Eye of the Tiger

by Melanie Greene

  "Me? No worries on that score. I sleep like a baby."

  "Don't babies ever snore? I think babies snore."

  He thought back to various nieces and nephews sprawled in cribs in their footie pajamas. "I think so? Probably. Well, I don't sleep like a baby, then. I sleep like someone who doesn't snore."

  "Okay. Unless one of us meets someone to start a real relationship with, we'll stick this out until Labor Day."

  Disquieting that September no longer felt very distant to him. "We should aim for four months. Easier to convince them we gave it a real shot with four months."

  She paused longer than his mellow mood was comfortable with, but nodded. "Guy Fawkes Day. But no couples Halloween costumes. Nonnegotiable."

  "Agreed. And can you ask your mom to ring the doorbell from now on? In case we happen to be sprawled naked on the couch when she stops by?"

  She squeezed his fingers. "Come on, that's a far-fetched scenario."

  "Humor me."

  They agreed to post couple-ish photos weekly, to only eat together by prearrangement, to not check in on the other's daily movements. To treat each other as roommates instead of partners. He took his median monthly household expenses, added a few hundred for the roof over his head, and let her negotiate him up nine and a half percent for his rent. "But you pay for groceries."

  "Unless you're buying some of that awful meat you're so fond of."

  "I'll keep it out of your kitchen."

  She shook her head. "You don't have to. I don't mind it as long as I'm not eating it. Oh, and we alternate paying for meals out, okay?"

  "I'm ordering steak and lobster every time it's your turn to pick up the check."

  She laughed. "I'm seeing the flaws in Op: Pom already. And realizing all those guys who took me out before got off easy, dating someone with my low-budget diet."

  "I guarantee they were counting their lucky stars."

  Her toe wriggled against the star on his arch. They were still wearing their Independence Day socks.

  Chapter Seventeen

  He slept over. Her last night before cohabitation, and she spent it tangled up with him.

  At six a.m., he rolled out of bed and skedaddled back to his place, leaving her to curl up with her solitude for three hours of dozing and pretending she wasn't going to open the door at ten to a porch full of parents with boxes.

  She'd say this for Evan: he didn't have a lot of stuff. He filled the spare closet, and it took work to rearrange her stash of yard signs so the garage could fit both her work supplies and his bike, but most of her house still felt like her house. Except for the stairwell. She'd removed half her framed photos to make way for his. There'd been no graceful way out of it, with his parents right there, holding stacks of family pics. He pulled her aside to apologize. She brushed him off.

  "It's okay. Now we're in the same boat. Seems like every time I head up lately I catch Mom's eyes following me. So I replaced her with one of your parents. Staring right at you. As you mount." She put special emphasis on the word mount. Evan growled and grabbed for her, but she slipped past him to the kitchen. Elaine was assembling lunch, pulling together a Mediterranean-style feast with a heavy Turkish influence.

  "Sweetie, where are your crudité platters? Don't you have olive boats?"

  "Right here." Natalie opened the cabinet above the microwave. Her friends joked about her serving ware assortment, but Elaine taught that good manners dictated a dish for every occasion. It was easier to agree. She arranged the cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, pistachios, and chunks of feta before carrying a stack of plates and cutlery to the table. Her dining room was, so far, Lee-free. She liked Evan plenty, and his parents, but having her place topsy-turvy with thirteen hours' notice stretched her nerves. She relished three minutes of staring out at the brick patio and focusing on the faint plink-tink-trinkle of water flowing in her fountain.

  Evan cleared his throat, but she'd been aware of his entrance, so she wasn’t startled.

  "Lunch is almost ready," she said, turning around.

  He walked towards her, slow, studying. "Do we need to abort Op: Pom?"

  She hesitated. "No. It's fine."

  "Could be like ripping off a Band-Aid, you know." He rubbed a hand through his hair. "We'll just lay out the whole thing. They tell me I'm a jerk, and I agree, and in a few days they'll be gone."

  "They're not going to call you a jerk."

