Dee lets the door slam behind her, and it sounds even bigger than it does when it opens. The swirling white air dances around the caged freezer lightbulb, and she pushes me right up against the dappled stainless-steel wall and kisses me with both her hands braided into my hair.
This is not our first kiss.
Dee is my real best friend, I guess. Kristina doesn’t know about her, and Dee doesn’t know the truth about Kristina, and that’s the way I want to keep it.
Dee is the funniest person I have ever met in my life. Her laugh is big and confident. She’s laid back and doesn’t like to gossip. She’s also kissing me. A lot. And I’m kissing her back.
Before I met her here at Maldonado’s, I only knew her as the neighboring school district’s badass hockey star who would periodically get mentioned in small-town gossip. I think the first thing I ever heard was from Ellis. I’m pretty sure she used the word dyke in her description, too. Because if you want to be a small-town girl in U. Valley, that’s what you say.
The first time I saw Dee was at one of Ellis’s hockey games last year. She smiled at me, and I never forgot it. Or more accurately, I always remembered it. And I checked the hockey schedule and went to the away game at her school, too, just to see if she’d smile at me again, and she did.
I smiled back. That was right about the time Tim Huber broke up with me, too, so smiling wasn’t something I did very often.
I didn’t know she worked at Maldonado’s when I interviewed. Believe me, my first day of work was some sort of proof that everything happens for a reason. I’d thought about her smiles for eight months at that point. Probably every day.
On my second day of work, she said, “Anyone ever tell you that you’re gorgeous?”
I didn’t answer, but I asked myself the question for a whole month. She must have thought I was ignoring it or just thought she was joking around. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t. I was considering it. Astrid Jones. Gorgeous. I’d never really thought about that. Tim Huber said things like cute or sweet or, one time, hot—which turned me off completely because I knew he was only saying it to see how far he could get me to go with him.
But when Dee said I was hot a month after she’d asked me if anyone had ever told me I was gorgeous? She meant it. “I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. You’re hot!”
That was the day of our first kiss.
Now she’s laughing while she kisses me. “You’re not going to tell me to back off again, are you?” she asks.
“Mmm. Hmm,” I manage while still kissing her neck, her ear. “Back off,” I say. I bite her earlobe.
So far in my life, Dee is the only person who wants to totally ravish me. I have to stop her all the time. I swear she’d do it right here in the walk-in freezer if she could. Right now. Before six AM. With morning breath. Next to a box of frozen taquitos.
“I dream of this all week,” she says.
“Me too.”
“We have to find more ways to see each other,” she says.
“I know,” I say, but the best I can do is go watch Ellis play hockey for the one game where Dee’s school is the visiting team. Or, well, the go-to-Atlantis-with-Kristina-and-Justin daydream, but I haven’t told her about that yet. Because it’s stupid.
At the moment, we talk twice a week outside of work. Between her hockey schedule and my paranoia, that’s about all we can manage. Plus, her mom is a bit of a stickler about phone minutes, and Dee only gets fifteen dollars’ worth a week.
Anyway, not being constantly connected makes the whole thing more intense. It’s better that way.
Dee and I are washing fruits and vegetables.
“You done with the mushrooms yet?” Juan asks.
“Almost,” I say. I finish them, put them in a container and take them over to him. I stop for a minute to watch him slice them. He is like ballet with a knife. “You’re a natural, you know that?” I ask.
He says, “Natural? What the fuck? Nobody is born this good, man. Takes years of practice. Now get back to work.”
Either way, it’s beautiful to watch, even if he is a dick sometimes. I send love to him. My brain says: Juan, you are a wonderful, awesome human being and a complete natural at cutting mushrooms, and I love you.
An hour later, Dee is washing and prepping the strawberries and cherries while Jorge melts dark chocolate in a double boiler. I will spend the next half hour sticking the pieces of fruit with toothpicks, dipping them and laying them on waxed paper. Then, when the tray is full, I will take it to the walk-in freezer. I find myself wishing I were a strawberry. Imagine that: washed by Dee’s soft hands, dipped in chocolate and left in the freezer, where no one bothers you for an hour and a half.
If I were to explain to you how she really makes me feel, I’m not sure I could. Do I love her? I don’t know. Maybe. I love kissing her. I love the way she smells, and I love her lips. But Dee scares the shit out of me, too. Because she knows. And I don’t know.
We punch out at noon and walk to the parking lot, which is now full of cars. It was empty at five o’clock this morning. We want to kiss each other good-bye, but instead we wave like awkward dorks and get into our cars and drive away in different directions. She goes left. I go right.
6
DO WHAT FEELS RIGHT.
THE CLOSER I GET TO MY HOUSE, the less I want to go home, so I stop at Kristina’s house. I park in back so Mom won’t see my car.
“Oh, God. You smell like fish,” she says as I arrive in her room. The sun is pouring through the windows, and as I bounce on her bed to annoy her, dust rises and sparkles in the sunrays.
“And that’s just my hands,” I say.
“Ew. No, seriously. You stink.”
I continue to bounce and watch the dust dance. “It’s probably the brassicas.”
“Brassicas? What the hell?” Now she’s cranky. My arrival—and my bouncing—means that she can’t stay in bed all day.
“You know, brassicas? Broccoli and cauliflower? The cabbage family?”
She’s squinting at me now.
“Come on. Get up and talk to me. I’m bored. I’m hyper. I don’t want to go home to Claire and her hellish Saturday mood swings.”
“How long have you been up?” she asks.
“Four forty-five.”
“Oh, my God.”
“How late were you out?” I ask.
“Like an hour before you got up,” she answers.
“Sweet.”
“Justin’s mom thinks he stayed over here. He’s probably still out before Chad has to drive all the way home.” Chad lives about an hour away. He and Justin met online at some photography forum. It’s not as creepy as it sounds. “Justin said he’d call me when he was going home so I could call his house and pretend he left something here.”
“And how’s Donna?”
She smiles. “Awesome.” She sits up and sighs. “We’re going back to Atlantis tonight. You should come. You could drink. You could dance. It’d be fun.”
Dancing and drinking. Two things very low on my list of priorities, along with sex, kickboxing and becoming a rodeo star.