“There’s no reason to panic,
Cormac. I’m here to find a
Hungarian
husband. Off a list my parents made. It’s an extremely specific list, and I’m not remotely interested in anyone not on it, okay? My goal is to find the perfect guy, and he’s somewhere on this list.”
It doesn’t seem like her tiny shorts have enough fabric in them to contain even a small pocket, but, apparently, I’m a poor judge of pocket size, because she pulls out a slim leather notebook out of one of the tiny pockets.
It’s slightly startling to see this notebook, which is nearly identical to the one I keep in my back pocket at all times. I use it when I sketch, or to jot down notes for my thesis, or, once in a rare while, in an attempt to get a pretty girl’s phone number.
She pushes the book my way, and I raise my eyebrows and point with my chin. She nods eagerly, and I open it.
There are no pencil etchings of trees or disjointed musings on Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and its relation to the current state of civil liberty atrocities in America.
Benelli’s
book is all hard-lined facts and severe tables and charts.
About men.
There are names and initials everywhere, and all kinds of complicated pie charts and pictograms and secret codes so fantastically complex, they make my head ache and my throat thirsty for something way stronger than this wine.
“This is genius.
Borderline evil genius.” I thumb through the pages and shake my head at the microscopic footnotes about education levels and work experience and counter-reference points documenting church attendance and criminal records. To think I once fancied my thesis research as complicated. I’ve got nothing on this girl, nothing at all. “Tell me the truth. I swear not to alert the authorities if you do, but do you have potential husbands in cages in some secret laboratory? Because I wouldn’t be remotely shocked if that was the truth.”
I take the bottle of wine and refill her already drained glass. She draws a fingertip around the rim, her eyes unfocused, her mouth pulled to the side like she’s frustrated, but she manages a laugh even though she clearly didn’t find my joke all that amusing.
I rush to fix what I’ve already bungled.
“No need to save my feelings. I know I can be a serious
wanker. It truly was only a joke. Unless, of course you really do have a few guys locked away, in which case, I’m not judging. At all. And, can I say, for the record, that I’m jealous of the lucky bastards if there
are
any locked in your basement? It would be a pleasure to be trapped by a woman as intelligent and lovely as yourself.”
I slide my hand across the table, but stop before I touch her. I have no business touching her. I take some kind of dessert made with apricots I’m not remotely hungry for.
“Kifli,” Benelli says, pointing to the little treat. “My grandmother makes the most delicious kifli.”
I take a bite and hold it out to her. She turns it around so she’s not biting where my mouth touched and nibbles.
“Mmm. This is delicious. Not nearly as good as Nagymama makes, but it’s okay for tourists.”
She’s ragging on me.
Which makes all the tension I collected during my clearly unfunny attempt at joking with her melt away.
“
Some day I’ll have to sample some of the amazing Nagymama’s kifli, because I honestly can’t imagine anything tasting better than this,” I lie. Because I’m imagining what her lips would taste like, and I know they would be unbelievably sweet.
Not that we’re going to kiss.
We’re not.
“I’ll bring you by her place sometime. She loves feeding skinny guys.” She pops another bite in her mouth and grins so big at her own
joke, it’s difficult for her to chew. After she swallows, she adds, “That is, unless you’re afraid of ending up in a cage in my basement?”
I press the rest of the
kifli her way, and she eats the last bite, not seeming to mind the fact that I bit directly from it. And that cements my undeniable crush on this safely off-limits girl.
“I will accept that invitation, since I’m clearly in no danger of being entrapped for engagement purposes. I’ve perused your notebook, and, sadly, I don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of making it into the running. I’m too lazy, hardly employed, don’t go to church, and have an arrest record. There are half a dozen straight-arrow, hard-working, pious strapping Hungarian men, probably with chiseled
jawlines and swelling muscles, who beat me on all of your charts. Luckily, I’m well aware of my shortcomings, and will be ecstatic if we can just do this once in a while.”
I’m bluffing.
Her eyebrows raise slowly, flirtatiously. She calls my bluff.
“What is
this
exactly, Cormac?”
There is a dusting of sugar crystals and a sticky smattering of apricot preserves on
Benelli’s fingertips and thumb. She delicately licks all that sweetness away, and I make a heroic effort to breathe and swallow and blink as if I’m a normal man and not some kind of feral animal about to pounce over the table.
“
This
is two incredibly witty, fun-loving, rational adults having a nice time in one another’s company over some wine and food. Very progressive stuff.”
I lean back and she does this little thing where she shakes her hair off her shoulders. It makes all those silky, dark strands catch the sun’s rays and shimmer around her face. For the first
time, I get a glimpse of what all those Romantic poets I used to suffer through may have been mooning on about.
“Maybe I need a progressive friend. I mean, I am the girl with the arranged marriage in the works. You can’t get more old-fashioned than that.” She slides her feet out of her flip-flops and balances her toes on the crossbar under the table.
“Well, arranged marriages aren’t necessarily regressive just because they have an ancient precedent.” I’m dangerously close to slipping into full-blown, blow-hard armchair philosopher mode, but her singularly cocked eyebrow ropes that impulse back. I clear my throat. “I just mean, you know, I’m not looking down on the way you’re going about this. To tell you the truth, it makes a hell of a lot more sense than the way most modern couples jump into marriage.”
When she tries not to smile, a deep, gorgeous dimple creases the left side of her cheek. She drops her feet to the stones under the table and wiggles her toes like children do when their feet hit sand at the beach.
“I’m kind of surprised you don’t think it’s unromantic of me to have all these guys divided and dissected like this. You being a poetry student and all.” She slides her fingers under the bowl of the glass and every droplet of moisture evaporates from my throat.
