Who: Gemma and Erran Where: The beach When: Sunset-ish
After her somewhat panicked consultation with some of the women in the house via the network, Gemma had settled on the sunset-colored dress she'd mentioned. She'd left her hair down in loose waves, swept over her left shoulder, and she'd pinned two creamy-white plumeria blossoms with yellow throats above her right ear. She'd gotten a little bit of a tan in the few days since they'd been at the house, and she was glad that she had some color, that she looked like she belonged on a beach. She was dangling her sandals in her hand as she paced, her dress billowing faintly in the breeze off the ocean. They'd certainly stocked her closet with things that were beach-appropriate, she thought distantly, but she was happy with the dress. Erran had told her to meet him on the beach, but she'd beaten him by a few minutes, which looked overeager. She didn't give two fucks. She wanted him to know that she was happy about this, eager to see him.
Erran didn't see any reason to buck tradition when they were already on a tropical island: to not walk on the beach at sunset with the cute girl would just be wasteful, plain and simple. There was a certain Potemkin-village kind of vibe involved in trying to have a normal-ish sort of date under these circumstances, trying to recreate the structures of everyday life in a place that wasn't normal at all, but he didn't think this would have a snowball's chance in hell of working without those structures.
And anyway, he wanted to see Gemma looking gorgeous on the beach, so it was happening.
He made the walk down the jungle path to the beach, and although he'd figured he'd get there first, Gemma must have been just a few minutes ahead of him, since she was there already. "Wow, you look amazing—did you teleport here or what?"
"Thanks." She gave a small half-pirouette, looking at him over her shoulder, and then dropped the pose. "Yeah, they didn't tell you? That's one of my powers." She smiled at the sight of him, walking up the beach to meet him halfway. "No, I was just kind of nervous, which is a little bit dumb. It's just you, and I like you. I feel like I should be the kind of person that's always late, but I'm always early. --You look good too. You always look good."
"Well, good, then all that effort was worthwhile." The climate had actually encouraged him to take it easier than he otherwise might have; he was wearing a simple button-down shirt with linen trousers, since the conversation that morning had reminded him of his grandfather's sense of style. It was another beautiful evening, breezy down by the water, the sky glowing with a rose-gold sunset. The party decorations were still up, although there was no real mess left behind from last night. He took off his own shoes too when he got down to the beach, and took Gemma's hand. "I'm totally just going to get sand everywhere if I leave my shoes on. I love the ocean, this place is really reminding me of how great California could be sometimes."
She slid her fingers into his, swinging their hands slightly as they walked. He'd done it so easily, but it had sent a soft tingle up her arm. She had to keep what he'd said in mind--that friendship was more important, that living together would get awkward if this didn't work--but she was pretty far gone, and she knew it showed. "I always wanted to go out to California," she said. "See the sequoias, drive the coast. Did you ever go to Yosemite?"
"We kinda halfways planned to once, Seth was in some mood where he thought we could somehow morph into the kind of people who hike. Then it changed to 'well, we can just drive through it', and then it changed to 'or we can go to Petaluma instead' and wine country won out for obvious reasons. But we saw some sequoias! And we shot some of Whale Music up in Vancouver so we got a pretty good look at the old coastal forests then. I could've spent that money better buying a goddamn house on the coast, if I'd known," he added, with a bit of uncharacteristic bitterness, but he let it pass. "Still, it's just cool to shoot those trees, they've got so much presence."
"How much time did you actually spend living in California? I keep thinking that I know the shape of stuff from reading about you, but I don't really think I do, the more I talk to you. I'm not turning this into the Barbara Walters thing, I just... I like hearing you talk. You tell good stories."
"You're not being nosy or anything, it's fine," he said as they walked, a slow amble down the football-field-sized stretch of beach that was allowed to them. "And I lived out there a pretty long time. We moved to Escondido when I was eleven, and then to Anaheim a year later when my mom got remarried. I used to go back home to Jersey in the summers to be with my dad, but..." He trailed off for a moment with a shrug. "That eventually stopped being a thing. We didn't get along. And I didn't move back East until...let's see, seven years ago? It was an election year, so '08."