  When he stopped, he was a step further away from her than he usually stood. "They'll pelt me with cacık. I'll pay to steam-clean your rug, grab my bike, escort my folks out of here. They'll send you email apologies for my existence."

  He was facing the window, lit by midday radiance. Despite the July sun being filtered through the trees above her patio, it made his expression stark. She knew how little sleep he'd gotten the night before, so it was no surprise he looked tired. There was a tightness at his eyes, a careful set to his shoulders, which she couldn't ascribe to lack of shuteye.

  "I don't actually mind all this, you know."

  His half-smile was always on the right side of his face. "Only a crazy person would say that."

  "Sex-crazed is all. I was taking a time-out to adjust. Wrap my head around it. That's not the same thing as minding."

  "Or hiding?"

  "Or hiding. Or running away." She slipped her arms around his waist. "What about you? Are you a crazy person? Or do you want to abort? Because I know Elaine will freak, but I suspect you'd get more collective long-distance grief than I would locally."

  His hug pulled her in, and his jaw stroked her hair when he shook his head. "I guess I'm no more batshit than you are. Let's just get through the next few days. And anytime you want to call it off...."

  "Right back at you."

  Marisa carried in the bowl of tabbouleh, pausing when she caught them pulling away from each other. Natalie could practically hear her internal camera shutter capturing the image for eternity. But Evan's shoulders had loosened, and it was possible Nat herself would long remember the complicit, relieved look he gave her before helping to set food on the table.

  "Can I get you to take our picture real quick?" Natalie asked the waiter before she turned their order in. They leaned towards each other and lifted their champagne glasses in a toast. "That's great. Thanks so much."

  Evan asked, "Are you tagging me?"

  "Of course I'm tagging you. That's the point, right?" She looked up from the screen. Did he not want to be virtually seen with her? She'd had her hair blown out that afternoon and was wearing a great new lip shade. Even Elaine would approve of the photo. Of her appearance in the photo. Elaine would approve first and foremost of her status update: "Sushi with Evan = Happy Hour."

  "Yep." But he took her phone and messed with her caption before posting it.

  "What did you do? You better not have screwed this up." It was their first official pretending-to-date date, and the plan called for social media proof of the pretense. Which, as Evan pointed out, meant hearing from his gossiping siblings within minutes of upload.

  She scrolled, then hid her mirth in her bubbly. He'd edited her to read: "Sushi with Evan = umami time!" and his brother Danny had liked the post already. As she watched, a couple of her friends and his sister Alice added their approval.

  "You're in trouble," she sing-songed, showing him the evidence.

  "Don't I know it? My pocket's been buzzing like crazy."

  She glanced at his pants. For once he was dressed down, in jeans and a sage Henley that had almost prompted her to jump him in the car. It clung to his chest and did fascinating glow-reflecting things to his skin. "And here I thought you were just happy to see me."

  "Clever. It'll be my siblings, giving me hell, because my life exists for them to ridicule."

  "Glad I could be of help." She said it lightly, because she knew by now that the alphabetical Lees would harass Evan no matter who he was dating. Or fake dating. "You going to answer them?"

  "In the middle of getting my umami on? Not a
chance." He toasted her again. She was taking full credit for introducing him to the concept of champagne with sushi, and as their waiter brought out their platters, she sat back to watch the effect of the pairing on his first bites. It gratified her: his eyes widened, and he was reaching for another piece of yellowfin before noticing she hadn't taken any for herself. She snagged an unagi roll.

  "What?" he asked.

  "Nothing."

  "That wasn't a nothing look."

  "You're not the boss of my looks."

  He eyed her, and she focused on chewing, because she didn't want him to push. She wasn't used to all this scrutiny. She liked keeping things neatly contained in her brain, not all over the table for him to poke at like he was picking up the right amount of wasabi to unlock the flavor of her raw self.

  "Who is?"

  She looked up from the entrancing sight of salmon, avocado, and rice rolls artfully displayed on the shallow rectangular plate. "Who's what?"

