Raven's Flight

by Chrys Cymri - BooksGoSocial Fantasy P

  “I do smile.”

  “You usually force a smile, but you never smile like you did right now.”

  “Why? What’s the point?” Indeed, what the hell was there to smile about?

  “Your entire face lights up when you smile like that.” He paused and seemed a bit sheepish. “You look gorgeous.”

  I was going to give him kind of a scowl, but somehow it ended up being a grin, then a broad smile that ended up in a chuckle. I closed my eyes, in half embarrassment, half flirtation. When I opened them, I found myself looking up at him from beneath my lashes, something I never did.

  “Did I embarrass you?” Tarek was smiling broadly now.

  “You—discombobulate me,” I said.

  “What does that mean?” His eyebrows furrowed.

  “It means—to cause confusion, like, you make someone confused.”

  “Why do I cause you confusion?” It was a serious question.

  I shook my head to clear it. “I—you just do, sometimes. Look, are we reading Crim Pro or are we discombobulating?”

  “Well, apparently, we’re doing both. And I love that word. I’m going to start using it.”

  “Great, I’ve created a monster.” I threw my hands up in the air, much like my mother would do when she was frustrated with something that I had said.

  Then we started with Crim Pro.

  We were taking a break.

  “How old do you think our International Law professor is?” I asked Tarek.

  “He looks young, like he’s about thirty or so.”

  “I think he looks like he’s about twenty-five, but he’s probably like a young-looking thirty.” I sighed. “That’s so depressing.”

  “What’s depressing?”

  “That he’s most likely younger than me.”

  “Oh, please. Thirty-four is young.”

  “Yeah, but I’ll be thirty-six when I graduate.”

  “So?”

  “I’ll be staring forty directly in the face.” Sometimes I started to dwell on my age. It sucked. The years were passing by at warp speed, even more so because I was in school and working and was so busy. I liked to be busy, but it made the time pass that much more quickly.

  I decided to change the subject.

  “So tell me why you transferred here.”

  Tarek sighed and looked at me. We were standing in the kitchen. He had refilled my water glass and I was drinking.

  “This is a better-ranked school.” He shrugged.

  Rankings meant about everything in the law-school world. If your school fell a couple of notches in the national rankings, it was bad news. All in all, it was better to be at a top-20 school, best to be at a top-10 school. Law firms looked at where you went to law school, and also at your class rank. Certain government agencies, like the Department of Justice and State Department, also focused on rankings, as if they were white-shoe law firms. It was pretty well-known that the State Department’s Office of the Legal Advisor mainly hired first-year attorneys from the Ivy League schools. Recently, the Office had hired a couple of new attorneys from our school, and that was a big deal since those positions seemed more attainable to us mere mortals now.

  The thing was, of course, really good attorneys came from all over, not only from the Ivy Leagues. But now the chips were down and the legal market wasn’t so hot. Starting in 2008, the year when the economy started to go under, law firms began laying off attorneys and non-attorney staff. Some firms and federal agencies weren’t even hiring entry-level attorneys. I remember that the university’s Career Center addressed my class in 2009, telling us that it would be challenging to find the jobs we wanted. They made it sound like now the rankings were more important than ever.

  Whatever. I was ranked in the top of my class at a top-20 school and it wasn’t helping me.

  “So you only care about the rankings?” I asked Tarek, raising my eyebrows.

  Tarek looked at me in a way that told me that he didn’t only care about that.

  “There are also a lot of job opportunities in DC,” he said then.

  I thought that I was pretty good at reading people, and I got the impression that there was something else he wasn’t telling me. But I disregarded it for now. If he didn’t want to tell me, there was no sense in pushing him.

  I was leaning with my back against the kitchen cabinets, thinking. What would make him leave Miami for DC? I decided to change my line of questioning.

  “So Zaida is your only sibling, right?”

  “Yes. And I like how you say her name.”