"We never went anywhere. I saw the Grand Canyon when I was twelve, but my grandparents weren't big traveling people. I was always jealous of the kids that got shipped off to their parents during summers or whatever, which is pretty fucked up. It was before I comprehended that divorce sucks." She absently rubbed her thumb over his, her short nail over the whorl of his knuckle. "How come you and your dad don't get along? --You know what, you don't have to answer that. That is not first date material."
"Yeah, travelling is exciting when you're a kid even when you're not going anywhere new. I never saw the Grand Canyon, though, that's gotta be cool," he said. The beach felt a little oddly sterile, and he realised after a few moments that he missed seeing and hearing the birds. There should have been a few gulls, at least. "And I don't mind talking about my dad. If you want to hear it, anyway." They weren't on the footing of a typical first date, he figured, since they'd already had a few pretty intense conversations.
"I kinda went into some of it when I was telling you that story about getting non-consensually kissed by that girl at the bus stop," he began. "My dad was part of this religious community where he didn't really fit in. To outsiders, those differences wouldn't be a big deal at all, but in this neighbourhood they absolutely were. Running a business there when you're seen as not Orthodox enough, and especially a restaurant, you know, that had a real impact on his bottom line. And he wanted to be accepted, it was important to him. So when his wife walks out and takes the kid, they go to California and start living like goyim, that makes him look bad. The only way he could still feel like a good father was to force me into the yeshivish ideal every chance he got. And I was willing to try, at first, but it's more than just wearing a hat and having a bad haircut, there's a serious amount of learning involved. I just couldn't keep up with everything I was supposed to know. Eventually I just told him no, I'm not wearing that anymore, I'm not going to daily Talmud lectures, I'm not going to hang out at the gross mikvah with forty other dudes, forget it. We fought about it a lot and he told me that I wasn't welcome at home if I was off the derech, so I stopped visiting. So that was when I was seventeen, and I haven't seen him since."
Gemma squeezed his hand tight. Not ever meeting your dad because he was a piece of shit human being was different than loving your dad and choosing to walk away because he was acting like a piece of shit human being. "But then you kind of circled back around into it," she prompted gently.
"I did, yeah, I have my own relationship to it now. By most normal people's definitions, anyway. People like my dad would still say I'm practically an atheist, but what are you gonna do, right?" He shrugged. "I dug into a lot of stuff, I was kind of vaguely Buddhist for awhile, and obviously I did a lot of yoga, but one of the first things I did after Seth died was call a rabbi. That was just the only thing that felt even close to normal for me then. I did make an effort to reconnect with my dad, because I thought he'd be glad that I was doing something to get back to acting like a human being, but he didn't respond, so whatever."
"Are you serious?" Gemma stopped, drawing him around to face her. "That's... Erran, my dad responded to to my letter. I shredded the goddamn thing, but he responded. That's... fuck that guy. I know I'm biased, I know I told you I'm into you, but I can't imagine anybody not wanting you in their life. He has no idea."
"You are absolutely biased and I'm grateful, thank you," he said. "I don't know—when I finished my B.A. I invited him to my graduation, but like, I'm not surprised that he'd ignore that because it was Yeshiva University, which his crowd thinks is a loathsome outpost of secularism. So I tried again when I finished with my Master's, because I thought a different school might seem less politically charged to him, but no dice. Which I don't like, but I've done all I can do, the ball's in his court. And I have a stepdad who's actually not an asshole, so I'm not the one missing out. Anyway." He squeezed her hand, to reassure her that they weren't headed into sad bastard territory, and they kept walking. "What was your situation like, were you one of those enviable 'no religion' families I used to hear about as a kid? Nominal Catholics or something? What was Chimayó's miracle story?"
