by Emily Mayer
Grandpa swallowed hard a few times before he managed a response. “Oh God, I was sure your mom would have covered this with you. Okay, I’m going to need to sit down for this. I should have had more of that wine at dinner, but your mom’s always on me about drinking. Gotta hide the good stuff in the garage. Do you want a drink? I think we should both have a drink for this.”
He was dragging over a stool and a bottle of what looked like whiskey. He sat down on the stool, placing the bottle on the bumper of the car. I watched, confused, as he took a fortifying breath.
“All right, okay, so when a man and woman—or, uh… a woman and woman, although I’m not going to be much help there—anyway, when two people love each other or have had too much to drink or are just, uh… attracted to each other in a healthy and consensual way—”
My head whipped back so fast I almost fell off my stool. “Grandpa, stop! Are you trying to give me the sex talk?”
He scrubbed two hands down his face. “Well, yeah, I thought that’s what you were asking about.”
Through the horror at the thought of my grandpa giving me a sex talk, my love for him grew impossibly bigger.
“Mom already had the talk with me.” I left out the part where I also had firsthand experience in that topic. Although, considering the experience, additional input couldn’t hurt. “I was just… I guess I was wondering how you know if you’re attracted to someone or you’re just having a physical response based purely on biology.”
“Is there a difference?” he asked, looking beyond relieved.
“I think so. For example, you can be attracted to someone purely on a physical level but think they have a terrible personality. Our bodies have been programmed through centuries of evolution to look for mates who possess qualities that will ensure offspring survive to pass on our genetic material. None of that has anything to do with personality. You can be attracted to someone physically, but understand intellectually that they would not make an ideal life partner.”
“Uhhh, let’s see here.” Grandpa cleared his throat. “I think your theory is a little bit flawed there, seeing as how we’re not fighting mammoth on the plains of Africa anymore, but I think you gotta have both things to make a relationship work, if that’s what you’re asking. There has to be a physical spark there, but you also gotta like talking to the person.”
I chose to ignore the statement about mammoths on the plains of Africa. “How did you know Grandma was the one for you?”
My grandma had died suddenly when I was eight, of an aneurysm that had gone undetected. A total fluke. I was just young enough that my memories of her were all a little fuzzy. She was Grandpa’s great love. As far as I knew, he never dated after she passed away. I never heard him so much as mention another woman, even though we all encouraged him to date.
“Well, now that’s a harder question to answer than you’d think. It’s hard to put that feeling into words. But you know, I didn’t have it all figured out when I met your grandma. I almost broke it off with her, actually. Dumbest thing I ever almost did.”
“You did? Why?”
“Oh, I had this big crush on a girl all through school. Never gave me the time of day until about two or so months after I started dating your grandma. Sara, that was her name. Anyway, Sara started taking an interest in me and, well, one thing led to another and I decided I was going to break things off with Grandma.” He smiled at the memory. “I walked her home that day, just waiting for the right moment. She smiled up at me when we got to her house and I just knew that there was no right moment, because that smile was my whole world right then. I can barely remember what Sara looked like, but I can close my eyes and still see your grandma smiling up at me like it was just yesterday.”
I swiped at the lone tear that managed to escape. “I really love that story.”
“The point is that Sara was very pretty and had a great personality, just like your grandma did. Love is more than attraction, but I don’t think you can have one without the other, either.”
I slid off my stool and wrapped my arms around him, squeezing him tight and ignoring his muffled protest. “Thanks, grandpa. I love you.”
“I love you too, kid.” He patted my back before releasing me. “Now, can we get back to this engine?”
I thought about what he’d said the whole ride back and while lying in bed that night. It was not even remotely helpful. I thought about the two brief relationships I had in college. I met my first boyfriend in my biochemistry class. I knew I didn’t love him, but I didn’t know how I knew it wasn’t love. I liked him. He was smart and funny and cute in a nerdy way. But in the six months we dated, never once did I ever consider the L word. My second boyfriend was a different story. I thought I could maybe love him. I thought the liking I felt for him could grow into love with enough time and effort. He did not agree. I was upset when he broke up with me, but I could honestly say I hadn’t been devastated.