  "The boss of your looks. Wait. Let me guess." His eyes narrowed. "Not your actual boss. You dress better than her. And we already decided your mom isn't allowed to have power over your self-expression."

  "We did?"

  "Gillian said so, remember? How it's time you stopped policing every centimeter of your attire as if Elaine lurked around a corner ready to attack you for not maintaining your--I forget her exact words. Gillian uses big words."

  "Sartorial perfection."

  He pointed chopsticks at her. "Right. Sartorial perfection."

  "You should talk." She'd offered to drop his dry-cleaning off along with hers that morning. It had taken her two trips to haul everything in from her back seat.

  "Hush. My mom doesn't care how dapper I am, so I can obsess over it all I want."

  "Dapper?"

  "Snazzy? Debonair? Modern metropolitan man à la mode?"

  "Ridiculous?"

  "Nah. People admire me. I make a killer first impression."

  "And yet I'm not supposed to do the same thing?"

  "We're not at work. We're not making killer first impressions on people we need to be predisposed to trust us and allow us to guide them as they make important decisions for the foreseeable."

  She ignored his good point, because it wasn't the point. "And I told you Gillian said that?"

  "Yep. You were ranting. It was after Elaine left that voicemail suggesting you should wear cream instead of white during the summer months. Which she's wrong about, for the record. Those pants you had on for the Fourth were...snazzy."

  "You were too busy looking at my chest to notice my pants."

  "Your chest is snazzy, also."

  "And yours is debonair."

  He bent forward in a little seated bow. "Why, thank you."

  It seemed he'd been storing up that tidbit, what Gill said about Elaine, so he could throw her by quoting it back at her. She'd been working on changing. On loosening up about her appearance. Not just leaving the gym all sweaty, a torture she'd stuck with because, like boring exercise, it was good for her. She grocery shopped with her hair in a simple, messy ponytail. She removed her heavy jewelry before running after-work errands. She ate breakfast with him before applying makeup.

  Policing every centimeter of her appearance just made sense when she knew Elaine would be superintending not just her body language with Evan, but also her hair and her eyelashes and her dietary choices.

  She took a sip of champagne. An abrupt subject change would let him know his meddling was unwelcome. "At my four o'clock showing today the lockbox code was wrong so we walked the property while we waited for the listing agent to call me back, and the owner's dog almost dug a hole under the fence to get at us. I had to carry over some loose bricks I found by the garage to block his access."

  "What kind of dog?"

  She shrugged, glad he'd played along with her misdirection. "I couldn't tell. Something smallish. Yippy. You wouldn't have liked it."

  He told her about some family dogs through the years. Trixie the Labra doodle. Butterfly the boxer mutt. The indeterminate Lola.

  "I call naming rights over the Pomeranian when we adopt her," she said.

  "What? That's unfair. Why?"

  "You'd call her Bruiser or Admiral or Dagger or something. Clearly you're scarred from a lifetime of frilly puppy names and you'll try to overcompensate."

  He folded his arms across his chest. "I named Lola. She was a showgirl. Well, she's what I thought a showgirl was when I was a kid. She was pretty and she liked to do tricks."

  "I think you captured the essence."

  "Cynic. And I would never name our Pom Dagger. That's absurd."

  "Prove me wrong, then. What would you call her? T-Bone?"

  "No. The name I picked out is perfect."

  She wagged her fingers at him to hurry along his dramatic pause.

  He leaned back and nodded like he was saying something profound. "Lancelot."

  Well. He had her there. She was tempted to call the rescue society right away.

  Chapter Eighteen

  A dozen days since his parents left, and Evan was thinking of changing his number. Though if his siblings couldn't hassle him via text, they'd switch to email or Facebook messages, and eventually to postcards or carrier pigeon. There was no way to permanently block them.

