“There was also a totally sober post Chinese food one, yes. So now we only have one more to go.”
“Okay, now you lost me.”
“It was this thing we worked out before this experiment began. It’s hard to explain, but I have to kiss him three times. It was an arrangement.”
“I’m going to need you to spill the tea on that one, please.”
“No tea, just something we worked out. He put this three-kiss clause into our contract.”
“Wait, wait, what contract?”
I’ve never said this out loud to anyone, not even Shoshana. She knows we have this experiment going on, but she didn’t know about the contract, or the clause, or any of the specifics. Saying some of it out loud now makes me hear what she’s hearing. It does sound a little scandalous.
We make our coffee—lots of half and half and lots of sugar—then we pop a squat at the dining room table to finish talking. I take her through everything—I even show her the napkin we wrote the contract on. She doesn’t react exactly how I think.
“Okay, it makes sense now.”
“Wait, that’s it? I thought you’d be shocked.”
“I’d be shocked if you told me you were shaving your head and playing bass in a death metal band. Outside of that, I’m pretty open. Now tell me about these two kisses—were they just to check off the ones you ‘owe’ him, or did you want to?”
“No, I wanted to—both times. Although I guess I can’t really know what I wanted while I was wasted, but I’ll assume it happened like he told me. I know that I was thinking about kissing him at the bar before I got drunk. Last night, though, I really wanted to kiss him.”
“This changes everything, doesn’t it? It’s one thing to play house, it’s another to kiss a guy and mean it.”
“I’m just. . . I’m not sure those kisses meant the same thing to him that they meant to me, or that he feels anything at all. In that way, he’s a typical man—roll your eyes if you want to.”
“Not this time,” she says. “I know what you mean. Guys are funny when it comes to that stuff—they can do it without emotional attachment. Some of them, anyhow. I don’t know exactly why that is, but sometimes it’s hard to tell if they’re feeling the same thing that we’re feeling.”
“It is. Guys suck sometimes.”
“More than sometimes, in my experience. But when they’re worth it, they’re really, really worth it, Tor. The only question is—is Cormac is worth it?”
“I don’t know, Shosh. What I do know is that the lines between fantasy and reality are blurring for me, and I don’t want to get hurt if I let myself fall for some guy I barely know. What if he doesn’t feel the same?”
“Well,” she says, thinking about my question. “Did it feel like he meant it when you kissed him last night?”
I stop and think about it, but only for a second. It’s not the kind of question that needs a deep analysis—I know what the answer is, and it both excited and scared the shit out of me. “He meant it. I know he did.”
“Then that tells you all you need to know. What are you two doing next?”
“We’re hanging out in the city tomorrow. Probably after walking around a little we’ll go to a nice dinner.”
“Well then, sounds like you’re going to need a new outfit. How about we go shopping?”
I love my best friend.
Cormac
Wednesday, July 19th
I’m not hating living in the suburbs, but there’s no place like New York City. We agreed to meet by the office and then we took an Uber to downtown. It’s late afternoon, and the city is buzzing with people. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else right now.
We’re walking around with no particular destination in mind, and out of nowhere I see something.
“Oh, do you want a hot dog?”
“Huh?” she asks.
“I love dirty water dogs.”
“Ewww.”
“Ewww? Are you serious? Long hot dogs in water on the street is one of the best things the city has to offer. How dare you? And you call yourself a New Yorker?”
“Oh, I didn’t know sticking disgusting tubes of meat into my mouth made me a good New Yorker. My bad. But you eat the meat for me, okay?”
“Happy to,” I say. “Wait. . .”
She giggles, and I can’t believe I didn’t catch the joke as it was coming. She must have me distracted. When she giggles her face looks so sweet.
“I’m all good,” she jokes. “I will take a pretzel, though. I love those. I’m a salt person, for sure.”
“One oversized and over salted New York City pretzel and one dirty water tube of meat, coming up! C’mon,” I say, taking her hand. “Let’s cross.”
Crossing streets in Manhattan should be its own Olympic sport. It’s a dangerous and thrilling game of dodge-the-taxis. It takes just the right timing, but we get across to the nice man who’s pulling hot dogs out of water. The smells of sauerkraut, onions, and a host of other things that are impossible to tell from one another get more intense the closer we get, and my mouth is practically watering.
“My good man, I’ll have one dog and one pretzel, please.” Everything smells amazing when you’re hungry. I could eat a horse right now, but I’ll settle for one of the best hot dogs there is. She takes a big bite of her pretzel, full salt and all. “Looks like I wasn’t the only hungry one.”
“This is the first thing I’m eating all day, so stop judging me.”
“Hey, no judgement here. Do you. I love a girl who can eat her weight in salt.” She has some rock salt on her face, and I reach out and rub it off gently with my hand.
“Thank you. And I want brownie points for letting you call me a girl without going all feminist Rambo on you.”
“Brownie points granted. I like it when you don’t scream at me. I could get used to it.”
“I’m not a bitch, you know.”