"Yup, nominal Catholics all the way. Christmas and Easter stuff. I basically came out of religion loving 'Ave Maria' and having no other knowledge of church stuff at all. My grandpa would sort of reluctantly put on the tie--he had this tie tack that was just a chunk of turquoise. My abuela hated it. I kept it after he passed away." She paused, thinking, and then said, "I bet I could find it if I looked at Cassi's hard enough. --The miracle story, okay. It's not a simple story, really? I mean, it's Native American stuff that was grafted onto Catholicism, which is bullshit, but yeah. It was a sacred spot to the Tewa, and then Penitente brotherhood claimed they found a mysterious crucifix buried there, and when they tried to relocate it to their church miles away, it returned of its own volition a bunch of times. There's a lot of reasons people think Chimayó is a miracle place. When you go to the santuario, there's a little room, the hermita where one of the Penitente brothers lived. You have to stoop to get through the door, it's this tiny place, and there's a little well full of red dirt. El pocito, the little well. It holds holy dirt that people think can cure things if you sprinkle it in your tea or rub it on your skin. There's a room in the santuario that's full of crutches and braces and canes." Gemma nudged a stone with her toe and looked out at the sunset, the last hot glitter of it on the sea. "I think it's mostly bullshit, but I love it anyway. I love that people want it to be real."
"I love that stuff too—so a lot like Lourdes, right, but instead of an underground spring it's the earth itself that cures things? I don't know if I literally believe in miracles like that either...I mean I guess not, in the sense that I wouldn't go to a place like that with any kind of serious expectation that it could cure epilepsy or something," Erran said, twisting around to look up at the house on the hill, its outlines dark against the fading sky. "There's an old Chasidic saying that anyone who doesn't believe in any of those stories is a heretic, and anyone who believes every story is an idiot. So you kinda keep some balance. If They ever let us go home, we'll go there and see what happens, right?"
She glanced up at him, hiding a smile. She'd told him to come visit Chimayó, but hearing him say it felt different. You need to develop some chill right fucking now. "They call it the Lourdes of America, yeah. I'd definitely take you there, we could figure out the best healing dirt uses. Capsules, teas, topical application. Kick that epilepsy's ass."
"Okay, I'm not eating dirt, I don't care how holy it is," Erran said, laughing as he bent over to look for a good rock for throwing. "I'd rather keep taking Lamictal. And sadly, Jersey's not really that exciting for visitors, probably the coolest thing I could show you at home is the train station to get to New York. I completely don't know how to skip stones, don't judge me for my lousy arm here."
"Hey, it's not a flat surface, it's basically impossible. The odds are against you here." The breeze was coming off the ocean at an angle that blew Gemma's hair straight into her face, so she twisted it and held it back with one hand, looking out at the waves. "But it's not far from New York, and I've never been to New York. You could probably show me some kickass places out there."
"I like living in a place that's New York-adjacent but not actually in the City, yeah. And it's fun to be in a position now where I don't have to give a shit about being seen in cool places, you know?" He pitched the rock up and out over the waves, one of those completely pointless yet still oddly satisfying human actions. "I still go to the Met a lot—I only really care about the ancient stuff, like the Egyptian artefacts and the Near Eastern collection, and I still haven't seen it all. And I got the world's lamest out-of-court settlement from them when I had my accident there, they were basically like 'this was your own stupid fault but security should have noticed it sooner, so enjoy this 20% off a membership and get out of our office.'"
"You're not serious right now." She had watched the rock until it vanished out of sight, but she turned to him, a frown deep between her brows. "That's fucked up, that's--I mean, this is not a great date conversation, me just denigrating all the people in your life here. Lemme have a shot at Laure, I'll do her in. No, I'm kidding, but--dude, just... what even happened that night? And how can they not do more for you than that? That's bullshit."
"Well, I'm not doing a martyr act or something, it seriously wasn't the Met's fault. I just told that story because I thought it was funny that I made an idiot of myself and they cut a deal," he said. "No, that one was totally on me. What happened was I got fucked up one afternoon on vodka and Ambien and I went down to Fifth Avenue to take a look at the Etruscan art, because that was my idea of a good time. This was just after Whale Music tanked and Laure left, I was just spending my time being a miserable drunk in New York, and the museums just seemed really peaceful to me then, I dunno. The Met was doing some construction or renovations or whatever, and the Etruscan gallery is on this little corner mezzanine space that you get to via a side staircase. It doesn't get a lot of traffic. I don't actually remember taking the spill but it must have been pretty spectacular. I left a good splatter scene in the stairwell, and it took about twenty minutes before security noticed. I only remember that sequence of events as 'I'll just finish off the bottle' and then four days later noticing that I'm in the hospital."
