I swat at him. “Oh my god. Are you going to make me say that I like hanging out with you?”
He catches my hand in his, lifts it to his mouth. When he kisses my knuckles, I have to fight a full-body shiver. Kissing a hand should not be that hot. “I was actually thinking of going to one of those movies in the park down in Fremont tonight. It starts at sundown, so we should still have time to make it.”
“That sounds like it could be fun.”
“There’s a catch, though—you’re not going to like the movie.” Grimacing, he holds up his phone. Sleepless in Seattle. “They play it every year,” he says by way of defending himself.
“So this was a trap!”
“I swear, it wasn’t!”
I groan. “Fine. I’ll go. You definitely tricked me, but I’ll go.”
He excuses himself to change before we leave, and I text my parents that I’m hanging out with Julia, not wanting to answer questions about Tarek. When he reappears, he’s dressed in dark jeans and a graphic tee, scratching at a patch of dry skin on his elbow.
He looks really nice in normal clothes.
I clutch my chest. “Are those—are those forearms? I may faint.”
“Guess it’s been a while since you’ve seen me in short sleeves,” he says, looking only half bashful. “Ready?”
“I will try to keep my cynicism to myself. Mostly.” I hop off the barstool and shoulder my purse. “Although I’m going to remind you one more time, that kind of grand-gesture movie romance isn’t actually real.”
With a lift of his eyebrows, he indicates the framed articles about his parents. “I beg to differ.”
I let my gaze linger on their photographs—his mother’s long hair, contrasted with the prim bun she wears most days, the way his father looks at her like he’s not sure she’s real. The Eiffel Tower in the background, a reenactment of the night they met. How many couples have posed like this in front of the Eiffel Tower? I wonder. How many have this kind of photo hanging in their homes?
“You really love it,” I say. I’m not trying to pick a fight with him. I just want to understand—to the extent that my hardened heart is able to.
“It’s the story I grew up with.” He doesn’t miss a beat. Tarek lives for people asking about his parents. “It was the first I learned about love, about romance, and I was just so proud that we had this epic family story. That there was this proof of how much they cared about each other, that they’d gone to such great lengths to find each other again. And now I see what they do and how much they love each other, and I want something like that someday. Simple as that.”
So everyone else just isn’t trying hard enough? That was what I asked him last year. And he told me yes, asserting that grand gestures were the only way to hold a relationship together when I’ve seen too much evidence of the opposite.
“Right. As simple as a chance encounter at the Eiffel Tower.”
He gives me a wry smile. “And sometimes the world is terrible, and love stories… They make it feel less heavy.”
I think about the times anxiety has felt like the tightest of blankets around me, one I can never fully cast off. “I guess I can’t argue with that,” I say as we head outside, Seattle flirting with dusk. “About wanting something to make the world feel less heavy.”
18
A confession: I don’t actually hate the movie.
Is it a masterful cinematic endeavor? Absolutely not. Is Meg Ryan a frightening woman whose actions—using her journalism job to track down Tom Hanks’s address after hearing him on a radio call-in show, spying on him and his child playing at the beach—should have been reported to the police? One-hundred-percent.
But the nineties nostalgia is fun, even though I didn’t live through it. No one’s clothing fits. They’re walking around in paper sacks that are vaguely human-shaped. Even playing a stalker, Meg Ryan is adorable, and there are moments that make me laugh. Every time this happens, Tarek turns his head, as though curious whether we find the same things funny.
We took his car, and I made fun of the stickers on it, which I didn’t feel comfortable doing back when he took me to urgent care. After we parked a few blocks away on a darkened Fremont street, we made our way to the movie, where we found a spot in the back, and Tarek spread a blanket on the grass. At first I didn’t know how to arrange my body. We weren’t going to be all romantically draped over each other, like some of the couples surrounding us.
When I was little, I’d see couples like that, the kinds who were all over each other and who didn’t care who saw, and I wanted so badly for someone to love me like that someday. Sometimes they were B+B clients and sometimes they were strangers. Of course, I had a child’s concept of love back then, the kind quashed by a separation no one in my family wanted to talk about.
Tarek and I don’t even touch for the first third of the movie. It’s only when women nationwide start going wild over Tom Hanks telling his story on the radio that his hand drifts toward me, grazing the fabric of my dress before landing on my calf. It’s so distracting, I miss what’s happening on-screen for a solid minute.
To retaliate, I slide my hand to his back, his skin warm through his T-shirt. His vengeance: his hand creeping upward, thumb drawing a circle on my knee. I counter that by moving downward until I’m tucking my fingers into the curve of his belt, my thumb beneath his T-shirt, brushing up and down along his lower back. His breath hitches, and it feels like a victory.
He leans his head down to mine. “It’s good, isn’t