It occurred to me briefly that maybe I didn’t have the ability to love. That maybe my heart was more broken than a cardiothoracic surgeon could repair. Frustrated, I gave up trying to fall asleep and decided working on the Hogwarts castle would be a more constructive use of my time. I made my way into the living room and flipped on the light. Boomer was curled up sleeping on top of the empty cardboard box I covered the castle with to protect it from him. Sighing, I lifted him up and placed him on the couch behind me, ignoring his loud, unhappy noises, and removed the box. I worked for a while, the silence and comfort of following a clear plan helping to calm my mind. Then my phone rang, startling both me and Boomer. I glanced at the screen and saw Sebastian’s name. I hesitated for a beat before answering.
“Hello?” I said, the word coming out more questioning than usual.
“Hey, I hope I didn’t wake you up.” His voice sounded rougher, like he was trying to sleep and wasn’t having any luck either, and it made his accent seem impossibly more attractive.
My mind wandered to tornadoes. The Enhanced Fujita Scale had been designed as a rating system to measure wind speed and the level of damage associated with those speeds. I thought a similar scale, rating the various presentation of Sebastian’s accent, should be created to better help people prepare for the accompanying damage of each. For example, sleepy Sebastian’s accent leads to moderate damage of the cardiovascular system, usually preceded by some sort of unexplained reaction in the gastrointestinal system. This was more damaging than calm Sebastian, which led to a much milder, though still dangerous, reaction in the pulmonary system, generally referred to as a sigh.
“No,” I finally responded, focusing back on the actual conversation. “I was just working on Hogwarts.”
Sebastian’s chuckle seemed to travel through the phone and settle directly into my chest. “How’s it coming?”
“Good. Boomer keeps trying to knock pieces off the table and just generally wreaking Godzilla-like havoc, but I’ve been covering it with an empty box and that seems to be working.”
Boomer chose that moment to let out an irritated part-meow, part-growl, like he knew what I was saying and wasn’t ready to give up the fight.
“What is a Boomer?” Sebastian asked, sounding genuinely confused.
“Oh, Boomer is a cat. Well, my cat to be more precise.” I reached behind me and gave him a little scratch on the head.
“You got a cat? When?” His voice was a weird combination of curious and angry.
“Umm, a little over a week ago now. I adopted him from the Cat Cottage—remember, the place I was looking at when you introduced me to Stranger Things?”
“You should have told me,” he chastised, though his voice had lost that small hint of anger from moments earlier. “How are you two getting on?”
I thought about chasing the cat down the hall in my underwear, the way he seemed to enjoy suffocating me while I was asleep, and getting out of the shower to find everything that had been on the counter was now floating in the toilet.
“We’re… getting us
ed to each other,” I said, eyeballing the cat in question who was watching me talk with a twitch of his tail, which I was quickly learning meant he was plotting something. “It’s an adjustment, but we’re making progress.”
He chuckled again and parts of my body sighed. “I can’t wait to meet this cat. I was actually calling to see if you were busy tomorrow evening?”
“Oh. Why didn’t you just text me?” I asked, caught off-guard by his question.
“I wanted to actually speak with you,” he confessed, his voice softening with the admission and adding another rating on the scale. “I haven’t spoken to you all week.”
My heart galloped wildly in my chest before I could tell it to calm itself down. Friend. Friend. Friend, I reminded it.
“We had dinner Monday,” I pointed out. To my friend.
He let loose a long, suffering sigh. “I remember. Are you going to answer my question?”
“I am busy tomorrow evening, but…” I hesitated, then said, “I don’t have plans Tuesday evening.”
“Tuesday evening will work. I’ll text you the details later. Have a good night, Lennon.”
“Goodnight, Sebastian,” I responded, ending the phone call. I stared at the phone in my hand before turning to look at Boomer.
“What just happened?” I asked him.