It’s a really weird thing for her to say, but that’s not what gets me. It’s the way she says it—like maybe she’s heard that word thrown her way one too many times.
“I never thought that you were.” That’s a little bit of a lie.
“Oh, c’mon, when I went back at you during my pitch meeting, you didn’t let a ‘bitch’ fly in your head?”
“Well, maybe a little bit, but I don’t really use that word a lot. I had a few other adjectives running through my head, but ‘bitch’ wasn’t one of them. You’re not a bitch because of you defending your book. And you’re definitely not a bitch because you write. . . I don’t even know how to classify it.”
“If I remember correctly it was something like radical feminism drivel. Something like that.”
I smile. “Something like that, yeah. But something tells me you’ve had people think of you that way a few times before, haven’t you?”
“You should see the comments section in some of my videos. ‘Bitch’ is the nicest thing anyone says about me.”
“Trolls.”
“They should be studied. They’re like their own species. They never have a picture of themselves, and leave the most hateful comments in a bunch of random videos.”
“Does YouTube take them down?”
“Only if someone reports them or they violate community standards, but otherwise those guys living in their parents’ basement can click away with their Cheetos-fingers.”
“That sucks. Don’t read that stuff. And if you do, definitely don’t internalize any of it. In real life those guys are exactly what you think they are—losers who have nothing better to do with their lives than hate on others who are way more successful than they are.”
“Thanks for that,” she says, her big blue eyes looking up into mine. “So,” she says, changing the subject, “when does Cynthia get back from her trip?”’
“Not too long from now,” I tell her. “Just about at the end of our experiment. Another few weeks or so.”
That word is starting to bother me. It’s an experiment, for sure, but with each
passing day it feels less and less like that, at least to me. It’s hard to tell what she’s feeling.
“How do you think your partner would react if she knew what we were really using her house for?”
“Knowing Cynthia as well as I do, part of her would laugh hysterically. The other part of her—the partner-in-my-firm part of her—would be horrified.”
“Are you ever going to tell her the truth?”
“Eventually, maybe,” I tell her. “But I’m not in any rush to tell her we’re playing house at her house.”
“Is that what we’re doing?” she asks. “Playing house?”
“I mean, a little. Isn’t that what you wanted to do?”
“I wanted to set up a situation where you could show me a different side of men.”
“Right. How am I doing with all that?”
She smiles. The breeze blows her hair in front of her face, and I move it gently to the side. “Not bad. Not bad at all.”
We keep walking with no destination in mind. That’s the best way to walk around the city, and I’m enjoying just being here with her and talking. We make our stop at the New York Public Library, which I have to confess I’d never been to before—the only time I’d seen the place is at the beginning of Ghostbusters! But it’s majestic, and walking around those stacks with her really did inspire me. After we look around for a while we do a little more walking.
“I’m still hungry,” she says. “You want to grab an early dinner?”
I look at my watch. “It would be a really early dinner, are you sure?”
“Yeah, screw it. We can always get Chinese later if I’m still hungry.”
“Wow, you really love your Chinese food, huh?”
“What self respecting New Yorker doesn’t?”
Cormac
We find a little place to eat during our walk.
If there’s any sure thing about the city, it’s that there’s always ten places to eat within a short walk from wherever you are. That, and lots of cabs honking and nearly running you over as you cross the street. Manhattan is a complicated place.
After we sit down and order some appetizers, Tori jumps into a subject I never thought I’d discuss with her.
“So, tell me what your book is about?”
“You mean the one I can’t seem to finish?”
“Oh, come on, don’t beat yourself up.”
“It’s not just the time,” I tell her. “If you told me that I’d have to wait ten years, but at the end of those ten years I’d have the perfect novel, I’d happily wait.”
“I hate to tell you, Cormac, but there is no perfect novel. It’s a myth. Don’t chase it or you’ll never finish.”
“You sound like you’re the one who works at a publishing company.”
“You’re right,” she laughs. “But what I really know—at least after having gone through it—is how difficult it can be. Even though a lot of my book is transcriptions of conversations on my podcast and YouTube channel, I added in a lot of images, original thoughts, and new material that took a long time to put together. I can’t imagine writing a whole book from scratch. So don’t beat yourself up.”
“Sometimes I just stare at my computer. I used to bullshit myself and believe that I was just too busy to get it done. I’d tell myself I had too many clients, or too many meetings to do my own work, and that little self delusion worked for a little while. At least I felt like I had a legitimate reason for not finishing. But then I got so fed up with always telling myself that that I took a day off every two weeks to work on my book, and you know what happened?”
“What?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. I’d turn my phone off, open my computer, get a drink, and be lucky if I wrote a paragraph after a few hours. It’s just frustrating.”
“Tell me something. How far along are you?”
“Not sure. Maybe seventy percent of what I wanted to do.”
“Well that’s great! Seventy percent has the finish line in sight. The way you were talking about it I thought you had like your name and a title and nothing else.”
I snicker at the idea. Sounds like something I’d do. Write my name on a Word file and call it a ‘book’ that I was working on, but luckily, in this case, I have more than that. “It’s an almost-book.”
