by Lillie Vale
The realization sticks to me like a wet sweater.
I’m not sure if he wants me to check in, because he never said—and I don’t want to be the one to reach out first. So I say nothing and get on with doing my job.
It’s better that he’s not here. It would feel too much that this was our place, our first home together. In my fantasy, I can pretend I have enough money to buy more than twelve square feet of it.
I fight a smile as I dress the king-size bed in the master with luxurious brown and warm hazelnut throw pillows. The cream linens are good quality, and the fitted sheet snaps tight over the corners without a single wrinkle.
Milan would have pouted about this bed being too big.
The few times we’d managed to spend the night together, he always hated it when I scooted away from his warmth in the night to find an untouched cool patch. He liked to cuddle, to sleep with me tight against him. I loved it in winter, called him my personal furnace and slid my cold toes over his bare calves until he yelped at me to wear socks. It turned into a joke between us; socks in my stocking every Christmas. Novelty ones, the kind with cheeseburgers, pugs in tutus, and sushi rolls with faces.
Ugh, I shouldn’t be thinking about him. I should be thinking about getting back at him.
And definitely not back with him.
I suppress every single warm fuzzy. Squash it down flat.
Nope. No. Not me thinking about Milan all wistful like that. Certainly not.
This is MyShaadi getting in my head, nothing more.
I had a solid hour with Milan on Sunday showing him my designs and doing the walk-through, and I couldn’t find a single window of opportunity to bring up my successful MyShaadi.com match with a “reliable” man to throw in his face.
Which would have been easier if I actually did have a successful match with Neil. But like he pointed out, maybe my dumbass answers threw the AI for a loop. He, on the other hand, already had three matches, and the number was growing. How? And, I ask again, how?
I take a step back to survey the room. It’s perfect, just the way I drew it. The room is draped in soft earth tones, from the vista of trees to the soft furnishings to the reclaimed barn wood I sanded and stained myself.
It’s weird, but I’ll be a little sorry to leave when all this is done. It was nice to pretend I was an interior designer. Someone who Milan needed.
I want you, Rita, echoes in my mind.
Yeah, for a job.
Not in his life.
Maybe it would be easier if I could point to one thing that happened and say, yes, that was the moment it all changed, that’s why we fell apart. That’s the catalyst that lead to his voicemail. That’s the moment when I fucked up. When he did.
But I have no clue who’s to blame.
We’d dated since we were fifteen, which was early in Desi families like ours. Most of the time you were questioned to the third degree if you wanted to go anywhere a boy might live, work, or even breathe in the vicinity of, frankly. But our parents put on their understanding, our-kids-are-growing-up-in-a-different-time game faces and decided to be okay with it, probably because it was better than the alternative of us sneaking around.
Even if they had forbidden us from being together, Milan would never have listened.
He even had this funny shirt he slept in for years, a joke present from his mom, that read: I’M NOT BOSSY, I’M THE BOSS. He wore it until the armpits yellowed and the letters faded off.
He was possessive about his tees that way. He refused to let his mom use anything for window rags until it was practically falling apart; even then, it was a fight.
“Hey,” says a voice from behind me.
I spin, heart jackhammering.
Milan steps across the threshold, taking in the whole room for the first time. “Wow.”
Wow, yourself.
He’s low-key today in dark indigo jeans and a short-sleeve white-collared shirt sprinkled with tiny blue sailboats, all pulled together with a camel-color belt that matches his shoes.
I can’t take his silent absorbing anymore. “Do you like it?” comes out before I can stop myself. I cringe, hearing the eagerness in my voice.
He doesn’t tease out his praise. “Fuck yes.”
I stifle my knee-jerk laugh. “Well, that’s . . . that’s good to know.”
“I promise I’m not here to check up on you,” he says. “I was just passing by.”
“Oh, you’ve got another house in this neighborhood?”
A beat passes before he answers. He scratches his neck. “Yeah.”
When he’s not any more forthcoming, I say, “It wouldn’t bother me if you were. Um. Checking up on me.” Quickly, I tack on, “I mean, it’s your money. You have every right to see how I’m spending it. Sorry about the drop cloths and the paint smell. I’d throw open the windows, but I don’t want to waste the AC, so . . . um. Should be gone by Sunday’s open house. And then you’ll finally see the last of me.” I pretend to mop my brow, miming relief.
Something shifts in his face. He doesn’t respond, but moves deeper into the room.
An arm’s length away from me. I tuck my elbows into my side, digging in deep.
His brown eyes travel the room, landing on each of my new additions. I can almost see him cataloging everything in his mind, matching it to the sketches I showed him.
And then, last of all, he ends up looking at me.
The seconds drag on, a string pulled taut enough to snap. What is he thinking?
He smiles like he’s read my mind. “You asked me if, in my dream reality, my dream house would still be decorated by you,” he states.
The words are familiar in a way that I can’t place.
I draw my eyebrows together. “When did I—”
“There’s no reality in which I wouldn’t want you, Rita,” he interrupts.
I’m rooted to the spot, throat too fuzzy to speak.
“—to design my house,” he concludes.