She looked a little sick at the thought, and turned face the waves again, silent. Erran bleeding from a head wound in some stairwell that nobody frequented... she didn't like the feeling it gave her, the sensation of teetering on the edge of this--the beach, Erran, the house--never having happened at all. She drew close and slipped her arms around his waist from the side, an easy, grateful kind of hug. "I'm pretty glad you made it through that stuff," she said. "It's weird to think of some alternate reality where I'm not right here, standing with you, you know? It feels dangerous or something, like saying it out loud could make it true. --Is that just an elaborate way of rolling out it's too good to be true, am I seriously that basic?"
"No—well, maybe, but if so I guess I'm basic too," he said, putting an arm around her shoulders as they looked out at the ocean. "I've been kind of analysing this whole thing in terms of, 'well, what if I was at home and she was the cute dance instructor at the studio next to the clinic, and we started chatting in the parking lot,' et cetera. When in reality we just wouldn't have met at all, I didn't have any plans to go to New Mexico. And obviously if I'd died like a dumbass ten years ago we also wouldn't have met. I'm pretty okay with how things worked out."
"What if I was the dance instructor at the studio next door and you were the therapist I came across in the parking lot every day? You think we would have just said hi and nothing else? That sucks. I probably would have recognized you and talked to you and crushed on you. I probably would have asked you out, or just figured you were tolerating me. --Does the age gap really freak you out?" It was quiet, and she looked up at him. "I want to know, for real."
"No, no, the crush was in this version of reality too, I was just thinking about when I would have made a move in that scenario," he said with a laugh, but he took a second to put together a more serious answer for her question when she asked. "It doesn't freak me out in a sense like 'what a twisted cradle-robber am I' or anything, no. I do think it's legit to be concerned about it, or at least to want to know how it's gonna shake out for us in particular. Like, I am at the point in my life where I'd like to get down to the whole family thing, if I'm gonna do it at all. Maybe my ideal is to do that within five years, and maybe you're like, 'I'm 25, I'm still figuring myself out, I'm not gonna be ready for that in five years, I might not even be ready in ten.' I'm pulling those numbers straight out of my ass, by the way, I don't have a timetable for that stuff at all," he added. "But that's the sort of thing I mean. I don't think it's as simple as 'half your age plus seven' but when people just go 'age is nothing but a number' I feel pretty sceptical."
"Same, yeah, I do too. I mean, I feel like saying it right now, but that's a little convenient." She smiled, looking up at him for a moment before she rested her cheek against his shoulder, looking back out again. It was a long silence, listening to the waves rushing in and out, and she murmured, "I always liked this e.e. cummings line. The bulge and nuzzle of the sea. Poetry's not my usual thing, but I like that guy." Another silence. Then: "I never really got to have a family, Erran. I'm from a town where people get married and have babies way younger than I am. I always figured I would too. I mean, I guess it's heavy for first-date conversation, but getting it out of the way is good. That doesn't bother me. At all. I don't know... if I'd be a good mom? But I think I'd do okay."
"That was sort of a bad example because I go back and forth on that a lot myself," he said, her hand in his as they looked out at the ocean. "But most of the women I date are about my age, and a forty-year-old woman definitely has an opinion about whether she wants to get married and have kids, and there's a right and a wrong answer. They don't like to waste time. I don't know if I'd qualify as a great father either, but the more I work with people the more I think that it's not the end of the world if your parents weren't amazing. We'd be missing out on a lot of great people if the world's best parents were the only ones who ever had kids—I haven't fully thought that argument out, that might be totally wrong. And stop with the too-heavy-for-a-first-date stuff, okay? This is exactly the kind of thing I wanted to talk more about. I'm not gonna go home thinking you're some kind of sorehead who doesn't know how to have fun, I've seen lots of evidence otherwise. Unless that was a hint that you want me to lighten the fuck up."
"No way. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't bumming you out here." She leaned her temple against his upper arm. "I don't know if I think there's ever really a right time. I mean biologically, obviously, but in the timeline of somebody's life. It just kind of happens and you deal with it." Or you don't and you bail on your family instead. Her hand tightened in his. "I'm actually really scared of it," she said, just above a whisper. "Having a family. Thinking about having that much and that it can all... it can disappear. It can turn into something ugly, stuff you never predicted. It scares the fuck out of me, just... bone-deep scared. Feeling too safe is scary."