  I had known a couple of Zaidas in Spain. It was actually a pretty popular name there, due to the country’s close proximity to Morocco and the Arab influence. But in Spain it was pronounced “Thaida,” with the Castilian accent, pronouncing the z’s and c’s with a ‘th’ sound.

  “My coworkers call it the Castilian lisp.” I smiled.

  “I knew some Spanish people in Paris. They talked like that.” He drank from his glass.

  “What was your impression of them?”

  “They were a bit arrogant.” Now Tarek was smiling. “But they loved life, and they knew how to have a good time.”

  “That’s about right,” I agreed, then continued my questioning. “You get along with your mom?”

  “My mom and my sister and I are very close.” He paused. I noticed that it was a meaningful pause, as if he was weighing something. It suddenly made me on edge, like he was about to tell me something very important. “We’ve always been close, but more so since my father died.”

  Time stopped for me. The flirtatious half-smile I had had on my face disappeared instantly. How had I not known that?

  “Tarek,” I said accusingly, “You never told me that.”

  He shrugged. “It never came up. It’s not something I would just—say like that.”

  “I’m so sorry.” I could feel my brows furrowing in concern.

  “Isabel, it’s OK.”

  “When?”

  “When I was twenty-two.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said again. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. When my father had died, people had kept repeating that to me. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Is there anything I can do? Do you need anything? And I knew they were trying to help, but they didn’t know how. And you didn’t know how they could help.

  Tarek continued. “He had AVMs. It stands for—um—arterial venous malformations. It’s apparently something you’re born with. But it can burst later in life, which is what happened.”

  I looked at him. I put my glass of water on the counter and crossed my arms. I felt like a jackass. When we had first met, I had assumed he came from a family of money, a full-time law student who was like a kept man. I again thought that he must be digging himself into over six figures of debt with law school tuition and with this apartment and with no income. It made me feel bad, and I didn’t usually feel sympathy for people. I was usually too wrapped up in my own thoughts.

  “He knew that when they told him. He was trained as a medic in the military. That’s how my parents met. My mother was a nurse.”

  I was wondering at all the machinations that had to have happened for the two of us to end up right here, standing in his kitchen. Somewhere, God must be pleased. Maybe he was even laughing.

  I was so sad all of a sudden. I felt the urge to go over to him and take him in my arms and hold him. I wondered what it would be like to feel him against me.

  But I didn’t do that. I was too scared.

  His next question broke me out of my thoughts.

  “Isabel,” Tarek asked gently, taking a step forward, “what happened to your father?”

  “Car accident,” I lied. That was what I told everyone. That’s what Josh, Melanie and Eric believed.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s OK. It was a long time ago.”

  The mood was too sad. I had to think of something to lighten it up. I inclined my chin over to his bookcase. There was a photo there of him with
two women. If the older one was his mother, she looked pretty young. But I assumed that was the case. “Your sister kind of looks like you.”

  “Yes, we both have our mother’s hair.” He smiled.

  “Unruly? Difficult to tame?” I smiled.

  “Yes, very.”

  “I like it, though.” I smiled, and suddenly my smile became one of those huge smiles that he liked. I looked away from him, slightly embarrassed.

  He continued, maybe to keep me from feeling embarrassed. I wasn’t sure. “My sister’s skin is lighter, though, like our father’s.”

  “She’s gorgeous. Your mother is too.”

  I got the courage to look at him again. He was looking at me intently. But then, his eyes always seemed to be intent.

  My cell phone rang then. I had left it on the dining table.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Let me see who that is.”

  “No, that’s OK.”

  It was Lara. “Speaking of sisters, that’s mine now.” I looked at him. “Let me tell her I can’t talk.”

  “You can talk to her if you want,” Tarek told me, waving his hand in a gesture saying that he didn’t mind.

  I answered.

  “Hey you.”

  “Hey, hey! What’s up?” Lara was always so chipper.

  “Not much. I’m out right now. Can I call you back?”

