“Of course. Starting at nine.” Kosta stopped at a round table covered in a white cloth. In the middle was a skinny glass vase with a red rose stuck in it, and an envelope propped against the side.
Irina smiled. “Gabe!”
Kosta winked at me as he pulled out her chair. “May I hang your coat?” he asked, already sliding it off her shoulders. She wriggled free and sat down, beaming.
I watched as he disappeared with the coat folded over his arm, weaving between tables, and I tried not to grin. Irina was already tearing open the card. She slid out a stiff rectangle and opened it. I leaned over to read it with her, hoping Kosta hadn’t gone overboard. The card was cream colored with tiny birds in the corners. Inside, Kosta had written in cursive:
Where true Love burns Desire is Love’s pure flame;
It is the reflex of our earthly frame,
That takes its meaning from the nobler part,
And but translates the language of the heart.
“Oh, Gabe,” Irina whispered, fingering the card and looking at me with big eyes. “I love Coleridge.”
Coleridge? Then it clicked. That must be the poet. I took her hand, thinking to myself that I’d wash Kosta’s car, mow his lawn, do dishes in this place for a month . . .
“It’s beautiful,” she said, squeezing my fingers hard.
Behind her, I could see Kosta coming toward us with a bucket that had a skinny bottle neck poking out the side. He set two champagne glasses on the table, his eyes twinkling like an elf’s. He wrapped the bottle in a towel, tucked it under his arm, and popped the cork with a hollow boom. Irina was starry-eyed as he poured a stream of bubbles in her glass. As he poured mine, I sent him psychic messages. You are the man. Thank you. I owe you forever.
Kosta handed us paper menus. “The special today is grilled lavraki in a bed of lemon rice. I’ll be back soon to take your order.” Even his voice was different, like some after-hours DJ.
Irina lifted her glass and said, “To the most romantic guy I know.”
I thought, That would be Kosta. Out loud, I said, “I can’t drink to myself. That’s bad luck.”
“All right. To life,” Irina said softly. Her eyes gleamed over the edge of her glass and her foot nudged my leg under the table. I drank. The champagne was tart and the bubbles exploded on the top of my mouth. I was feeling kind of messed up, with her foot on my leg. Was she playing with my head? Kosta’s cupid act was amazing, but we had some issues to work out, and this was kind of clouding things.
Like she read my mind, Irina pulled her foot away and said, “This is all really romantic. But I’m kind of confused right now.”
“Me, too,” I said, and took another sip of champagne.
“The thing you did on New Year’s . . .”
I sighed. Here we go.
“No, listen to me.” She set down her glass and leaned forward, her thin arms resting on the table, her fingers curved. Her voice was intense. “This is our chance to just put it all out there, okay? I have to say this. I understand why you don’t like me hanging out with Micah. But I’m at least five years away from marrying anybody. I want to be friends with anyone I want to. Girls and guys. I can’t have a boyfriend telling me who I’m allowed to spend time with.” She cut her eyes away. “It’s something my dad would do.”
I winced. That was the last thing I ever wanted to hear out of her mouth. Her dad was a control freak, all right. Should I tell her how he tried to pay me off? I almost did—I even opened my mouth—but I stopped myself. She already hated him half the time. And he was her dad. This could ruin their relationship forever. I couldn’t do that to her.
She looked worried. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m not like your dad.”
“Okay. Well, maybe not, but when you did that thing at the opera, you reminded me of him. You were acting like you owned me or something.”
“Can you try to say it a little differently?”
“No, that’s how I felt. And the drugs, too. That was so uncool.” She was on a roll. “And the sex thing.”
My mouth fell open, and she reached forward and touched my wrist. “No, listen. You’ve been amazing. But I know it’s driving you crazy. And I want so badly for you to not just put up with it, but to get it. To actually, like, think it’s a good thing.”
“You want a religious guy,” I said.
“I want you.” She looked away. Then she said softly, “But I would also love to be with somebody who’s . . . yeah. Not Micah, though, don’t worry.” She covered her face with her hands. “I don’t know what I want.” After a second she laid her hands in her lap. “I think I do eventually want to marry somebody religious,” she said in a low voice, not looking at me. “It’s so hard to do this alone. I want somebody who understands.” She took a breath. “And believes the same thing.”
“I didn’t know you were feeling like that,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s not easy for me to talk about what I’m feeling.”
“Oh,” I said. Something was gathering in me. “Well, I have to tell you something, too.”
“You’re finally going to tell me what happened to your poor face?”
My neck was getting hot, and I felt like one pounding drum of blood and skin. Say it. “I lost my job. They found out I was lying about my age, and they took me out in the desert and beat me up and stole my car.”
Irina’s face went loose with horror.
“But that’s not what I was going to tell you.” I closed my eyes. “I failed my GED. Even the tests I told you I passed.” I spoke each word clearly, so she wouldn’t ask me to say it again.
She did anyway. “What?”
Kosta—I hadn’t heard him coming—reached around my shoulder and set a silver tray on the table. We both froze. “Souvlakia, tzatziki, baba ghanoush,” he said, pointing at piles of green-and-brown foods. “Are you ready to order?”
