“Am I not?” His arms are through the sleeves now, but the shirt is still unbuttoned, leaving a long thin rectangle of skin for me to definitely not ogle. And yet he doesn’t look embarrassed. There’s the faintest smile nestled in one corner of his mouth, like he finds all of this amusing.
“Please avert your eyes while I get this dress back up and talk myself out of walking into Puget Sound.”
He muffles a laugh as he turns around, giving me a chance to readjust.
“It’s not funny,” I insist.
“Okay, but it kind of is,” he says, and fine, he’s not wrong.
“Can you please just help me zip it up? That’s why I came in here, for help with the zipper from hell.”
“Sure.” He walks over to stand behind me with his unbuttoned shirt, like we are two people casually getting ready for an event we did not learn we’d be part of only twenty minutes ago. “Oh—it’s caught on the lace back here. Just a sec.”
Then I feel the gentlest press of his fingertips on my back as he works at the zipper. That’s the only part of him touching me, those few fingertips, and yet I am suddenly intensely aware of how close his body is to mine. We haven’t been this physically close in a long time. I’ve never felt the heat of him like this, the warmth of his hands as he rests a palm and then a wrist an inch from my spine to steady his grip.
Last year’s symptoms come rolling back, a tidal wave that flips my stomach and floods my brain until I’m wondering what would happen if he moved forward, closing the space between us. Or if I leaned back.
After Boatgate, I didn’t hear from him for a few days. He was getting ready for school, I told myself, but I sensed an iciness in his silence. I didn’t know whether he’d gone on that candlelit cruise by himself or whether Elisa had loved it and they’d been fused at the mouth all week and he didn’t have the time for a goodbye. There was nothing on Instagram, which made the whole thing even more mysterious.
Still, the crush wouldn’t let me go. I was this horrible combination of angry and heartsick. He’d hurt me, even if he hadn’t meant to, and I’d done the same. And yet I still wanted him. It had gotten to the point where it was all I could focus on, a whirlpool of obsessive thoughts that sank me deep, deep. I had to let them out or they would drown me. Otherwise, if he went off to college and left me alone with those feelings, I’d only obsess more—over his texts, his social media, the constant mental replay of memories.
I couldn’t do the kind of gesture he was so skilled at, but I could send an email. This was my running through the airport, my “meet me at the top of the Empire State Building,” my kiss at the Eiffel Tower on New Year’s Eve. The way his arm brushed mine when we rummaged through the kitchen for leftovers or the way his eyes sparked when he talked about his parents’ love story, he made me think we could have the thing I’d grown more disillusioned with every summer. I didn’t think I loved him—that word was too heavy. But if I was ever going to have the kind of romance he bundled into his grand gestures, I wanted it with him.
And he did not.
“Got it,” he says in a low voice. Finally, and too soon at the same time. Logic intervenes: he ignored you for a year. Then he lifts my hair out of the way and zips the dress so slowly, his other hand anchored on my shoulder blade. “There.”
“Thank you,” I manage, letting out a long breath I hope will combat the dizziness.
He returns to the hanger with his jacket and tie. “That green is… a choice,” he says as he loops the tie around his neck, and it lightens the mood a little.
“Ugh. I know.” I bring my hands to my cheeks, hoping they cool down before the photos. “I’m starting to think your parents don’t value you as part of the Mansour’s operation. They sacrificed you to take me to urgent care after the mango incident, and now this?”
“Nah. They’ve got plenty of help today, and they love working with your parents. They want the wedding to run just as smoothly as yours do. Shall we?” he says after pinning a boutonniere to his lapel, turning to face the mirror.
I chance a look at our reflections. We match, the garish green of his tie and my dress. The wave of his hair and the swooshing thing my stomach is doing. “I suppose we shall.”
I curse last night’s impulsiveness one more time, and then I follow him outside.
The photographer poses us in a variety of ways: standing in a line, looking serious, then pretending to laugh, then walking a few steps before backing up and doing it again. The whole time, I’m radically aware of the guy next to me, my arm hooked through his. I try to ignore how much I don’t dislike the way he looks in a tie. Most people look good in a tie. That’s not exclusively a Tarek thing.
I’ve never thought of my back as a particularly sensitive area, but now I can’t stop imagining his hands there. It makes me wonder how many girls he’s touched like that. While his dating history is all over his Instagram, the flashiness interspersed with very obviously staged couple photos, I have no idea what he’s done physically and with whom. Our conversations never got that personal. The thought makes me feverish, and I’m relieved when the photographer splits us up to take a few photos with just the bridesmaids, then just
