We Can't Keep Meeting Like This

by Rachel Lynn Solomon

  “It is. I really am bummed that we didn’t get together sooner, but at least our schools aren’t that far apart.”

  “You’re changing your mind about long-distance?”

  Julia gives a coy smile. “Maybe? I just feel like we owe it to the relationship to at least give it a try.”

  “That’s great,” I say, and I mean it. But it doesn’t mean I need to want that for myself.

  Back in the lobby, I decide to check on the Seattle Rock Orchestra tickets to see if by some stroke of luck, all the bidders dropped out and they’re going for twenty bucks.

  What I see on the sheet of paper instead makes me feel as though someone’s run my stomach through Maxine’s band saw.

  Tarek Mansour… $750

  “Quinn? You okay?”

  Silently, I jab a finger at his bid, and Julia’s eyes go wide.

  “Oh. Holy shit. He really, really likes you, then.”

  “This isn’t like. It’s… I don’t know what it is.” And before I can give it a second thought, I snatch the paper and march outside, where Tarek and Noelle are arguing over where we should grab pizza.

  “You can’t do this,” I say, pressing the paper into his chest. Thank god the auction hasn’t closed yet.

  “What is—oh.” Realization dawns, and he gingerly takes the piece of paper from me. “I thought—you made it seem like you wanted them, and it’s for a good cause, and…”

  “I think we’ll meet you guys there?” Julia tugs on Noelle’s arm and says to me, “I’ll text you where we end up.”

  My face burns. I don’t want to do this in public, but that’s the thing—Tarek forces these gestures to be public, which makes it impossible for any conversation about them to be private.

  “Do you even have this kind of money?” I say once Julia and Noelle have sped away in Julia’s car. “Because I definitely don’t.”

  “I have some savings,” he says quietly.

  “I just—I don’t know how you leaped to this conclusion. Regular tickets can’t be that expensive. If you wanted to do something nice, why couldn’t it be that? Why did it have to be this—this—”

  “Grand?”

  “Excessive.” I reach to run a hand through my hair out of frustration, getting even more frustrated when I remember I attempted a hairstyle and don’t want to mess it up. “Even after I told you how I felt about that message at the movie. Evidently you weren’t listening.”

  “I’m listening,” he insists. “I’m just not understanding. All I’m trying to do is show you that I like this. Spending time with you.”

  “Really? Because it feels like you’re doing this for you. Not for me. Because you want me to, I don’t know, fall at your feet or something.” It’s so ridiculous to say it out loud that I can’t help scoffing.

  “Of course it’s for you. Why else would I have done it?” he says, holding up the paper again. “I thought it would be romantic. Clearly I was wrong. Why do you act like that’s the worst thing in the world, for someone to want to be romantic toward you?”

  “Because it’s not real.” Our old argument, except now it’s much more personal. I don’t know what else I can say without digging into my family trauma, opening up the wound and showing him how ugly it is. I’m back at the marina, and he’s telling me my parents, who’ve devoted their whole lives to till death do us part, didn’t try hard enough to keep their marriage from fracturing.

  Sure, not in those words, but I can’t imagine he’d change his theory if he knew the truth.

  I walk over to a nearby bench and drop down onto it, hoping it’ll calm my temper. He approaches cautiously, as though worried I won’t want him to sit next to me.

  “Quinn. I’m sorry. Okay? I messed up. I’ll scratch off my name, tell them I made a mistake.”

  “Okay. I would appreciate that.”

  This is all he knows how to do. He’s never not made that clear to me. This can’t last much longer—or there won’t be any of our friendship left afterward either.

  When I speak again, my voice is softer. “We can go home, if you want. I’ll text Julia some excuse.”

  His brow furrows. “What? Why?”

  A laugh slips out. “Because we’re fighting? You really want to keep hanging out with me after this?”

  “Yes?” He phrases it as a question. “I’m not going to stop spending time with you because we had one argument.”

  I wasn’t expecting that. “Well… okay then.”

  I guess… we’re done fighting? There’s no way it’s that easy, but he forges ahead. “Did Julia text you where they are?”

