Buzzfeed, Boys, Black Magic

soul skinny dipping

Rafi didn't seem to want to leave my car.

By the time I had driven out of the diner's parking lot, Rafi had opened the sunroof and leaned back. His gaze fixed on the dashboard and we talked a little about fireflies and lakes and the street names in his family's development: all dead British poets and ivy-league schools.

For most the drive, he seemed immovable, draped over the passenger seat. His left hand tickled the air through the opened sunroof- his brown fingers ashen in the gray moonlight.

And when I parked in the driveway of his childhood home, he didn't move anything except his eyes. I watched as his gaze slowly crept from the vinyl dash and met mine.

"Well," I said.

He nodded.

"It's a pain I got work tomorrow," I said. I'm not sure how much I meant it. "Otherwise, who knows what we'd get up to-"

I knew full well what we'd get up to. He'd give me a mediocre kiss, maybe grab a boob, I'd excuse myself, return to my shoebox house, burrito-wrap myself in blanket and watch Scrubs on YouTube alone in the dark.

"Why don't you quit it?" his eyes narrowed.

"Quit what?" I hadn't even begun to nag him.

"That stupid job," Rafi said. I exhaled.

"I need it-"

"You hate it," he said. "I saw you hop after those crickets."

"I don't hate it," I said, but then again, I wasn't sure if I could hate anything anymore. That would require an intensity of emotion that I didn't know I could feel.

He tilted his chin. He looked like a friendly dog. I pressed the unlock button on my door. I don't think he got the message. He only leaned closer to me.

"Why do you work there, anyway?" he asked. "You're smart, you could get a better job."

"I can't," I said, "I've tried."

"You can't or you won't?"

"It's the only place that'd hire me-"

"You applied to what, 5 jobs?" Rafi said.

"Around 5." The actual figure was 4. "But that doesn't matter because-"

"I applied to like 50 in the last two months." He interrupted me.

"There aren't 50 open astrophysics jobs-"

"Do you even want an astrophysics job?"

I felt inexplicably attacked. But before I could defend myself, he chuckled to himself.

"You know, this entire time I've been trying to figure out what it is that you want." His gaze bounced from my eyes to my lips to my eyes again. "You're damn near impenetrable."

"Impenetrable?"

"I know some GRE words too, little miss android," Rafi said.

Something about this sentence ticked me off.

"All you engineers think the economy is so damn good, but I was dumb enough to get a theoretical degree and things aren't so easy-"

"You know what I think," Rafi seemed oblivious to the flush in my cheeks or the anger in my voice. "I think you're chicken. I think you're so afraid to fail, you're not going to let yourself try anything."

"You're a fucking chicken-" I creaked. "You're a fucking Tyson nugget-"

"You said the only thing you ever wanted to do was astrophysics, and yet you're working a job with no real astrophysics anywhere," Rafi said. "You coulda applied to dozens of aerospace labs or observatories-"