My lips part in surprise. That’s . . . not where I thought he was going.
That feeling in my gut isn’t disappointment. It’s not.
Milan scratches the back of his neck. A flush rises to his ears, but he doesn’t take the coward’s way out by looking away. “I wanted to clarify that. In case there was . . . confusion.”
All I can think is: Today is Thursday and he couldn’t stop thinking about something I said on Sunday, and it bugged him enough to come here and tell me I had it wrong.
“You wanted to clarify,” I repeat, heart hammering in my ears.
He clears his throat. “For the sake of accuracy.”
Faintly, I manage, “I see.”
“So I’m just gonna . . .” He jerks his thumb over his shoulder toward the door, taking a step backward with a rueful grin. “Let you get back to work.”
I could just nod and let him go, but I’ve done that once before. So I follow him out, down the hallway I lined with small black-and-white abstract prints, past the kitchen and living room that now look so welcoming any family could see themselves growing here.
I don’t know if I’m waiting for him to say something or for myself to.
Why did you break us? Why did you let me go?
In the end, he breaks the silence first. He stops at the door, but makes no move to open it.
“Did you mean it about being on MyShaadi to meet reliable men?” His lips twist, about to make a face, before he catches himself.
He reminds me of Una, able to pick up conversations days later, juggling threads in his mind palace until it’s time to trot them out again.
This is different, another way he’s changed since I knew and loved him.
I haven’t answered his question. There’s something in his steady gaze that begs me to tell him it was a joke. But I made a plan, and I haven’t chang
ed—I see things through.
I gather every ounce of fortitude I have. “Yes,” I say, proud my voice doesn’t quaver the way I’m afraid it will. I tip my chin up. “In fact, I’m surprised you’re not already one of their ‘Success Story’ testimonials.”
I wait for him to bring up the elephant in the room that we’ve been tiptoeing around—the fact that we’d matched.
He just looks back at me.
“I mean, you’re the kind of guy who’d do really well. Especially dressed like . . .” I wave my hand over his general area, trying not to zero in on his slim-fit jeans. “You.”
Milan glances down at his torso, amused. “Spend a lot of time thinking about my qualities, do you, Rita?”
It crashes into me that I may have inadvertently complimented him.
“I don’t think about you at all,” I say through my teeth, plastering on a smile.
His eyes light up. “I might have actually believed you if your mouth had moved even once during that sentence.”
I relax my grimace-smile.
“Thanks,” he adds.
I squint at him. “For saying you dress well?”
Is it that much of a surprise to him when he looks as though he just waltzed out of a Ralph Lauren Nantucket photo shoot?
His voice lowers, turns serious. “For making a house into a home. I always knew you’d be good at that.” He smiles, but it’s strained and doesn’t reach his eyes. “Whoever you find on MyShaadi, the person you make your home with is going to be ridiculously lucky.”
I blow past the tenderness in his voice. He’s on MyShaadi, I’m on MyShaadi, but we’re both going to pretend that we didn’t match?
I used to feel so bad, and maybe even a little superior, when couples from high school would be draped all over each other in first period and icing each other out by fifth. I was sure that would never be us. Walking down the hallway without even a chin lift to acknowledge the person whose tongue had been in their mouth a few hours ago.
Is what’s happening with me and Milan now just the adult version of that?
I want to be brave. I want to ask him if he saw that we matched, but if I ask first, he’ll have the upper hand. For the same reason, I want to—and I don’t want to—ask about what happened six years ago. Why he’d been struggling so much with school and why he’d never said a word to me about it before the voicemail.
But he can’t ever know that I’m still hunting for that closure.
I’m scared to be the one who cares more, who cares too much. I might have been a girl who waited, but he can’t know that a part of me is waiting still.
Milan pauses, about to say something else, then shakes his head. “I’ll see you soon, Rita.”
* * *
—
Neil comes over a couple of hours after I leave Milan’s listing, which I can no longer in fairness call the Soulless Wonder after all the work I put in to make it family friendly.
I’m just about to pull the sheet pan of loaded nachos out of the oven when the key turns in the lock. Harrie’s attention darts from the cheesy yumminess I’m sliding off the rack—which he’s hoping will fall—to the door. He bullets toward Neil the second he’s in the house, the cacophony of his shrill barks going straight to my temple.
“Harrie!” I shout, pulling the chilled pico de gallo out of the fridge. “Stop it.”
“See, this is why I hate kids,” says Neil, raising his voice to make himself heard.
I accidentally dump the cilantro-lime mixture in one place. “You what?”
Mercifully, Harrie stops barking, but not before shooting me a wounded look. He trots back to the nachos, staring with expectation.
“Smells delicious in here,” says Neil, sliding his keys back into his pocket. He sniffs the air appreciatively the same exact way as Harrie did five minutes ago.
“Rewind to what you said about hating kids?” I drag a fork through the diced jalapeño, tomato, and onion, spreading it out evenly across the layered nachos.
“Figure of speech.” Neil smiles as he enters the kitchen, sidestepping Harrie, who’s now ignoring him totally to make a point.