  As I dig for my phone, fighting conversation whiplash, Tarek makes a move to reach for my shoulder—maybe to wrap an arm around me, or maybe just to give me a friendly pat. On instinct, I dodge it.

  It’s not worth it for the way his face falls, but I promise myself I’ll make it up to him in the dark later.

  21

  Pizza turns out to be supremely good at smoothing frayed nerves. Since Julia had to be up early for another Kirschbaum camping extravaganza, she and Noelle took off ten minutes ago, leaving Tarek and me alone to navigate our awkward post–silent auction feelings. Except—it hasn’t been that awkward.

  I stare down at my last half slice of pulled pork, pineapple, and jalapeño. “Do you want this?” I ask him from across the booth. Tarek declared this the best pizza in Seattle, and he was right; I’d never had wood-fired pizza quite like this, with gorgeous blackened bubbles on the crust, and it’s a crime I can’t finish it.

  Tarek shakes his head. “Pork.”

  “Shit. Sorry. Now I feel bad for eating this in front of you.” Pork products are getting Berkowitzes into all kinds of situations lately.

  “Don’t apologize. And please, don’t stop on my account.”

  Tarek doesn’t often talk about his religion, but now I’m wondering if it’s because we’ve only just recently started talking about serious things. Mansour’s doesn’t have pork on their menu, and aside from that, they only use humanely raised animal products. The first time I realized this might be unusual for a catering company was when my parents dropped a client who said something insensitive when they suggested Mansour’s. My parents refunded all their money, despite the work they’d already done. Said they refused to work with people like that.

  “I don’t keep kosher.” I motion to the pizza. “I mean. Obviously. My sister’s fiancé, he’s, like, very Jewish, and I remember he was shocked when they started dating and she ordered pork at a Chinese restaurant in front of him, completely unaware. And now she observes more of the customs he grew up with, and she’s keeping kosher too. Sometimes I feel like I’m letting down ‘my people’ or whatever. I don’t know. I’m not a very good Jew, I guess.”

  It’s not something I’ve ever really vocalized, and he’s quiet for a moment, taking it all in. “I feel like there are probably a lot of different ways to be Jewish, just like there are a lot of ways to be Muslim. Is it something you think about a lot?”

  I shake my head. “Only occasionally. But when I do, it’s suddenly all I can think about. What about you?”

  “My parents aren’t nearly as religious as their parents were,” he says. “But some things have just sort of stuck? Like, we work with a halal butcher, but not everything we eat or serve is halal. My mom drinks, but my dad doesn’t, and, well, you saw me do it at the beach. And I’ve had sex before marriage.”

  “Right,” I say, feeling my face heat up.

  “There are some things I agree with and some I don’t, but I still consider myself a Muslim. Just like you probably still consider yourself Jewish.”

  And I do.

  We split what’s left of the bill. I love this city at night, especially in the summer. Maybe that’s why I was so bold after the movie in the park, because I feel it now too: this sense of heady anticipation, liquid gold in my veins. Opportunity Possibilities. We’re past the halfway mark, the days getting shorter, those opportunities dwindling. Tar
ek and I have been seeing each other a couple times a week, sometimes at a wedding and sometimes on nights like this.

  Logically, I know I’ve got to start distancing myself before we get any deeper. But it’s so hard to remember that when we’re tangled in his back seat or even when we’re talking about pizza.

  Before we head out, I check my bag, probably spending more time doing it than usual. Checking, checking, checking.

  “There’s something I’ve been wondering,” he says when we get outside. “And feel free to tell me to shut up if it sounds insensitive.”

  “This sounds ominous.”

  “I swear, it’s not. Or if it is, you can be the judge. I’ve just been wondering—when you’re doing those things, those checks, what does it feel like? I’m not judging. I just want to try to understand it.”