"Yeah, well, sometimes it does. And then sometimes the ugliness turns back into beauty. We both had shitty fathers, but we're here. I'm not trying to argue that everyone should have kids, and definitely not that you should want them. I'm just saying...there's a limit to how much damage a person can do to the world," he said, after taking a moment to think about how he wanted to phrase it. "Like those pictures you see on clickbait sites of nature reclaiming old abandoned buildings, you know, if you give it time then the grass is gonna come back."
"You got that many years in you, old-timer?" It was feather-light, the tone she often used to tease him, but she didn't shift her gaze from the ocean. "So you don't think... God, it sounds stupid when I say it out loud. You don't believe in bad blood?" The tip of her thumb was circling his knuckle again, absent, anxious. "I think I kind of do."
"Yeah? You might have to unpack what you mean by bad blood," he said, looking back down at her. "I mean, intergenerational trauma definitely exists, abuse leaves scars, cycles repeat, but no, I don't think I'd call any of that bad blood. None of that lasts forever. I talk to a lot of abuse survivors and other people who've been through shit, and they often think that they're sort of inherently poisonous, but it's not true. How do you mean it?"
"Exactly like that, yeah. Inherently poisonous. Inherently..." Inherently unlovable. To say something like that was a betrayal to her grandparents, who had loved her the best they knew how, in a bewildered and adoring kind of way; she'd been dropped into their lives unexpectedly, into everyone's lives unexpectedly, and though she was welcome, she wasn't wanted. "Like I just wonder sometimes if there's some kind of mark on me because I wasn't ever supposed to happen. Because I happened to someone that didn't want me at all. I was forced on her, you know?"
He put his arm around her waist as she leaned her head on his shoulder. "Okay, I need a word here that means 'I hear what you're saying and I respect that you feel that way but I also vigorously disagree.' I'm always wishing I had that word. You're a good person. I don't believe anybody's born just so that they can be marked defective at the factory, and even if I did—like, we've all met those people who are our personal candidates for Possibly Unredeemable Shitheads, right? You just flashed through a few names in your head when I said that, don't lie. And your criteria for putting them on your list wasn't 'they weren't wanted by their parents', it was 'they did more shitty things than good things.'"
She settled in against his side. "God, you're sneaky," she murmured. "Sneaky therapist. What if I've done just neutral things instead of good things? What if it's just a wash? --Should we make up a word? Some kind of code word for when the situation arises so you can tell me I'm full of shit without actually saying it?"
"I'm not saying you're full of shit, I meant it when I said I get where you're coming from. And if you think I'm going to tell you you're full of shit often enough to need a code word for it, please just shoot me in the head because I'm horrible," he said. "That's like the stereotype of the older guy who dates a young woman, that they just want to have somebody they can talk down to all the time. Which gives me the douche-chills just thinking about it."
"Oh, Jesus, you're right," she said, starting to laugh. "I just meant a word for when you said you wished you had a word, I didn't--oh my god, trying to think of you talking down to me is the funniest thing in the world. You're so good about that, you're so careful about it... oh, man. You could never be that much of a douche." She slipped her thumb through one of his belt loops, keeping her arm secure around his waist. "But yeah. Yeah. Possibly Unredeemable Shitheads, my dad falls under that category. He's not even in prison for what he did to my mom, nobody even knew about that. He's in prison because he killed somebody. And he still wrote me that letter like he's learned nothing. And I just worry, you know, what genes did I get? Basic stuff like I can't ever give a doctor a complete medical history because I don't know, but what if something in my brain is broken somewhere because he's broken? --See, this is where the word would come in handy, but I'm just talking. Venting. I don't know. Tell me something good instead."
"Something good, okay. Well, a few days ago I met someone really cool and this morning she told me she's actually into me, so that was pretty great—we're going to give everybody else cavities, I swear to God," Erran said. "One of my patients at home, the same one who got me watching Game of Thrones, her dad was in prison too. He was this toxic narcissist type who'd burned down some properties for the insurance money and got caught, and this girl I was counselling had that same kind of feeling that you're talking about, feeling like her dad being an awful person implicated her too. But I caught up on the show and we'd use it sometimes in therapy, talking about how people can change the meaning of a family legacy, stuff like that. She ended up doing really well, when we finished out the year she brought me one of those little Pop vinyl toys with the big heads, I still have it on my desk."
