Scandalized

Eden calls out to me, “Just bring the entire six-pack out here. I think we’re going to go through them pretty fast.”

She’s not wrong. We go through the six-pack in only the time it takes us to play four hands of poker, all of which I lose. We’re knocking them back not only because beer pairs great with pizza but because the two jokers with me are apparently long-lost fraternity siblings and have turned the entire evening into one big drinking game.

No elbows on the table.

Drink beer in single swallows only.

Last one to touch their nose when the word love is used in any song on the Spotify playlist has to drink.

I find out there’s a drinking penalty for innocently questioning whether we’re freshmen in college again.

And, of course, there are drinking penalties for using the names Alec or Eden. Given that they’ve never spent time together and therefore have no habit at all of calling each other by their real names, I am the one drinking a lot more than anybody else.

Even so, I realize at some point that Alec is brilliantly dissolving Eden’s fangirl tension, and she is unknowingly distracting him from the weight of everything we discussed at the beach today. I adore them both for it.

He sets his third empty bottle down on the table and groans. “I don’t think I’ve had this much beer in years.”

“How could you,” Eden asks, “and maintain that six-pack?” She squints and I realize she’s mentally counting. “Or is it a twelve-pack?”

“Okay, Lucy: drink.” I close one eye to focus across the table at her. “New rule, every time Lucy’s a creep, she has to take a sip.”

Eden laughs, tilting her bottle to her mouth. “Now you’re getting the hang of this.”

“What if I’m a creep?” Alec asks.

“Frank,” I say, pointing at him, “is allowed to be a creep, but only with me.”

He pauses and then leans over to kiss me before going still with his mouth against mine. His eyes open and he slowly pulls away in realization of what he’s done. Across the table, Eden’s jaw hangs open.

“You just—” she says, and then tilts her bottle to her lips, taking a single, preemptive Creep Drink again.

With his cheeks flushed from either the beer or the kiss—or both—Alec picks up the cards, shuffling.

He turns his hat around, and the movement catches my eye. Alec Kim, right now, is deadly. Black T-shirt, black jeans, hat on backward. Dimples to die for and they’re making a constant show because he’s tipsy and Alec is, apparently, a delightful drunk. I keep seeing the realization pass through Eden’s expression: Alexander Kim. Right there. But the way he teasingly laughs at her from behind his cards, the way he sings badly with the music, the way the professional actor in our house drinks some beer and then has no actual poker face… there’s just something so perfectly ordinary about him, too.

“We’re going to play Trash now,” he says, dealing us each ten cards.

“I don’t know how to play Trash,” I admit.

“Then you’ll lose a lot.” He grins at me and Eden laughs, delighted. “And this is speed Trash. Here are the rules: If you take longer than two seconds to start your turn, you drink. Winner each round is exempt from rules the following round. Any swear words result in a penalty that is chosen by the previous hand’s winner. Got it?”

I can’t stop smiling at them. “Not at all,” I admit, but Eden is nodding, so we move on. These two are two peas in a pod.

Alec drums his fingers on the edge of the table. Eden cracks her knuckles. They stare each other down and clink bottles, and we begin. I have no idea what the rules are or what we’re supposed to be doing but it doesn’t matter. Even as the game speeds up, for me time slows, and the music seems to grow louder, and I’m watching my best friend and this part stranger, part lover solve a disagreement over cards with Rock, Paper, Scissors. I’m watching his open-mouthed laugh when she beats him and launches herself to her feet for a victory dance. I’m watching him slap a pile down faster than she does and fall backward laughing. I’m watching her forget for longer and longer bites of time who she thinks he is while she’s in the company of who he really is.

I think, This is a moment I will remember for the entire rest of my life. No matter what happens after this, I will file tonight under Happiness.

We go hunting for more beverages in the kitchen. Eden digs cookie dough out of the fridge and Alec leans back against the counter, pulling my back to his chest before reaching over and stealing a mound of cookie dough from her spoon. He takes a bite and feeds me some and then presses his cookie lips to my neck.

“Still weird,” Eden says as she spoons more out onto a baking sheet. But she doesn’t seem to be standing on shaky ground anymore. In fact, she says this teasingly, like it’s settled and sorted: Alec-and-Gigi is no longer weird.

But aren’t we? Isn’t this? We are count-on-one-hand days into this whatever-it-is-we’re-doing and not once have I felt like I’ve had to put on an act to impress him. Maybe that’s because I expect it to end, because we stated clearly today that it would—and cleanly. So why pretend? If he doesn’t like what he sees, then the worst thing that happens is it ends a little sooner than it would have otherwise. It’s not like I won’t be devastated either way—I will. I know that now.

We return to the living room with a plate of warm cookies and tea, and Eden turns on John Oliver. I sit on the couch, and before I can pull my legs up crisscrossed on the cushion, Alec sweetly invades my space, lying down with his head in my lap. He takes a bite from his cookie, chewing as he studies where he might take his next one, and on instinct my hand goes to his hair, combing it off his forehead. It feels like silk between my fingers, and I remember touching it when he made love to me in Seattle, when he kissed me between my legs only yesterday, when I swept it off his forehead today in the water.

He hums quietly, taking that second bite, and our eyes meet. “Want one?” he asks, even though I am perfectly capable of reaching the plate myself.

I shake my head. It’s a struggle to push away the world outside of this apartment, where the reality of him and our circumstances and the impossibility of an Us feels like a weight on my chest. Instead, I try to remember what it is that he wants, why he’s here. He’s here to just be a guy with his head in a girl’s lap.