  “No problem. Where are you?”

  “At a friend’s house.”

  “The friend you told me about?”

  “Yes.”

  “Interesting.” Lara’s tone was playful. “Actually, I was calling because today is my day off and I wanted to know if you wanted to go out to dinner with us. A bunch of us residents are going out, including that guy I told you about.”

  “I would love to, but I have plans tonight. I’m going out with the guys.”

  “The guys?”

  “Yeah, you know. Josh and Eric and—someone else you don’t know.” I saw Tarek smiling out of the corner of my eye. I didn’t think he knew I could see him.

  “Well, well, where are you going?”

  “Out to dinner and then dancing.” I didn’t tell her that I was only going out to dinner with Tarek.

  “Well, have fun and I’ll call you later.”

  “OK, you have fun too. Is Patrick going with you?”

  “Yes. He wouldn’t miss it!”

  “All right. Love you.”

  “Love you too. Bye.”

  We hung up.

  “My sister Lara,” I explained to Tarek. “She wanted to know if I wanted to go out with her and some of the other residents tonight.”

  “Well, you have a busy social life.”

  “No, not really. This is just a fluke.” I weighed whether to say more. “She’s trying to set me up with one of the guys in her residency.”

  Tarek suddenly seemed really interested. “Really? What, like a blind date?”

  “Oh, no!” I put my hands up. “I don’t do blind dates. It’s more like, she was going to invite me out when the rest of them were going out, like in a group.”

  “And you would go out with him?”

  I laughed. “I don’t know him. This was my sister’s idea. Anyway—” I looked at him playfully. “I’m going out with you tonight so I can’t go with them.”

  “Lucky for me.”

  I was trying to read his face. It was difficult. His expression was neutral but his eyes kind of gave him away. I thought I saw longing there. It was hard to tell. I bit my lip.

  “Yeah, well,” I told him, one edge of my mouth creeping upward into a smile, “you should feel lucky.”

  At 12 we had sandwiches and by 1 p.m. I was packing up to go.

  “I have to be somewhere at two-thirty,” I had told him. The metro was always unpredictable on the weekends, so I would leave with plenty of time to spare.

  “Where?” he asked, curious.

  “It’s a surprise,” I told him. That would leave him wondering.

  He chuckled.

  I got a little nervous then. “So what time are we going to dinner?” I asked him. He had his arms crossed. He was lean but really muscular. Oh my God, would I be able to handle tonight?

  “Can we meet at eight-thirty?”

  “Sure. Where? Oh, and Josh said to meet him and Eric at the club at eleven. But Josh is always a little late, FYI.”

  “We can meet here, but in the metro station if you want. That way you won’t have to leave.” He meant that way I wouldn’t have to exit and pay again upon reentry. The DC metro was pretty expensive, especially if you lived at an end-of-the-line stop like I did. I wouldn’t have had a problem with it, but I had to admit that it was considerate of him to think of that.

  “Text me when you’re on the metro and I’ll meet you,” he told me, as he walked me to his apartment door.

  “OK.” Then I remembered my manners. “And thank you for lunch.”

  “Oh, please. I mean, it’s not paella but—”

  I smiled broadly. “See you tonight.”

  He opened the door for me. “See you tonight, Isabel.”

  I smiled nervously and left.

  Tonight was going to be very interesting.

  I left my house at about 7:45 and drove my car to the metro. Parking was free on the weekends. The problem with taking the metro on the weekends was that there was almost always trackwork. I had checked the schedule for this weekend and there might be some delays but the high-traffic metro stations were all going to be open, so that was OK.

  At 2:30 I had had my hair done. The lady who always did my hair was Vietnamese, and she was a firecracker. However, thankfully, she never let me look bad. After much debate, I decided to get dark red highlights done. Then she had trimmed my hair, leaving it in long layers. It looked good; I was happy with it.

  After that I had called Ariel and had found her at home.