Gemma was looking up at him, watching him as he spoke, the smile lines around his eyes that showed when he squinted in the glare off the ocean. "I guess that's true," she said quietly. "There's nobody left to fuck it up but me, but there's nobody left to make it good but me. Daenerys Targaryen, yeah?" She smiled. "Which one did she give you? Somebody really nice. Is there a Davos Seaworth one?"
"It was Oberyn Martell, I was like, 'what is this, a threat?' But she said she chose that one because of that conversation Oberyn has with Tyrion in the jail cell, telling him that he's not a monster and he wasn't actually responsible for his mother's death. Reframing the narrative. And I guess he's also a more negative illustration of what I keep telling patients about how it's never too late for things to turn around." They began walking again, the wind off the water a little more chilly now. "Davos would've been a good choice too, I'm down with that guy. He's all about being supportive to others and supplying them with onions. I approve of that."
It made her laugh, though she was looking down at their feet in the sand as they walked, deep in a brown study. She still had his hand clasped in hers, the long strong bones of his fingers solid and reassuring. She drew him a little closer to the water's edge so that she could walk in the foam. "Of course it had to be Oberyn, it had to be the dude I would have just laid right down for," she teased him. "God, he was pretty. --You know what, I'm not being fair to my mom. Not really. I... she loved me sometimes. There's this page of pictures in a photo album of me and her, I probably hadn't been walking very long. Really little. And we were in the driveway of the house, it was the first time I'd ever seen rain, and she was bent over with me and laughing because I was so happy. Her hair was all wet and hanging down and I was looking up at her like she was the best thing in the world. Like she made it rain, you know?" She swallowed hard and then said, "She was so beautiful, man. She really just was."
"I'd put big money on the guess that you're more loved than you know. Vegas odds," he said as they walked, the water rolling in over the smooth sand under Gemma's feet. "Also not a big shocker that your mom was beautiful, I gotta say. I wish I could see that picture, you must've been the cutest kid."
"I have dark hair, like my mom, I bleach it out now. In the picture, it's plastered down in all these baby curls. And I'm so happy. It almost feels like I can remember it, the blue dress she had on and everything." She was trying to keep her tone light, but she swiped quickly at her cheek with the blade of her free hand. It was the sort of thing that therapists said and that she could have brushed off as psych-speak, but she'd put equally big money on the guess that Erran wasn't saying it because he was a therapist. It felt odd and too good to hear someone say something that kind.
"This isn't real? My hopes are crushed, this date is over," Erran said with a smile, reaching up to touch the long messy waves of her blonde hair, nearly dislodging the plumeria blossom behind her ear. "Real blondes only, I have Hollywood standards here. No, that definitely happens, people feel like they remember things because they've seen childhood pictures. There's one of me as a toddler, I'd climbed into the fridge while it was defrosting because even back then I loved trying to kill myself, and there's a Polaroid of me curled up on the bottom shelf over the crisper. I always feel like I remember that incident even though I totally don't."
"I bet you were a pretty cute kid too." She'd managed to get the rogue tear under control, but her eyes were still too bright when she grinned up at him. "I always like it when I meet people and I feel like I can imagine what they looked like as little kids. It's your smile, you still have that shy-kid smile, that sweet smile."
"Yeah, I was a big ham as a kid, I loved the camera. That was actually my first job, Kodak commercial when I was twelve. You see, back in the '80s cameras used something called film, you've probably never seen it..." He drew her a little closer as they walked, wanting to gently guide the conversation back to happier territory, or at least something neutral. He liked seeing her smile. "Not that I'm nostalgic for the days before digital, that was a dark period in human history. I did a lot of commercials as a kid but nothing for Colgate, Pam managed to guess the one product I've never had to shill for."
"She was more excited about this date than I was, and let me tell you, that is a lot. Lot. I think she was half a step away from making me swear on a Bible that I'd tell her every detail." Gemma reached up to fix the drooping plumeria blossom that he'd bumped with his fingers, and then she said slowly, "Not that I asked for any other female advice about this date."