He stretched out one little paw toward me like he was about to offer me some small amount of creature comfort. This was it! We were finally connecting on an emotional level, enough for Boomer to be able to sense when I was upset. This was the moment I had imagined when I’d first started planning my future as a cat lady. I leaned toward his paw slowly, not wanting to ruin the moment with any sudden movements. I kept my eyes locked on his, hoping to communicate that we were in this thing together. Just before his paw connected with my shoulder, it flicked once, twice, sending a pile of LEGOs onto the floor. He meowed, curling back into a ball and closing his eyes.
I slumped in defeat. Why were all males so confusing?
21.
The next day I showed up at Paige’s yoga class, hoping to finally get a chance to ask her what was going on. She had been sad and distant since her fight with her mom. Even more concerning, she had become uncharacteristically militant about her vegan diet. When I asked her if she wanted to come over and binge-watch Bravo shows, she told me she didn’t have time. I even tried to lure her back to my apartment with the promise of cookies from Lola’s, but she wouldn’t take the bait, so I had resorted to exercise and bribery. I was at the very bottom of my bag of tricks. I was getting seriously concerned we would have to stage an intervention if she didn’t break soon, since having Janie kidnap her seemed like the option of last resort.
Tuesday started with a bang. Literally. My alarm startled Boomer and he flew around the room, knocking everything off my nightstand in the process. Did I think it even remotely strange that I apologized to the cat dangling from my curtains while I cleaned up the mess left in the wake of his terror? Not even a little bit.
I should have recognized that my wake-up call was an omen of things to come, but I was too excited about seeing Sebastian later to recognize it for what it was. The first sign that the day might not be all rainbows and sunshine was the loud, gurgling death of my coffee pot. Harrison had been trying to get me to replace my trusty machine with a Keurig for years, but I was loyal to my classic piece of machinery. We had been through so much together! I made the sign of the cross and whispered, “RIP, old friend,” before hustling out the door hoping to have time to stop for coffee on the way.
Every single person in the city seemed to be getting coffee this morning; I gave up trying to find a short line by the third place and accepted that I was going to have to drink the extremely subpar, mostly-water drink that the people on my floor called coffee.
As if being deprived of a decent source of morning caffeine wasn’t bad enough, the lunch situation was an actual tragedy. I had just enough time between my morning meeting and my afternoon team session to grab a quick lunch with Janie. The daily menu board proudly announced that it was “Tofu Tuesday.”
“Tofu Tuesday?” I turned to Janie in horror. “Tofu Tuesday? What fresh hell is this?”
I tried so hard to convince myself that the tofu nuggets tasted just like my beloved chicken nuggets, but my body refused to accept such treachery. Even Janie looked like she was struggling to swallow her all-soy burger. I ended up eating a lunch composed of the reject items left in the vending machine. Then Sebastian sent me a text telling me to be ready at six—and to wear athletic gear. My excitement over seeing him turned to dread. Nothing good ever came from the words ‘athletic gear.’
I was busy trying to push down the butterflies in my stomach with chips when a knock at my door had me glancing at the clock. Ten minutes till six. Sebastian was early. I made my way to the door, keeping an eye out for Boomer, and opened it to find Sebastian smiling at me. My eyes traveled up the length of his bare shins to the pair of athletic shorts and across his broad shoulders, which always seemed to be testing the strength of whatever material his shirts were made of. I swallowed, offering a weird wave instead of saying hello. My brain cells were apparently too busy greedily taking in eyefuls of the masterpiece standing just outside my door.
“Hey, Lennon.” His smile hitched a little at the corner making the chips in my stomach want to make a sudden, violent reappearance.
A thud from somewhere in the apartment got those pesky brain cells back on track. I grabbed his arm and dragged him into the apartment, quickly shutting the door behind him.
“Hi,” I finally answered, taking a look around the apartment to see if I could find the source of that ominous thud.
Sebastian looked mildly amused and definitely confused. “Everything okay?”