“Um,” I said.
“I’ll give you some more time.” He disappeared again.
Irina said in a harsh whisper, “What are you talking about? You didn’t pass?”
I shook my head and looked down.
“I can’t believe you lied to me!”
I stayed very still, my heart racing, staring at the tarnish stains on the tray. Each handle was a bunch of silver grapes and curly vines.
“What else have you lied about?” Irina’s voice had gone up a notch.
“Nothing.” I felt unsteady, but charged.
“What about women?” Irina demanded. “Those Bacardi girls you told me about? Did you ever cheat on me?”
I looked at her hard and said, “No, I did not cheat on you.” And I realized I didn’t care if she believed me. The thing that mattered was, it was true. I’d been loyal to a woman for the first time in my life. A strange happiness bubbled up in me.
“Thank you,” Irina said softly. She knew I was telling the truth.
I thought of something. “You didn’t cheat on me, did you?”
“I would never!”
“You swear?”
“If you mention Micah, I’ll throw my drink at you.”
I looked up at the ceiling, which was blue like the floor. “He does look like an ad for a protein shake. That’s all I’m saying.”
Irina drank the rest of her champagne and poured more. She was flushed. “Well, since we’re telling each other things.” She took a breath. “Before New Year’s, I told my parents that I was seeing you. And they said they wouldn’t pay for college if I kept it up.” She lifted her chin and looked at me with the strangest expression. “I told them I didn’t care. I would get a scholarship, and I didn’t care if they never talked to me again. But then you showed up on New Year’s.”
“You said that to them?” I’d always felt like she’d pick her parents over me if it really came
down to it.
“I love you, you idiot!” snapped Irina.
I said, “I love you, too,” and then we both stopped talking because the old man who’d been smoking outside was coming toward us, weaving through the restaurant. He’d lost his apron and was holding a brown instrument like a fat little guitar. He stepped onto the wooden stage and smiled, showing a gleaming gold tooth. An old Greek pirate. He plucked a string. Then three more, very quickly. Everyone was turning to watch. Someone started clapping, then someone else started stomping, and the old man really began to play.
Irina reached across the table for my hand. She slid her fingers through mine, white and tan interlocked. She gave me a sweet, mischievous smile. I smiled back.
“Want to dance?” she asked.
“Dude, I owe you so big,” I told Kosta. We were in a long white hall outside the bathroom. I could barely hear my own voice over the stomping and smashing from the dance floor.
“She liked the poem?” he said.
“Of course she did!”
He gave me a cocky smile. “I told you.” He lowered his tray and looked toward the swinging brown door to the kitchen. “Want to come say hi to my dad? He’d love to see you. He’s been telling me all day to ask you over for dinner.”
“He works here?”
“Our family owns this place. Priests don’t make enough to support a family.” Kosta was already walking. “Your girlfriend is good at Greek dancing,” he said, and from his tone, I had the feeling he’d just paid a big compliment.
She was good. Greek dancing involved stomping, clapping, money throwing, and, once in a while, plate throwing. Irina had been going steady for, like, an hour. Slick Greek men swung off with her when they got the chance, but mostly, the dancing was a big stomp circle around various one-man shows.
Kosta pushed through the door to the kitchen and I followed. The air was thick with steam, and there was a different kind of noise in here, clanging pots and hissing, frying food. A troop of cooks in white jackets were lined up at a long metal range, their elbows moving like machines.
“Baba!” roared Kosta, and the biggest one looked up. It was Father Giorgios. He was wearing a floppy white hat and slicing a carrot into a huge steel pot, his knife flashing like a helicopter blade. He jerked his chin at us and we went over.
“Gabe brought his girlfriend for dinner,” Kosta told him.
“Tikanis?” said Father Giorgios. “That means, how are you?”
“Say kala,” Kosta instructed me.
“Kala,” I said.
Father Giorgios nodded approvingly. “You have dinner yet?”
“It was delicious, thank you,” I said, backing up a couple inches from the blur of metal in his hand.
“Hey, Manoli,” Kosta said to another cook. He crowded up behind the guy and reached past him to steal a taste of something. Manoli whacked his arm with a spatula and barked something in Greek that definitely meant Step off.
Father Giorgios leaned toward me, his gray eyebrows crunching together, and examined my face. “Your cheek already looks better.”
“Yeah, it feels better.”
“Good.” He tossed the carrot top away, slid a pile of round mushrooms down the board, and made little white paper-thin slices fall like cards. “You’re young. Maybe it won’t even scar.”
“That’s what I’m hoping,” I said. “What are you making?”
“Soup! Beautiful soup.” He smiled proudly.
A strange idea was growing in my head. Maybe it was the champagne. Maybe it was that I liked this whacked music and high-energy atmosphere. Maybe it was that the Kourises were so solid.
I glanced at Kosta, who was still talking to Manoli, and said to Father Giorgios, “Um, you know how you said to ask if I needed anything?”
He stopped chopping and turned his eyes to me. “Yes?”
“What about a job? I mean, even washing dishes or sweeping, or whatever.”