  I try not to be embarrassed that he noticed. “It’s sort of like… getting stuck in a loop. I’ll do something, but I won’t believe my memory that I actually did it, even though I know I would hear it if I dropped my keys or phone, or I would feel it if a door didn’t lock, or I would see it if I didn’t turn the stove off. Like I can’t trust any of my senses. So I check again, and I still don’t have actual proof that it happened, or I worry I’m checking so much that I may have undone the thing I want to make sure of, so I keep doing it, and then I can’t stop.

  “When I was at my worst, I went through this phase where I’d take photos of things to make sure they were the way they were supposed to be. I had hundreds and hundreds of pictures on my phone of my house’s locked front door, of Edith, of our stove.” I’m not used to being this open with someone I’m hooking up with, but I don’t hate the way it feels to tell him all of this. “It’s that searching for proof and realizing I’m never going to get it. That’s how my therapist talked about it. Because the photos didn’t stop me from doing additional checks, or from taking even more photos. I have to be okay with the uncertainty. I have to trust myself. It’s a fight with my brain, and most of the time, my brain is acting especially infuriating.”

  “I’m sorry.” He taps the side of my head with a fingertip. “I happen to like your brain, whether it’s fighting with you or not.”

  Tarek liking my brain feels a little too boyfriend-adjacent for comfort, so I smile and try to brush it off. “Speaking of fighting,” I say. “I have the perfect idea to end this night. How do you feel about breaking things?”

  * * *

  Tarek is wearing goggles and a hard hat and wielding a sledgehammer. I’m sure I look equally goofy in my protective gear, plus a borrowed jacket and pants, since I wasn’t allowed to break things in a dress.

  “A rage cage,” Tarek says, laughing as we enter the room. “Maybe nothing should surprise me about you at this point.”

  “No, it’s RAAAAGE CAAAAGE! You have to be aggro while saying it or it doesn’t count. And it’s supposed to be very cathartic.”

  I’d always wanted to go to a wrecking club like this. Breaking things and not getting in trouble for it? What’s not to love? I didn’t think it was possible to look good in goggles and a hard hat, but damn it, of course Tarek pulls it off. After we get a safety spiel from one of the employees, we’re led into a graffitied, industrial-looking room set up to look like a very sad office: an ancient computer and TV, a chair with three legs, and a long desk with woodworking that would horrify Maxine, stacked with old ceramic plates.

  I pick up my sledgehammer and bring it down on the chair, and a hunk of it breaks off. Then I do it again, smashing it into smaller pieces. In a Venn diagram with people who play the harp on one side and people who like to smash things on the other, I thought there wouldn’t be any overlap, but nope, I am loving this.

  Tarek takes his sledgehammer to the stack of plates. He’s gentle at first, barely nicking one, before sweeping them to the floor in a massive crash.

  “You want to do this one together?” I ask, and we join forces to obliterate a TV monitor.

  I can’t remember the last time I laughed this much.

  After about twenty minutes of hard-core destruction, we take a break on a bench in the room. Tarek removes his goggles and hat. His hairline is damp with sweat.

  “This is a great look for you,” he says, pulling my hat down over my eyes. If we were a real couple, we’d probably be taking selfies. “That was quite a lot of rage. Well done. I’ve got to come back here with Harun sometime.”

  “It’s been a summer.” I take off the hat and fiddle with the brim of it. “Sometimes I wonder if it would really be that terrible if I kept going along with what my parents want.”

  He just stares at me. “And keep being unhappy?”

  “I don’t know! It’s less scary than the alternative. It’s comfortable. You’re not there when they’re guilting me into something. They make me feel like I can’t say no to them.”

  I’ve planned it out in my head a hundred times. It starts with those words women use to qualify things so often, “maybe” and “I’m not sure if” and “I just.”

  “Even if it does hurt them,” Tarek says, “that hurt isn’t going to last forever. Isn’t it better to tell them sooner as opposed to having it keep building? Wouldn’t it hurt less that way, for all of you?”

  “Why do you have to be right?” I grumble.

  “I’m older. More educated.”

  I roll my eyes. “So if I told them, what would that look like? ‘Hey, Mom, hey, Dad, I fucking quit. Oh, and by the way, I’ve been taking harp lessons because I wanted to expand on my least marketable skill.’ ”

  “You still have to play for me.”

