Soft Body

15: Frozen Yogurt & A Proposition

I sat in my car with such a rush that I got sick. The butterflies were fluttering too hard. What did I just experience? Tucker's hand on me. Tucker's hand holding mine. Tucker, period. It was all so much at once.

    My phone buzzed again.

    You're making me double text? Dang girl.

    Oh yes. Ben. Ben was a person. Ben was a person that I was flirting with. Ben was a person that I was flirting with and had not texted back. If this was what desirability felt like, it was anxiety-inducing. Tucker came back into my life like a hurricane.

    Sorry!

    He took no time with his response.

    Frozen yogurt?

    And how could I say no to it?

****

    The frozen yogurt place was packed with minors, screaming and running from topping station to fro-yo station and back. It was disgusting. Grubby child hands. High pitched voices. Teenage girls who wore too much body spray trying to impress the pimply boys with braces sitting across from them.

    I watched Ben make his fro-yo with a nutritionist's precision. He took a small cup with vanilla, putting only fresh fruit and granola on top of it. This had to be what hell was, standing in front of a beautiful man eating healthily while you have a giant cup of cake batter fro-yo covered in M&Ms, brownie, Oreos, and hot fudge, while a thirteen year-old on a date is trying to get to second base.

    I pulled out a fiver and paid quickly. The only table open was high with two bar stools. Ugh.

    I put my yogurt down and prepared myself to make the giant hop onto the bar stool. I looked towards the register. Ben's back was turned. Okay, I could do this.

    I failed on my first hop, my butt pushing the stool back. I'm no stranger to this type of heartbreak. Big booty problems, as they say.

    I tried again. Success.

    After what felt like forever, Ben came over to the stool and had no problem sliding his gorgeous self onto the stool.

    We were quiet for a second. I certainly didn't know what to say, especially not to Ben. I stared into my yogurt.

    "God, these kids are the worst," he said. My eyes shot up.

    "Seriously," I leaned in and dropped my voice, "but the teenagers are even worse."

    He laughed and matched my lean, "Yeah, I remember my first date."

    "Do you? Do you remember your first date?" I leaned back. It was coming back to me now, acceptable human interaction.

    "Yeah. Her name was Angy. She came here from Lebanon when she was eleven and because I was the only other Arab in my school, I had to show her around. We became friends and then I took her to prom our senior year."

    "Prom was your first date?"

    "Hey, you try being in love with the same person for seven years."

    "So you must have gone on a date at some point?"

    He shrugged his shoulders and looked out at the parking lot. "It was a lot of hanging out, not a lot of dates," his eyes darted back at me, "What about you?"

    "Oh god. It was my eighteenth birthday. We went to the movies and made out the whole time."

    "You didn't have your first date until you were eighteen?"

    I looked down into my ice cream again, "My parents are strict."

    "So are mine. My sister had it really bad. She wasn't allowed to go to prom."

    "Oh but you get to take Miss Angy all over town for seven years?"

    "Yes," he laughed. I felt relaxed now.

    "Are you Lebanese too?"

    "No, I'm Syrian."

    "Interesting."

    His body language changed, like people had given him this answer before. He squared his body and furrowed his brow. "No!" I blurted.

    He tilted his head. "I didn't mean anything by it! It's just, I have a lot of questions about what you think about the whole situation in the Middle East, but it would be so rude to ask you about it because I only just now found out that you were of Arabic descent at all and I don't want to talk about politics when this is supposed to be chill."

    "That was a lot of information at once."

    "I didn't want to be rude." I stuck a spoonful of fro-yo into my mouth, hoping it would stop the gratuitous verbal vomit shooting out of me.

    Ben grinned, his relief visible. "Don't worry about it. That's a lot nicer than what I'm used to."

    "So you speak Arabic?"

    "Yeah. Do you speak Spanish?"

    "Are you racial profiling me?"

    "You've texted me in Spanish before."

    I must have been drunk when I did it, because I had no recollection of what he told me.

    "Was I drunk when I did it?"

    "Yeah! You said you were watching Food Network and drinking wine and then you started texting in Spanish and the only thing I got was something about oil, I think?"

    Cringe. I remember deleting my text thread that night because I didn't want to get excited hoping Ben would text me back.

    "Did you know Spanish and Arabic are closely related?"

    Trivia. A man after my own heart. "Yes."

    "Did you know that I don't have a roommate?"

    My heart stopped and then it raced. What did that mean, in any sense of the word? For me? For him? For me and him? For me and Tucker?

    Tucker. I had forgotten him for a hot second, as crazy as that sounds, but the thought of him brought my feelings for him back. The electricity I felt in my hand from the small touch he gave me earlier came back. I shook the tingle out. And he said he wanted to talk to me about not-work. Now what did that mean? He was like every repentant male lead on every soap opera my mom watched, begging, almost, and grabbing me. Though maybe the women on the soaps had taught me to play hard to get, something brand new for me.

    But this moment wasn't about Tucker. It was about me.

    "You move fast."

    "I don't get a lot of no's."

    I leaned back in. "Is it the tattoos?"

    He matched my lean again. "They help."

    "I'm not saying yes to anything."

    "I'll teach you to speak Arabic. We'll talk about politics."

    "That's enticing."    I'm not easy. I'm not easy. I'm not easy. I'm not easy.

    "We'll have some wine."

    "After all this ice cream? Seems heavy."

    "Where is this mouth coming from?"

    "I'll tell you where it's not going." I'm not easy. I'm not easy. I'm not easy. I'm not easy.

    And suddenly, his hand was across the table, touching mine. This was more action than I'd gotten in months. He moved my hand onto his forearm. "This one is a tomahawk."

    "Why do you have a tomahawk on your forearm?"

    "Wouldn't you like to know?"

    And I was had.

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