Erran had to crack up at that. "You asked for—oh my God, that's hilarious. And really cute. I honestly didn't think you'd be that excited, I thought it was gonna come off like asking you to buy a Coke for a nickel down at the soda fountain or something. And I'm glad Pam thought it was exciting too, she seriously doesn't seem like she deserves that rep for being an asshole."
"It's not cute, it's desperate, oh my god do not make fun of me--" Gemma was done for; she'd swung around in front of him to stop him laughing, holding up a hand, but she was cracking up too. "I'm so nervous, are you kidding, that's why I keep trying to talk about appropriate first date conversations. I want you to like me here, that's the goal. --And I like Pam, she's been awesome to me. It's cool to have someone to freak out with. Stop. Erran. Stop laughing."
"I am, I am, I'm doing it—okay, I'm good," he said, getting the laughter under control, although he was still grinning. "Look, I already like you, I liked you the first day we met. We got along pretty much right from when you stopped thinking I was a serial killer reality show host. If we weren't nervous in Uncle Touchy's Naked Puzzle Basement, there's nothing to be nervous about now."
"I know, I know, it's totally irrational," she admitted, and her cheeks were pink even though she was smiling. "I pretty much strong-armed you into liking me, I do that with people. I don't give them room to tell me they don't like me. You were pretty easy, though." She slid her hands into his, palm to palm, bringing him in closer to her. "But you like everybody."
"I don't like everybody, please lower your expectations before I fuck up and disappoint you," said Erran. "I don't like Nick Denton or the Republican Party or my dentist or Xavier Dolan, I promise I'm full of hate. But yeah, you didn't really have to struggle to win me over, I was easy. —You really do look good," he added, because the rosy-gold light from the sunset made her look distractingly luminous and pretty. After a brief moment's uncertainty, he decided not to overthink this and leaned in to kiss her.
It made her smile--if you keep making that face it's going to freeze that way-- and they really were going to make everyone else in the house sick and she didn't care because Erran was kissing her. She kept his hands in hers, her chin tilted up, her mouth soft. When they broke apart, she rested her forehead against his and murmured, "Yeah. I'm pretty gone." She brushed his nose with hers before she kissed him again, sliding her hands up his arms.
Some things were classics for a good reason, and kissing a pretty girl on a tropical beach at sunset was one of them. The wind was lightly rippling her hair and her dress, the water rolling in at their feet, and it was an outrageously photogenic first kiss, almost embarrassing. But he forgot about external judgements like that as they kissed again, his hands settling at her waist.
She wrapped her arms around his neck, drawing close, wanting all the finer details of this pressed between the layers of her memory and preserved. It had been a long time since she'd kissed anybody, especially anybody she intensely wanted to kiss, and she was going to fuck this up royally somehow. It already felt too good. It was difficult to care. "God, I forgot how much I love kissing," she murmured.
"It's a great hobby." He could barely remember the last time he'd kissed someone with more than an experimental let's see if this works sort of interest—probably Emily last summer, someone he'd had tons of chemistry with but painfully banal in conversation. When they broke apart again, he said, "You want to start making our way back up to the house? We're running out of beach here."
"Mmhm. Yes, I mean, yeah. I forgot we can't go that far, I was concentrating on other stuff here." She cupped his cheek in her hand, brushing her thumb across his cheekbone, and her smile was hazy. "What's the plan for the rest of the evening here? Raid the fridge and crash on the couch? --I don't have any illusions about innocently watching a movie here, by the way, I'm absolutely making out with you."
"That's pretty much the plan, yeah," he admitted with a smile. "Some other time I'll actually cook—I'm not Jack but I'm also not immune to wanting to impress you here, I make a good eggplant matbucha. But we'll do that when we're back at Zenith and the weather's colder, tonight we can graze. You can pick a movie for us to start ignoring halfway through, we talked about my favourites but I don't know your top film list yet. Important date questions."