“Oh yeah, yes,” I said, turning my attention back to him. “I was thinking, though, maybe we could grab dinner instead of… whatever it is you had planned?”
“You’ll like what I have planned, I promise,” he reassured me. Those little crinkles at the corner of his eyes made me light up somewhere in the general vicinity of my ovaries.
“I’m sure I will, but I definitely won’t like it as much as I like dinner,” I pointed out. “Plus, I haven’t eaten yet.”
He picked up the half-empty bag of chips on the counter. “The crisps should hold you over until dinner.”
“My blood sugar is low?” It sounded weak even to my own ears, but I was getting desperate.
“You’re not diabetic,” he began, but then his attention shifted to his leg. I followed his eyes to find Boomer trying to climb his right leg, one of his front paws making a swipe for Sebastian’s shorts.
“Oi, what the bloody hell is that?” Sebastian yelled, his finger pointing at the cat now fighting to hold on.
I dove for his leg and struggled to detach Boomer’s claws from the hem of his athletic shorts before his hind claws could find a new home in Sebastian’s flesh. Finally freeing his claws, I clutched Boomer to my chest and stood.
“That is Boomer. He’s my cat.” Boomer let out a deranged meow from my arms. His one free arm pointed in Sebastian’s direction, claws on full display.
“That is not a cat,” Sebastian accused, pointing at the struggling cat in my arms. “It’s… it’s a... a bloody gremlin, is what it is!”
“He is not a gremlin!” I gasped, offended for both of us. Although, honestly, he did look a lot like a gremlin, now that I thought about it. “You’re going to hurt his feelings.”
Sebastian pinched the bridge of his nose. “Is this the cat you adopted from the Cat Cottage?”
“Yes,” I answered, bending slightly to release Boomer now that Sebastian seemed to be recovering and I wasn’t so worried about Boomer getting kicked across the room like a soccer ball.
“Lennon, love,” he said, eyeballing the fury menace inching on his belly toward him. “You quite literally got catfished.”
“Catfished?”
“Yeah. They lured you in
with all those pictures of normal-looking cats and sent you home with… this thing.” He pointed at Boomer, who let out an insulted hiss as if he actually understood the insult. “It doesn’t even have both ears!”
“He has one and a half ears, which is a perfectly respectable number of ears. And just because he’s a little banged-up doesn’t make him deserve a good home any less than a cat with both ears and all of his tail.”
He sighed. “Fuck, sorry. You’re right. That wasn’t very well done of me.”
I watched as he crouched down and stuck out his hand. Boomer inched toward him eventually nudging it with his head. Sebastian scratched him behind the ears, and I resisted the urge to sigh. I wasn’t familiar with the proper execution of a swoon, but if Sebastian kept talking to Boomer like that, in a voice too low and deep for me to make out any of the words, I was pretty sure I was going to discover it very quickly.
“He likes you,” I pointed out in a voice that was a little too high and squeaky.
“The little blighter’s all right when his claws aren’t in your leg,” Sebastian grumbled, standing up. “We should get going.”
It was my turn to grumble. “Fine.”
Sebastian just laughed. “Try not to sound too excited.”
“I’ll do my best,” I declared dramatically, slipping on the sneakers that had spent most of their short life in the way back of my closet.
22.
I used most of the car ride trying to explain to Sebastian that I was not athletic. I promised him that I wasn’t just trying to be humble. I told him that athleticism and I were polar opposites, but it somehow led to me explaining that the phrase ‘polar opposites’ referred to diametrically opposite points on a sphere. And then a small—teeny, really—speech about how the north and south poles are polar opposites but they both get the same amount of sunlight. So, clearly, I was nervous.
By the time we arrived at a large park filled with soccer fields, I was already working myself into a solid anxiety sweat. Sebastian bore it all with a smile and a patience that made me wonder why he had decided to make me his friend. Was he trying to make his clique more well-rounded by adding a socially awkward nerd who tended to sweat profusely when she got nervous? Was there some kind of quota system I wasn’t familiar with?