  “I will, I will,” I say, unsure whether I’m lying. “It’s just hard, with my parents, and even finding the time to play…”

  He reaches over, pulls my legs across his lap. “I know. Hey. Let me try something. Don’t think—just say whatever comes to mind first. Five years from now, what are you doing? Your biggest, wildest dream?”

  I close my eyes. I can imagine myself with B+B, but maybe that’s only because it’s the default. Would I still be helping out in Maxine’s workshop? Would I still be playing the harp at all?

  “You’re thinking,” he says.

  “Because I honestly don’t know,” I say. “You go. Wildest dream.”

  His smiles slides to one side. Of course he knows. “I love the idea of opening a bakery–slash–test kitchen, where people could come in and try something new every week or take cooking classes.” He moves his hands as he speaks, almost like he’s waving around an invisible whisk or spatula. “One week we’d do Middle Eastern pastries, and the next we’d do pies, and then we’d do gourmet grilled cheese. I’d want to test out new recipes for different allergens, too, the way I started out with Harun. I’ve been trying more of that lately.”

  “I can picture it.” I can, and it sounds wonderful. When it’s like this between us, it’s easier to forgive his flashy attempts at romance. Easier to forget I’m not supposed to be this comfortable with him, no matter how good it feels.

  “For now, though, I’d be thrilled just to get a chance to do a cake on my own. When I made the cake batter for the wedding we filled in at, even minus the frosting and the actual assembly—that was a huge deal. My parents are intense about cake. I’ve been wanting to do one on my own for a while, but it’s one of those things that needs to be perfect, so they’re hesitant to give up control. But if I’m going to have my own bakery someday, I’ll need to be able to do that without my parents watching me as I measure each ingredient.”

  “You’re amazing at what you do,” I tell him, awed not for the first time by the differences between our parents. “They have to see that. And when the bakery happens, I’ll be there for your grand opening.”

  “As long as my depression doesn’t get in the way,” he says, each word as heavy as that sledgehammer.

  “Is that… something you worry about?” I ask. We’ve already dug deep today. Might as well keep digging.

  He scuffs at the floor wi
th his shoe. “All the time.” He says it softly, and the raw honesty in those words shocks me. All the time. Even with my own issues, there are plenty of days I’m not actively concerned about them.

  “It’s not that I’m depressed all the time,” he amends. “The therapy and medication have helped so much. It’s just made me wonder if that future I’ve pictured… if it’s something I’m going to eventually fuck up for myself. If I’ll never get to have it for no other reason than my shit brain chemistry.”

  “Tarek,” I say, running my hand along his arm. If he doesn’t get his bakery–slash–test kitchen, I’m going to be devastated. “That fucking sucks. I’m sorry. I’m sorry you have to feel that way.”

  He nods, still not meeting my eyes. “It’s a competitive industry, and college was competitive too. Everyone so full of ambition. That was part of what dragged me down initially, this fear of not being able to keep up. And I was so fucking lonely, even living with Landon. And the rest was just… the way I am.” He turns his attention back to me. “Let’s talk about something else. Or not talk at all,” he says, moving in to kiss me.

  I like opened-up, honest Tarek. I hope he doesn’t think he said too much.

  When we move apart, his eyes are still closed. “I’m going to ask you something,” he says slowly, his fingers tapping out some unfamiliar rhythm on my back. “No gestures. Just me with you in a rage cage, asking a question. And I might already know the answer, but I’m going to keep wondering if I don’t ask it. So. What if… What if we made this official? You and me?”

  The room grows smaller, the air thinner, these borrowed clothes turning stiffer than my most rigid pair of B+B slacks. I like him—I can admit it. That much is clear from the pounding of my heart alone. Last year’s swirly sickness multiplied by a hundred.

  But that’s not enough.

  “This silence is doing a lot for my ego,” he says with a half laugh.

  “I’m sorry,” I rush to say. “I want to keep doing this. Hanging out with you. But…”