"We just shot right past that. But see, yours was really cool and film-nerdy, I'm not a film nerd. I'm a film garbage compactor. I've seen Showgirls more than once just out of boredom. I could say something really hipster and cute, I could tell you I love The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, when in actuality I'm the kind of person that went to see Inception four times while it was in theaters. Mm. I don't know." She kissed the corner of his mouth again to buy herself some time, drifting back into an actual kiss before she took his hand again to start the walk back up to the house. "Stranger Than Fiction, maybe, and Rear Window. Little Miss Sunshine. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. --How am I doing so far?"
"I loved Kiss Kiss Bang Bang so much, that's one of my favourites too," he said as they turned to head back. "Rear Window is my favourite Hitchcock too—either that or Rope, maybe? I love the story that a camera guy broke his foot during one of those crazy long takes on Rope and they just gagged him and dragged him off the set so that he wouldn't interrupt the take. And I'm a film nerd but I'm not a film snob, okay, I'm not too good for Nolan here. I liked Memento better than Inception but that might just be a casting thing, Leo's a nice guy but for some reason I just hate his acting. Inception was stylish as hell. I actually haven't seen Stranger Than Fiction, that's the one with Will Ferrell, right?"
"I may sacrifice making out with you to make you watch it," she said with chagrin, but it was clear from the mischief in her eyes that she wasn't serious. "The things I do for movies. --Wait, hold up, what the hell do you mean Leo's a nice guy? You can't just throw stuff like that at me here, thinking about your contemporaries may put me into an early grave."
"Well, we weren't best friends or anything but it was the '90s, you had to work to avoid running into Leo," Erran said, laughing. "He was everywhere, he partied a lot. Seth hung out with him more than I did but I saw enough of him that I feel bad saying how much I hate watching his performances. Especially since I'm not exactly John Gielgud here myself. But I still root for the guy, I want him to get that Oscar."
"I want him to get an Oscar so everyone will shut the fuck up about him getting an Oscar," Gemma groaned, stopping at the foot of the path to slide her sandals back on. "And what is--what is the eggplant stuff you said before, I've never heard of that in my life. I love fried eggplant, though."
"Matbucha, it's a cooked tomato salad with garlic and peppers, they make it all over North Africa. Adding eggplant is a Syrian thing, I think, because my grandmother never made it that way, but I'm all about eggplant so I always put it in. You eat it over rice or dip your bread in it or smear it in a pita sandwich or whatever, it works everywhere." He put his shoes back on as they reached the path. "And I'd eat fried eggplant every day if I wasn't afraid of a heart attack, I love that stuff. We can take the cable cars back up the hill, speaking of heart attacks..."
"Good idea, yeah, these are not walking shoes..." Gemma slid her arms around his waist, standing up on her toes just a little to find his mouth again. It was something she still felt she had to be careful with, still a carefully-given privilege. "Thanks for asking me on a date," she said quietly. "I mean it. It was a good idea. My abuelo would've liked you."
"I would've passed muster, huh? That's good." He wasn't sure yet if he believed they were going to get back home—it definitely seemed unlikely, because how else could you protect a secret like this if you didn't make sure the lab rats never escaped? But they didn't know that for sure, and he wanted to think it was possible to wind up at home. Visiting Chimayó, trains into New York, holiday dinners in Anaheim. "We're doing okay with the date thing so far, yeah. Still time to fuck it up, the night is young," he added dryly. "But it seems like it was definitely a pretty good idea."
"You kissed me on a beach at sunset, Serfaty. You're not fucking anything up." None of this seemed permanent, not the houses, not the people; Erran was the axis, the only thing that was vital, and he would exist whether the experiment did or not. She knew that she was clinging tighter to him because of it, but she wasn't going to think about it. Not tonight. "C'mon, let's get in and raid the fridge before everybody else gets hungry."
"Yeah, sounds good, let's clean them out..." They headed for the cable cars, the jungle dark now after the sun had gone down with typical tropical swiftness. It was idyllic, and as much as Erran believed in positivity, he didn't particularly trust idylls; a lot of the time they turned out to be artificial settings, cardboard backdrops. Still enjoyable, sometimes, but you couldn't wander through them unless you had a friend with you, somebody else who wasn't fake. He needed Gemma for that, someone who could help keep all this from becoming oppressively weird. So far the gamble seemed to be paying off.