Page 11 of Double Dared
“I hug my male friends,” he said.
It provoked a rumble of laughter from me, and I shook my head. Taylor followed me up the short flight of stairs to the front door and waited for me to unlock it before joining me in the narrow hallway with a blocky, Art Deco staircase leading up to my apartment. “What do you mean you’ve never dumped anyone?”
“Exactly what I said,” I replied. “I’m not the sort of person who can cut things off neatly.”
“You must have been with someone who didn’t turn out to be who you thought they were,” Taylor said.
I wasn’t sure if he understood just how deep that particular dagger cut me. “I’m very good at lying to myself.”
When I looked at him, I could see he wasn’t sure if I was joking. “At least you’re self-aware.”
We reached the top floor without getting winded, and I opened the door to my apartment, dropped the keys into the bowl by the entrance, and flicked on the light in the hallway.
“What did you tell your friends?” I asked.
“That we’re watching some Soviet movie,” Taylor replied.
“That would be a Tarkovsky film,” I said. “And it wouldn’t kill you to actually watch it if you want to be convincing.”
“I wasn’t under the impression that I would have homework,” Taylor said, stepping into my bedroom. He turned on the light like he was at home. It was thesort of confidence I liked. “Man, it’s like a rainforest in here.”
My bedroom was cluttered with plants. A particularly resilient sansevieria occupied a corner, sprouting its thick, bold stems high from the clay pot, while a pothos spread its vines down from a basket suspended from a hook in the ceiling. Many of the longer vines were fastened to the small nails along the wall above my bed with its black, wrought-iron frame. On the many messy surfaces of the bedroom, there was a pot of lavender, a spider plant, a peace lily, and a Boston fern in a round pot on the floor. Orchids occupied the windowsill.
“Did you pick all of these?” Taylor asked.
“Uh-huh,” I replied absent-mindedly as I walked into the kitchen. He followed, whistling as he entered. The tiles were a colorful collage of mismatched patterns lining the wall with the counter and cabinets, and my dining table was a very old, wooden block on decoratively carved legs with four wrought-iron chairs around it. “Want some wine?”
“It wouldn’t be a date if I said no,” Taylor joked.
I glanced at him over my shoulder. “You know, we don’t have to pretend to be boyfriends when we’re alone.”
“Haven’t you heard of method acting? I thought you were a film student.”
I laughed harder than I intended. “You are going to live in character for three weeks?”
“Don’t be surprised when I start sending you rat tails and cockroaches after we break up,” he said.
The cringe hurt me. “I didn’t think you would know about that.”
“That particular weirdo has gotten away with it for far too long,” Taylor murmured, his hand moving over the surface of the table. He was a very beautiful guy, I realized all of a sudden. And it was sudden. I had noticed his good looks before, obviously, but never quite like this. His locks were a little curlier tonight, swept to one side, and his olive skin had an extra warmth in the light of the Edison bulbs in my kitchen.
I opened a drawer and found a corkscrew, then picked up a bottle of red from the wire-frame holder in the corner of the kitchen counter. I faced Taylor while working on the cork. “What do you want to do?”
A particularly cute expression came over his face. In his girliest, six-year-old voice and best British accent, he said, “Do a backflip.”
I snorted so hard it hurt. “You are impossible.”
“I’ve heard it called adorable.”
“You’re like a depository of pop culture references and stupid memes,” I said.
“Charming,” he said as if I proved his point.
Arrestingwas the word that came to mind. Intense, contradictory, architectural. I popped the cork from the bottle and placed both on the counter, turning away from him as this strange dawning passed through me.
“Glasses?” Taylor suggested.
“Huh?”