“An almost-book?” she asks.
“Yeah. Like, it has a crust forming. It’s pulling away from the pan, you know, but still too gooey in the middle to take out of the oven. It’s an almost-book.”
“See, you’re funny. You need to put some of that in your book. It’s fiction, right?”
“It is. This may shock you, but it’s a romantic comedy. Like Crazy Rich Asians—only not Asian people, and not even close to the plot of that book at all.”
“So. . . it’s an almost-book that’s not at all like Crazy Rich Asians?”
“Exactly. You’re getting it.”
We both laugh. I usually don’t like talking about my book to other people—it’s kind of a sore subject. In fact, there are only five people who know I’m even attempting it. My partners, my brothers, and now Tori. When I first met her, it was the last thing that I ever would have told her, because I know she would have ripped my ideas to shreds, but now I feel comfortable telling her. Not just comfortable, it’s helping to talk through it with her.
“You still didn’t tell me what it’s about, though.”
There it is. The question all authors dread. What’s your book about? I’m sure Tori’s gotten this question too. It isn’t that we don’t like talking about our book, but it’s the question itself. There are too many ways to answer it, but I try my best to be a good sport about my own non-book.
“Ummm. . .”
“I know, we all hate that one. I mean, what’s the basic plot?”
“That I can answer. It’s a rom-com with two main characters—a guy and a girl—total opposites. Each of their friends knows that they’re into one another, but they can’t seem to see it. They kind of don’t even get along. It’s a little John Hughes meets. . . I’m not even sure.”
“But not Crazy Rich Asians.”
“Nope,” I joke. “Definitely not that. No rich people and no Asians in the book.”
“It sounds good,” she says. “Now all you just have to finish it so I can read it.”
“Tear it apart, you mean.”
“No.” She stops walking and looks at me pretty seriously, like I might have just said the wrong thing. “Why would you think I’d do that? Just because you did it to me?”
The answer to that question is ‘yes’, but I don’t want to admit it because now I feel like a dick. “Sorry. I thought that maybe you might.”
“I have an idea,” she tells me, her face softening a little from a minute ago. “How about we not think the absolute worst of one another? Does that sound like a deal?”
“I don’t think the worst of you now. Not the real you. Not the you I’m getting to know, I’m sorry.”
“That’s the funny thing, Cormac.”
“What is?”
“They’re all the real me. The feminist author at the pitch meeting, the vlogger, the podcaster, and the girl you ate Chinese take-out with who kissed you. They’re all me, all bundled into one complicated package. The greatest danger in the world is seeing only one story—seeing a person for only one thing.”
“So how do you see me, then? Because you sure as hell didn’t see the whole complicated me when we first started this. Actually, I’m not sure there is a whole complicated me, I’m just saying.”
I get a smile. It makes her look even more beautiful than she already does. “Of course there is, you know that. And no, we don’t ever see one another for who we are from a distance, I realize that. I thought that you were just some big, good looking, jock type who likes beers and football, and hanging out with the guys.”
“Wait, go back.”
“What?”
“Go back a second. You thought I was what?”
“
A big jock.”
“Not that part. You thought I was good looking?”
She looks away. I swear, for a second, that she’s blushing. “Well, you are.”
I throw my hands up in the air like I just won something—maybe that football game she thinks I love so much. I don’t have the heart to tell her I’m a baseball guy. I’ll let her keep some of her male stereotypes.
“What?”
“Winning!”
“Oh, come on. You know you are. I’m sure you got all the girls in high school and college, right?”
I laugh. And I don’t mean a little snicker. I laugh so hard that I’m thankful I don’t have any liquid in my mouth. “Are you serious? That’s what you think of me?”
“Well, kind of, yeah. I mean, you seem really sure of yourself.”
“I am.”
“And you’re good looking.”
“I am, at least according to you a second ago.”
“Shut up. You know what I’m saying.”
“Ready for the shocking truth? I never had a girlfriend until my junior year in high school. I weighed about a buck twenty-five, soaking wet, back then. I had bad skin and I was pretty shy and into comics. Trust me, no girl wanted any part of me.”
“Really? Don’t bullshit me.”
“I’m not, I swear. I’ll be happy to have my parents delve into the old leather-bound family albums to show you some of my high school photos. I was a dork, and a tiny one at at that.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, a growth spurt end of sophomore year helped. I sprang up over six feet, but it was that awkward height because I didn’t have the weight to go with it, so I just looked like a stick. By senior year I actually listened to my parents and saw a dermatologist to get my skin cleared up. I still read too many comics, though, so that might have been a little bit of a girl repellant.”
She laughs. “I was into comics also.”
“DC or Marvel?”
“Marvel, of course. DC is trash.”
“Complete trash. Except for Batman. He’s always been cool. Sometimes Superman, too, but it depends.”
“Look,” she says. “I would have talked to you in high school. Hell, if you’d talked to me I might have dated you in high school.”
The Three Kiss CLause Page 16