My laugh comes out awkward, strangled. “Yeah, but a pretty revealing one.” I take off the oven mitt, but don’t put it back in the drawer. “You don’t . . . mean it, do you?”
It bugs me, even though we’ve only been together three months and I’m not even looking at Neil in that way. My womb is hardly rushing to put together a sperm welcome party, but that doesn’t mean I never want kids.
“Ma says I’ll feel differently when it’s my kid,” says Neil. “That’s how it was for her, apparently. But she’s always doted on me and my brother. Still does. She’s always saying we’re her biggest achievement. That’s why she likes us over there all the time. We’re her world.”
He comes close, about to go in for a hug, then spies the reddish-brown stains on my apron and stops an arm’s length away. “Why’d you chop the avocado instead of making guac?”
Because I’m tired of him stealing the nucleus chip with all the guac on it.
“Slicing is easier than mashing. Maybe next time you could help cook and do it the way you like it,” I say tartly.
He looks thoughtful, but puzzled, like he’s not sure I’m deliberately trying to be passive-aggressive or aggressive-aggressive.
It’s the latter, for sure.
If we’ve started to have these little domestic squabbles, the honeymoon period is over.
That should be a good thing. It means we’re comfortable enough to zing at each other. Which makes this officially my longest relationship since Milan.
By the time Neil washes up and we sit down on the couch to eat (“No, Harrie, not you.”), I’m still thinking about what he said, and the fact that his mom maybe didn’t want kids but now revolves around them so much that she can’t let them live their own lives.
“What do you want to watch?” I ask, pulling up my Netflix list.
Freddie and Harrie curl up against each other on their doggy bed, the prime location for both TV watching and human watching.
“Anything other than romance,” says Neil. He pokes a broken chip corner into a glob of melty, bubbly cheese. “If I have to watch another movie about a woman who moves to some rural small town and falls in love with the local lumberjack, these nachos are going to come up.”
Harrie looks disconcertingly pleased at the prospect of secondhand ground beef.
“Those guys are rugged and outdoorsy,” I protest.
“If they wear flannel, they’re a lumberjack,” he insists stubbornly.
“I wear flannel.” I stab my own tiny chip triangle through a runaway pinto and a black bean in one move.
Stumped, Neil shovels in a chip. “Fine, then I’ll watch anything other than a Christmas movie. I mean, it’s June. Who’s craving snow when we have all this awesome sun? And how many movies can you make with ‘Christmas’ as an adjective, anyway?”
“As many as they want because they are absolutely delightful.”
“Hey, what about Die Hard?”
How can I deny him Bruce Willis when his eyes light up like that?
I’m pretty sure I hit a maturity milestone for not telling him plenty of people—not me—also consider Die Hard a Christmas movie, don’t ask me how. Ex-boyfriend number five would attest.
With an internal groan, I hand over the remote and let him add about a dozen movies I’m never going to want to watch to my queue, start two different WWII movies before giving up ten minutes in, and half listen to his rant about all the great TV series that left Netflix this month before he got a chance to watch them. He switches to Hulu, asks me for the millionth time why I didn’t pay for the more expensive ad-free subscription, and points out the fact that I’m clogging my queue with things I’ve never watched for as long as he’s dated me.
Dinner’s over by the time he finds a movie with high-speed chases and big explosions. I swear he’s the only guy I know who thinks jumping back and forth between ten different things counts as “watching TV.” After I do the dishes, I return to the couch just to be polite. I’ve missed the beginning of the movie and I don’t care enough to ask Neil to catch me up, and he doesn’t offer. He’s slid beyond the middle cushion, verging onto my seat. I curl into the armrest and pull out my phone, tucking my feet partially under him.
Neil sucks down air like there’s been a horrifying on-screen death. He inches away from me. “Maybe you should wear some socks if you’re cold. Or turn down the AC.”
I draw my knees up to my chest, cold toes curling.
His eyes flick to my screen. I wait for him to ask me if we’ve matched yet, but he doesn’t.
Part of me thinks it’s because he’s never really believed in the Shaadi scam in the first place. He’d chuck it aside and introduce me to his mom even without it. I bet he hasn’t even checked his account more than the once.
It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if he’s relying solely on me to give him the—fingers crossed—good news. Neil’s so fixed on the TV that he doesn’t notice my soft gasp of recognition when a name from my childhood shows up in my matches.
Sanju Khanna, the boy my entire fourth-grade math class had caught slurping down a rope of his own snot the day before winter break. Two weeks off from school hadn’t made anyone kinder, and our first day back in the New Year was full of creative nicknames for him.
Not me, though. And not Milan, who was sitting next to him when it happened, either.
“Neil,” I start to say, reaching out to poke him with my foot without thinking.
The giggle evaporates in my throat. Slowly, I draw my leg back.
He has no idea who Sanju is or why the snot anecdote will forever make this man singularly repugnant. Sure, he’ll make the right faces and laugh about how it’s just my luck, but he won’t really get why it’s so funnily horrifying, because he wasn’t there.
If I’m being honest, Neil isn’t the one I want to tell.
He’s not listening anyway.