a spot in the back, and Tarek spread a blanket on the grass. At first I didn’t know how to arrange my body. We weren’t going to be all romantically draped over each other, like some of the couples surrounding us.

  When I was little, I’d see couples like that, the kinds who were all over each other and who didn’t care who saw, and I wanted so badly for someone to love me like that someday. Sometimes they were B+B clients and sometimes they were strangers. Of course, I had a child’s concept of love back then, the kind quashed by a separation no one in my family wanted to talk about.

  Tarek and I don’t even touch for the first third of the movie. It’s only when women nationwide start going wild over Tom Hanks telling his story on the radio that his hand drifts toward me, grazing the fabric of my dress before landing on my calf. It’s so distracting, I miss what’s happening on-screen for a solid minute.

  To retaliate, I slide my hand to his back, his skin warm through his T-shirt. His vengeance: his hand creeping upward, thumb drawing a circle on my knee. I counter that by moving downward until I’m tucking my fingers into the curve of his belt, my thumb beneath his T-shirt, brushing up and down along his lower back. His breath hitches, and it feels like a victory.

  He leans his head down to mine. “It’s good, isn’t it?” he says into my ear, and for several seconds I’m convinced he isn’t talking about the movie.

  Shortly after, there’s an intermission, food trucks all around us selling popcorn and ice cream and nachos. I make a move to get up, to stretch my legs, but Tarek places a hand on my knee.

  “Wait,” he says, nodding toward the screen.

  I sit back down. It’s one of those corny social media shout-outs they have at big events: baseball games and concerts and graduations. The whole thing looks like a PowerPoint presentation put together by a seventh grader. Who got a B on it.