“Is that all?” Father Giorgios sprinkled a handful of mushrooms in the pot like snow. “Would you rather wait tables or learn how to cook?”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Five billion thread count,” Irina murmured, stroking the white pillow.
I pulled her closer. The only beds made this tight were in hotel rooms or military barracks. Irina hadn’t skimped: she had a view of the Strip, a marble tub, and the biggest TV I’d seen outside a sports bar. Her little bag looked kind of silly on the giant luggage rack.
She lifted her face to mine and wrapped her arms around my neck, kissing me slowly. I felt sad as I kissed her back, a deep kind of sadness. “I know it’s hard, but we could keep trying,” she whispered. But she didn’t sound sure.
“No, what you said before was right. You’re going to college. You should be able to spend time with whoever you want.” I turned and stared out the dark window at the glittering Strip. “You should even date people if you want.” I couldn’t believe I was saying it. But weirdly, I felt relieved.
“You should be able to see people, too,” she said, burying her head in my shoulder.
“Yeah?” I pulled away. “You mean that?” I looked into her eyes. I’d never been good at reading them. Or else she was good at hiding her thoughts.
“Not really. It makes me sick to think of you with someone else.”
“Will we still be friends?” I asked sarcastically.
“That’s ridiculous. We’ll never be ‘friends.’”
“I agree.” I kissed her gently, trying to put everything I didn’t know how to say into the kiss. After a minute, I felt wetness on her cheeks, and I kept kissing her, loving that she cared enough to cry.
“What are we, then?” she asked. “If not friends?”
“We’re just us. No labels. All we’ll have is the phone for a long time, anyway.” I pressed my forehead against hers and looked into her eyes, golden brown with light lashes, her freckles easy to see against her slice of white nose. It was my favorite view. “But I don’t want to hear about it if you go out with guys, understand?”
“And I don’t want to hear about other girls,” she said, wriggling out of my arms and scooting away. King beds are so big: the mattress stretched between us like a desert. She turned away from me, hugging herself. She never liked me to see her face when she was upset.
“Don’t be like that. You’ll go to college and meet rich, smart guys, and you’ll marry one of them,” I told her, knowing it was true. She ignored me. I watched her thin back tense up.
“Do you think it’s better to meet the right person at the wrong time or to never meet them at all?” she asked.
“Are you talking about us?”
“Who else?”
“Maybe it wasn’t the wrong time. Maybe it had to be now. If we met in a few years, we wouldn’t get together,” I said.
“That’s not true! Don’t say that.”
“No. It is true. You wouldn’t look at me. I wouldn’t go after you. We’d be in different worlds. We probably wouldn’t even meet.”
“I’d look at you no matter when we met.”
I didn’t answer her. I knew I was right. “Come back.” I reached for her, and she let me pull her over and lift her on top of me. She went soft, dropping her head onto my chest. We lay quietly, our hearts thumping together, our bodies fitting exactly right.
“Will you do one thing for me?” Irina murmured against my chest.
“Yeah?” I said cautiously. “What?”
“Promise?”
“Not until you tell me what it is.”
Irina lifted her head to look in my eyes. “It’s the thing I’ve been asking you to do forever. If we ever do end up together, it’s important.”
“What?”
“Take that test I told you about. The link I sent you, like, a month ago, to the dyslexia site. Okay?”
I
frowned. “I’ll think about it. But probably not.”
She made a frustrated sound and pinched my arm with her nails. She liked to do that when she felt I was getting out of line. I pinched her back—on the butt. That started a wrestling match, which was wonderfully easy to win. When she stopped struggling, I looked her in the eyes and said, “You’re the first girl I ever loved.” I wanted her to remember it, to carry it with her through whatever else happened in her life.
Sunday afternoon, like I was waking from a dream, I found myself sitting in Berto’s car in the McCarran parking lot, my throat tight, wishing I could run back into the airport. I looked at Irina’s empty seat. A receipt had fallen from her purse or pocket—or maybe it was Berto’s. I picked it up and smoothed it out with my fingers: $4.12 from Starbucks. It was hers. I folded it carefully and held it in my palm. The car still smelled like her, faintly.
The weekend had been magic: no fights, no tension. Irina and I had wandered the Strip, laughing at all the crazy, wonderful things in Vegas. We’d gone to The Comedy Stop at the Trop and eaten at a cheap buffet. On Saturday night, I’d taken her to Cirque du Soleil, like I’d promised. But it slipped by quickly, like all times that leave a mark: fast in making, although I’d remember it forever.
I could see her in my mind: her eyes shining, her big smile, her bag hitched over her shoulder as she stood below the flight-information screen.
She had said, “I really love you, Gabe.”
She had said, “This thing we have, whatever it turns out to be, has been one of the best things in my life so far.”
She had said, “Good-bye.”
And then the airport had swallowed her.
I’d stood there feeling helpless. Staring past the metal detector until the woman checking IDs began to give me funny looks.
I blinked and turned Berto’s key in the ignition—I’d promised to get the car back to him quickly—and joined the line of cars easing out of the parking garage onto Sunset Road. Had our time just ended? Or was there more? Impossible to read the future. In a way, I didn’t want to.
Out of Aces (Betting Blind #2) Page 16