  “Isabel, que alegria! Cuanto tiempo! Que tal estas?”

  It was a very curious thing but Ariel and I almost always spoke in Spanish, but Lara and I spoke like a mix of Spanish and English. I guessed that was because Lara’s husband didn’t speak Spanish, but Ariel’s boyfriend did.

  As soon as I heard her voice, I realized how much I missed her. “When are you coming to DC to visit?” I asked her.

  “Uff, I don’t know. I’d like to, but things at work are crazy. I’ve been working really late. Can you come up?”

  “Maybe over Thanksgiving,” I said tentatively. “Hey, are you coming home for Christmas?”

  “I’d like to. I’m not sure. We were kind of planning on it. Javier’s parents are going to Mexico City.”

  The father of Ariel’s boyfriend, Javier, was a Mexican diplomat who worked in the New York consulate of Mexico. Ariel had studied her MBA in New York City and had met Javier at school.

  “They wanted us to go with them, but I’d rather see you guys. Frankly, we see his parents pretty frequently since they live here.”

  “I hope you can come,” I told her. Then I had an idea. “But if you do end up going to Mexico City over Christmas, maybe I can go with you guys—if you don’t mind.”

  “Oh, Isabel, that would be great! I miss you so much!”

  “I miss you too.”

  Then her tone changed slightly. “Hey, I have a question for you.”

  Oh no. Her tone suggested that she was going to ask me a question that I wouldn’t like. I knew my sisters too well. I mentally braced myself.

  “What?” I asked hesitantly.

  “Lara said that you’re seeing some guy.”

  Oh my God. I loved Lara, but she could not keep a secret to save her life.

  “That’s not accurate,” I said carefully.

  “So you’re not seeing anyone? But you’re interested in someone, right?”

  “No—I mean, I don’t know. I have a new friend.”

  “But not a boyfriend?”

  “No.” Not yet, I thought, if I was even sure that I wanted him to be a boyfriend.

  I
decided to tell her straight. I didn’t talk with her that often because of our schedules and I wanted to tell her about my life, or as much about my life as I felt like I could share with her. “I met a new friend at law school and we’ve been studying together and—kind of hanging out together.”

  “Hanging out?!” She was incredulous.

  “Not the Millennial version of hanging out!” I corrected her quickly. “Not as in a quickie once in a while! I meant, you know, the Gen X’er version of hanging out—like, hanging out at school.”

  God, I was really going to have to remember what word choice I used with Millennials. As Melanie often said, when a Millennial guy asked you to hang out, he often meant for casual sex.

  “Just as friends?” Ariel asked me.

  “Yes!” I was a bit too emphatic. For some reason then, I felt the need to dish. “Although, we’re going out dancing tonight, me, him, Josh and Eric, and he asked me to have dinner with him before going to the club.”

  “Just you and him?”

  “Yes.”

  “So it’s like your first date?!” It was cute that she was so excited for me.

  “No, not a date. In fact, I asked him if it was a date and he said it wasn’t, that it was as friends.”

  “Oh.” Ariel sounded confused. “Isabel, it sounds like maybe he wants a friends with benefits situation with you.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Would you do that with him? I mean, would you have that kind of arrangement?”

  I was completely truthful with her. I felt like I always had to be truthful with my sisters. “No, I don’t think I could do that—with him.”

  “Oh, Isabel.” There was concern in her voice. “You really like him.”

  “I don’t know,” I told her again. I was kind of embarrassed now. “I told him the first day we studied together that it would only be studying, nothing else.”

  “Oh, well that changes the inquiry.” Ariel was logical, like me. “You told him that at the beginning, but now you like him. Maybe he’s afraid you’ll reject him if he asks you out on an actual date.”

  I was more confused than ever.

  “How old is he?” she asked me then, curious.

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “Oh, you cougar!”

  “Oh please!” I resented that term.

  “Of course, maybe he’s intimidated because you’re a real woman who knows what you want.”