I’m not so sure coffee is the best idea right now, since I’m more nervous than I ever was walking into a hotel lobby to meet a client. I knew what to do then. There were guidelines, expectations. Different for each man because they all had different preferences. But the rules of the road were ironclad—nothing below the waist, you paid your money, you got your kicks. Everything was prescribed and then delivered according to the order.
With Trey, I’m going off the menu. So far off that we’re having a different kind of cuisine. Something I’ve never tasted or tried. Because I’ve never gone on a date with someone I wanted to date. Someone I chose to date.
He’s the first guy I want to sit down with, have a cup of coffee with, get to know. I want to flirt, I want to talk, I want to feel his hands on my body again. This might be the last time—or maybe the only time—I have this chance.
He holds open the bright-yellow door to the coffee shop, and I head in first, shucking off my jacket quickly since it’s warm inside. He does the same, and I like when he doesn’t wear a jacket because his arms are amazing. Not just the artwork, but the shape of them, the firm, taut muscles, the way T-shirts were made for guys like Trey.
At the counter, we peruse the chalkboard menu, and he stands close to me. Shoulder to shoulder, his bicep touching my skin. A ribbon of heat runs through me, sweeping across my body, and it’s a foreign feeling—this very first inkling of want. But I like it, this want. I want more of it, and I’m dying to know how nights unfold when they aren’t bought, sold, or arranged in advance.
After our drinks are ready, we sink down into a red couch, my espresso and his coffee on the wooden table. There’s an awkward silence, and I don’t know if I should go first or if he will. It’s uncomfortable, but I also kind of love it because I think it’s normal. Right? That great unknown of what to do or say.
“So,” he begins, then clears his throat.
“So,” I repeat, and the silence expands, spreads between us.
“So you go to school?”
“Yeah. You too?”
“Yeah. Senior year.”
“I’m a sophomore,” I say, even though we’ve had this conversation already.
“Cool.”
There’s another pause, and it’s like we’re on the radio and we’ve created dead air.
“And you’re studying English?”
“Yep. And history for you?”
“Yeah.”
Another bout of nothing to say. Another round of meaningless chatter.
“Do you like it?”
“Definitely. You?”
“Yep,” I say, and it feels like we’re simply repeating our chat from earlier, only this time it’s because we have nothing to say. Maybe this is how dates go.
Dully.
I better drink this espresso stat and get the hell out of here. Because this night is sliding downhill as we retread the same terrain. “I’m so thirsty,” I say. I take a hearty gulp of my espresso, and it scalds my mouth. “Ouch.”
He quirks up his eyebrows. “You okay?”
“I think I burned my tongue,” I say, wincing.
“Let me check for you,” he says, all deadpan and toneless.
I raise an eyebrow, shooting him a skeptical look.
“C’mon. I’ve had a needle in your skin. You won’t let me inspect your tongue for burns?”
“You’re going to inspect my tongue for espresso burns?”
He nods seriously. “It’s part of our secondary training as tattoo artists. Needles, ink, and tongue burns. Now let me see that tongue, Harley.”
When I stick out my tongue and say “Ahh,” the date that had been crash-landing pulls out of the nosedive. He touches the tip of my tongue with his finger as if he’s inspecting it. It tickles, and I laugh more.
He parks his hands on his hips. “If you’re laughing, I can’t check out your tongue properly.”
I adopt a serious look and stick out my tongue again. He pretends to examine it. “I’ve arrived at a diagnosis.”
“Okay. Tell me.”
“You do not have a burned tongue. What you have is a desire to end this coffee date as soon as possible.” His eyes pin me, and his words are so searingly honest that I blush, look away, then back.
“Was it that obvious?”
He nods. “Yeah. But it was kinda going downhill fast, right?”
“Coding big time.”
“Do you think we pulled it out?”
I shrug playfully. “I don’t know. Do you?”
“I think we can if we stop talking about pointless things like school and majors—which is my fault,” he says, tapping his chest. “Because I have to be honest here, I don’t usually have coffee with girls who walk into my shop, and I don’t usually talk about school, and I’m a little bit nervous because I think you’re both badass and beautiful. So, can we make a pact for tonight to get rid of the bullshit and just talk about stuff that matters? Like why you want to go to the beach, and how you feel when you listen to your favorite band, and whether you love or hate New York as much as I do, and what you want out of life.”
My heart thumps loudly, and I half wonder if he can hear it, because that is the coolest, most real thing anyone has ever said to me. It might be a line, but it doesn’t feel like a line—it feels like the truth of one night, and that is all I want. A night without lies or lines or pretending.
“I’ve never had coffee after a tattoo either. Since, you know, first tattoo. Second, I’d love to talk about the beach and why I love it, especially because I never get the chance. Third, Arcade Fire’s music makes me feel as if I can feel. Like I’m feeling everything inside me that I don’t usually let myself experience. The music does that to me, like it’s turning me inside out.”
Trey’s shoulders relax, and he grins. “I love that. I think music can be like that. That when you don’t know what to do or say, sometimes you listen to a song and it makes you, I don’t know, brave or crazy or just makes it seem like a bad day isn’t so bad.”
That’s all it takes. The weirdness dissolves. We took the elephant in the room, and we turned it into a mouse and then it scurried on out of here. We spend the next thirty minutes talking about music that hits us hard in the heart, from Dave Matthews Band to Screaming Trees and Natasha Bedingfield to Nirvana.
“So, can I ask you another question?” Trey says as he sets down his drained coffee cup. “Why did you picture the beach?”
Memories flash by. Days when I was younger. Running through the sand. Falling asleep to the ocean waves. Eating pizza on the deck as the sun sets over the water. Just a few weeks a year, but they were the best days.
They were the only ones that ever seemed normal in my life, the only time I remember being a family, and I haven’t been back to the beach since my parents split. I’m not really sure how to say all that. I’m not accustomed to speaking the truth. Not to men. Not to friends. Not to my mom. Not to anyone. But right now I don’t feel like a jaded teenage girl. I feel like a real girl. Like a twenty-year-old who doesn’t know what her future holds, and even though I know what tomorrow will bring—an end to this, an end to him, an end to the fluttery possibility of a real date—I decide to tell him some of my truths. To see how it feels to be Harley and not the girl I was with all those other men.