  The hell of it was, it wasn't even the domestic bliss Ben accused him of enjoying, much less Chloe's cruder interpretation of his daily life. Most mornings he was out the door before Natalie opened her eyes. He'd wake and head to the guest bedroom, where he could shower and dress without disturbing her. He was at his desk by seven, and many evenings she was with clients until seven, or if she was home when he got in, she was shut into her insanely messy home office, writing listing copy or pulling together comps or transcribing the handful of notes she scribbled on the backs of her business cards over the course of the day.

  A couple of years back he'd tried explaining his job to his nephew Marcus, who, okay, was maybe seven at the time. He'd still been put out when Marcus seemed disappointed by the details, because he thought being a banker meant Evan got to carry stacks of money around in his briefcase. Living with Natalie was teaching him that his conception of her job was just as wrong-headed. And she never stopped working. It was hard to entice her to step away from her computer and into his arms, even if he poured her a glass of wine first.

  So Alice's message in the sibling group text, asking if he and Natalie were too busy k-i-s-s-i-n-g for him to make New Orleans reservations, was just irritating. He wished he was ignoring the entire state of Louisiana in favor of kissing. Instead, he just hadn't caught Nat long enough to ask her about it.

  The twins would be forty-two in late August, and everyone was supposed to go to New Orleans, where Chloe lived, to celebrate. They'd originally planned a big fortieth birthday reunion, but Danny's twins were toddlers, and Chloe was transitioning to a new position, so it was inauspicious timing. The next year, Ben and Tara had gotten a great deal on a vacation package, so they'd left Marcus with their grandparents and hopped on an Alaskan cruise. Everything worked out for this birthday, though, and Evan didn't expect he could get out of it. His parents wanted him to bring Natalie. And Chloe had gone outside the group message to warn him that if he dared to bring his girlfriend to her birthday weekend, she would play Shrek movies in their parents' suite every time the cousins vegged during group hangout time.

  Despite their ten-year age difference, he and Chloe had shared plenty of moments of solidarity about being the single ones. Chloe's twin, Ben, had been the first sibling to marry, but Alice hadn't been far behind, plus she'd had Lizzy right away. Perhaps a little too right away, but that was neither here nor there. The point was, over the prior dozen years, Evan and Chloe had watched their siblings become increasingly domesticated, and agreed that the only reasonable course was to maintain the balance of wildness in the Lee clan, no matter how many of their staid siblings became domesticated. Alice and Ben and Danyal said he didn't know what he was miss
ing.

  Evan had known perfectly well what he was missing: nothing.

  Except his perspective had shifted. Not much, not to the point that Chloe feared, but enough to put her pricklier teeth in play. He'd thought of confessing his and Natalie's arrangement to Chloe, but she would blab. And not be nice about it, either.

  So he hadn't booked a flight to New Orleans, because he wasn't sure if he should reserve one or two seats. He didn't want to explain Nat's absence to his folks, but there was no reason to put her through the Lee clan wringer. She'd had enough of that just knowing his parents. And there was a huge difference between putting up a few online images and spending a couple of nights trapped in a hotel with fourteen of his closest relations.

  He uncorked a Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon and poured a couple of glasses to carry upstairs as he went to hang his suit jacket. In the guest bedroom he paused, disoriented. Granted, he didn't spend a ton of time in the room itself, but he was sure there had been lamps on the bedside tables. And an abstract orangish triptych on the wall above the dresser.

  When he knocked on her office door, wine in hand, her face brightened and she shut her laptop. "I am officially done for the night. I think you've turned me Pavlovian. I heard you head up and my mouth started watering."

  "That sounds promising," he said, stealing a kiss before handing her the glass.

  "For this," she said, taking a sip. "It turns out I would rather drink than review closing work for the Takedas."

  "Slacker."

  "Guilty as charged. How was your day?"

  He laughed. "Put an apron on and say that again. I want to send a video to Ben."

  "Sure. And after that you can kiss my ass."

  "With pleasure." He savored the dark oak and blackberry bite of the wine. "Have you eaten?"

  "Nope. You?"

  "Nope. How about I order something?"

  "Does that mean I can take off my bra and collapse on the sofa for an hour?"

  "At least."

  "Cool. I want Korean. Something spicy. And soup."