“No, I think I know what you mean,” I said, and leaned over, resting my elbows on the bar, cupping my chin in my hands. “Like, I think you are one hundred percent worthy of all the interest and always have been, and if a lot of these women had gotten to know you before your success, they still would’ve been lining up outside your door—”
He laughed. “You’re blowing smoke up my ass.”
“Only a little,” I said. Sure, Raf had never been rolling in the ladies, but he’d done okay. He had always been catnip for a certain type of girl—overbearing ones who loved the idea of a shy, sensitive soul who would worship them. Over the years, a few of those girls had fallen hard for Raf, had felt that they had “discovered” him. They decided that he would be their boyfriend and pursued him relentlessly, only to be disappointed when they realized he wouldn’t drop everything to be at their beck and call, because sometimes he needed to disappear for a couple of days to work on a recipe, or because he was really close to his parents and listened to them (maybe a little too much) if they hated a new girlfriend of his.
My mom and I had spent many hours discussing this. “The Problem of Raf,” we called it: that the type of girl who loved the first impression he gave off was also the type not to appreciate the fullness of who he was. When the Vanity Fair profile had come out, I’d brought home a hard copy of the magazine to show to her. She’d been weak and lethargic—we’d ended up taking her to hospice care ten days later, and she’d died only a few days after that—but the article recharged her temporarily. “Maybe this will solve the Problem of Raf,” she’d said to me as she cut out the pages to put them up on our refrigerator, making slow and deliberate strokes with the scissors, needing to use both hands to force the scissors closed. “So if you want your chance with him, you should get in there soon.” (I laughed it off. This was the same woman who had said to me, years before, Oh no, you and Raf should never date. You’d break his heart, and then his family would hate me and I would have to move. But in her final months, she became very concerned that all my eggs were dying, and started trying to set me up with everyone from her doctor to the barista at her coffee shop, who had literally just graduated from high school.)
“Anyways,” I said to Raf, “now that you’ve got all this interest, I could imagine that it’s hard to separate the women who are genuinely into you from the ones who want you as a sort of . . . trophy.”
“Yeah, exactly,” he said. “It’s like they’re using me and I’m using them, and that’s okay for a while but then it gets kind of empty, you know?” I nodded, and he shrugged, his cheeks a little red. “Anyway, it’s good to have an excuse to figure it all out.”
“Well, then,” I said, and patted his hand with my own, my face a perfect mask of sincerity. “You’re welcome.”
I slid him another drink, and he took a slightly-too-enthusiastic sip of it. “Ah!” he said, startling as some liquid sloshed onto his chin. He wiped at it with the back of his hand, a sheepish grin on his face.
The party down at the other end of the bar closed out, then pushed back their chairs with loud scrapes and headed out to their next destination, leaving a disaster zone in their wake: crumpled napkins, overturned beer bottles. We always put out little bowls of pretzels on the bar, and these men had decimated them, spewing crumbs all over the place as they talked, knocking one of the bowls off the bar entirely without noticing on their way out.
I sighed and went to go clean up. “Here, I’ll help you,” Raf said, and grabbed a bar rag. I studied him as he wiped crumbs into his hand with the practiced motion of a man who’d seen all sides of the service industry.
We hadn’t hung out with this frequency since we were little. The hours of someone working his way up in a kitchen were basically the opposite of what mine had been at Quill. Neither one of us had ever wanted the kind of jobs where we’d just go punch a clock. We’d wanted to pursue passions, and the worlds of those passions had swallowed us up. Since he’d finished culinary school, we’d gone to each other’s places only a few times a year, and that had lessened even more when I’d moved back into my mom’s house. Sure, we saw each other there sometimes, but when he came home, we’d fallen into our old roles, him digging his dusty skateboard out of the basement and riding it down the block while I read a book on my front stoop, occasionally looking up to give him affectionate eye rolls.
Over the past few years, he’d grown into himself while I’d