I dump emergency rations of wine down it to get back some function and try to stay on top of this conversation, but every soft, sweet movement from her dominoes a thousand imagined seductions.
It’s been way too long since I got laid.
“I do. Find it shockingly unromantic. And I’m not. Technically, I’m not an official student of poetry. I mean, I am.
In part. I got my undergraduate degree in the Classics. I’m working on my graduate thesis, on
The Odyssey.
So, yes, some poetry, but also lots of good old fashioned tragedy and history and everyday human stuff that’s anything but romantic. Not everyone can be Odysseus and Penelope, after all.”
The hot afternoon sun is most likely blistering the skin off back of my neck, and I think about how I’m probably developing a god-awful farmer’s tan.
Which I don’t care about, except I’ll look like red and white and gangly with my shirt off, like a giant human candy cane.
Which is a worry that makes zero sense.
One does not have to take one’s shirt off while researching minute facts about Greek to Hungarian to English translations for
goat-stew
and
sirens
.
Benelli’s
skin is the exact color of a caramel square, the ones I loved to hold on my tongue and suck the velvety richness off of when I was young.
“But Penelope found Odysseus again when she was looking through all her potential suitors.” She swirls the dark wine in her glass and drinks, her lips lightly stained at the edges. “Maybe my Odysseus is somewhere here.”
I’m well aware I’m nothing like the barrel-chested, hard-drinking, hard-playing men she’s lining up to choose from, and that fact doesn’t bother me. But her last words feel like a challenge and an invitation too perfect for me to ignore.
“If your Odysseus is here, somewhere, he’s probably not on that list.” I tap two fingers on the buttery leather of her notebook. “Remember, he came to find Penelope, not the other way around. He traveled the world over to get back to
her
.”
Her blue eyes
shadow, and the color morphs to something duller, a silver-gray like the tarnished metal of a suit of armor. “There’s no one who’d come across the world for me.” Her words bite and snap out of her plush, wine-stained lips. “And that’s fine. I don’t want epic. I want everyday.”
She pulls a few bills out of those incredibly short shorts and drops them on the table. I gather them up, press them back to her, and open my wallet. She backs away, shaking her head.
“No. Don’t. Just, let me pay. Please. With every other guy...it’s a thing. It’s a point. Please, just let this be easy, Cormac. Please just let me know upfront that this isn’t going to be all awkward and…romantic between us?”
Her eyelashes cover her irises because she can’t make direct eye contact.
Because she’s embarrassed. For me.
“Paying for the tab is just mannerly,
Benelli,” I assure her, but, even though I grit my teeth while I do it, I lay some of her bills back down. “If we’re going to be proper friends, we have to, of course, go Dutch. I’m not looking for romance, but I’m also not sniffing around for a hand-out.”
She takes the bills back from my outstretched hand and shuffles her feet, her hair curtaining her face. When she looks up, there’s the deep pink of a blush on her cheeks.
“I feel…really stupid.” She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath before looking at me with off-putting intensity. “It’s been a long couple of months. And this summer, I hoped it would be fun, but it’s not fun at all. This is the most important decision of my life, and I feel like the pressure to get this right is crushing down on me. There have been so many perfectly nice guys, and I guess I’m just feeling super guilty, because I know I’m dragging my feet, but I don’t know
why
. And you were just fun and easy to talk to right off the bat. And I actually got scared for a second when I thought that maybe I misread and that you wanted more, because the last thing I need is another worry about my love life, you know?”
She’s babbling. The words are just spilling out from her gorgeous mouth, and she alternates looking directly at me, glancing at the ground and knitting her eyebrows, and staring off into the
distance as if she has laser eyes and there’s a target she’s going to explode once her concentration peaks.
I close one hand over her shoulder, my palm and the tops of my fingers in direct contact with the heat of the skin exposed on either side of her tank top strap. I have a sudden, idiotic vision of the middle of my fingers seething with jealous rage that they don’t get to touch her directly too.
“It’s okay.” I press her shoulder back and forth, friendly-like, even though I want to grab her with both hands and pull her closer in a way that would be decidedly more-than-friendly. Damn my pent-up reserves of testosterone. “Stop apologizing. I’m the last person who’d get upset with you. I think you and I will do very well as friends, and, I’m telling you, that’s absolutely fine by me.”
“Yeah?”
When I nod, it’s like all her bones were uncooked pasta suddenly dropped into boiling water. The tension is gone, and that wet-noodle ease reaches all the way to her mouth. Her smile borders on dopey. “Do you have plans for the rest of the afternoon?”
If I did, I’d cancel them, no questions. Even if I know damn well our decision to keep this new relationship a strict friendship is a solid one, I’m fast becoming addicted to having her around.
“Not a plan in the world, except to kick back with my gorgeous new
friend
.” I hold out an elbow and feel a rush of hot possession that has nothing to do with lukewarm friendship when she slides her arm through mine.
“I wanted to hike on that ridge over town since the day I landed.” She points with a finger, manicured, polished, and dainty. “But, so far, every single guy has taken me on a date to some super-fancy restaurant or to a party surrounded by dozens of his great aunts and cousins. I just
want…to get away for a few hours. Do you like to hike?” She pops out her bottom lip, as if there would be the remotest chance she’d actually need to plead to get me to agree. I’m thankful, at least, that she seems oblivious to the power she wields over me.
“I love hiking.” I do. But I’d go shoe shopping or to see a Broadway musical or riding on a subway full of kindergartners just back from a field trip to a sugar factory...or any other unimaginable horror if it meant spending more time in her company.