Page 8 of What It's Like in Words
He returned, placing down two old-fashioneds.
Oh, I—
Was it stranger that I hadn’t told him what I wanted or that he hadn’t asked?
I hated whiskey. My mum used to drink it on the holidays. She might have drunk it other times, but after she moved to France, I only saw her on the holidays, so that was when she drank it. Christmas. Easter. The occasional week in the summer.
We clinked our glasses and I thanked him for the drink. Sláinte, he said.
Are you Irish?
No, he answered.
He took a sip and sighed. Perfect, he said, referring to the drink. Then: I fucking hate dates. He said that he couldn’t think of anything worse than meeting a boring person in a boring pub to hear about their boring hobbies. I looked around the pub to make a point, and he said: Ah, butthispub is agoodpub. Settled, his face was cantankerous, angry even, and I remembered Ruth’s words:What do you think about him?
Flight.
Ruth had all sorts of ways of ending a date. The main one was just being honest and leaving. But there was something about how his hands gripped the glass.
Fight?
I took a large sip of the drink I hated and tried not to be boring.
But is a date even a date if no one talks about hobbies? I asked.
It’s much like the tree in the wood, he replied.
FUCK.
He laughed, and it was as unruly and brilliant as I remembered. He was two very different, equally disarming things. He removed his denim jacket to reveal a black wool shirt with the sleeves rolled up. I wanted to touch the mole on his forearm.
Shall we?
He set up the Scrabble board. I arranged seven tiles on my rack so that they almost made a word, and we began. He placed down the first word: “NOW.” I added an “S” to make “SNOW.” Before I could take a replacement tile, he spelled “WHISTLE” on a triple letter score.
Wolf or tin?
That’s not the game, Enola.
We played, and I watched him study the board like it mattered more that he won than what I thought of him. It was sexy, his confidence, his ability to exist in every moment.
Jump out that plane, Laa.
You know, I’m actually glad that tonight isn’t a date, I said.
He looked up. Oh?
I nodded. I’m not wearing date underwear.
His face reddened, and it was thrilling. I knew then that I wanted him to win. I asked why he had come to our writing group last week.
Fuck knows, he said. Maybe I wanted my ego stroked, maybe Mat said he would fucking be there.
Are you and Mat close?
Not really. We did a three-month writing thing and he was the only person I didn’t want to punch.
Because his entrance into my life had been a truck crashing into a house, it felt more like he had been compelled to our writing group by forces of the universe—the way that I always felt Ruth and I had been brought together for those same four years in Nairobi. It seemed impossible that he had just entered my life on a whim.
