That should have been the end of it. There’s just no good way to recover from a disastrous first encounter like the one we’d had.
Strangely enough, Nate was back in a couple of weeks, much to my astonishment. And he was alone. No Jim tagging along.
Before I could stop myself, I’d blurted out, “Back for more sandwiches?”
I blushed immediately. It was rude. And cruel.
Nate only smiled and said, “Why not!”
It became our thing as we began to hang out more frequently over the next three years. We’d meet, drink beer, eat sandwiches, and talk about our lives.
He had been born to a farming family. He’d been the first in his family to graduate high school. He was in college against the wishes of his family, who wanted him to stay on the farm and help his father and brothers work the land. He wanted to be an engineer and build dams.
I was a single child. My parents had divorced when I was six. Jim and I had been joined at the hip since the second grade. I wanted to be a teacher. Or a counselor. Help children going through a difficult life. We were idealists in those days.
We went on our first official date more than three years after that first encounter. Oddly enough, it was Jim who was responsible for that first date.
One night, we were hanging out in my apartment. Jim had ordered pizza to celebrate the end of our college days. For dessert, I had made fried bread triangles dipped in chocolate sauce and dusted with powdered sugar. I’d made sure that the chocolate sauce did not have milk solids in it. When I heard that Jim had ordered pizza, I told him to cancel.
“Nate can’t have pizza, moron,” I said to Jim. “He’s lactose intolerant.”
Jim threw me a weird look and called the pizza place. The delivery guy had already left, they told him. In the end, Nate had to make do with jam sandwiches for dinner. Knowing we’d be ordering in, I hadn’t bought any groceries.
Jim apologized profusely, though insincerely, to Nate. Nate brushed the whole thing off in his usual good-natured way. To this day, I suspect that Jim had deliberately ordered the pizza to wrangle a larger share than he deserved. He’s never accepted that, of course.
As we were eating, Jim suddenly asked, “Are you two dating?”
“Shut up, Jim,” Nate and I said together.
“Can’t blame a guy for being curious.” Jim shrugged and stuffed another slice into his mouth.
The rest of the night felt awkward. I liked Nate. A lot. I loved spending time with him. We met almost every day. I felt miserable on the days that we did not meet. I waited restlessly for him to turn up every evening. We talked and went on walks and bought groceries at the local market together. On weekends, he stayed in my apartment till almost one or two in the morning before going home. We went to church together on Sundays. Yet, I’d never thought of him as my “boyfriend”. We’d never kissed, never held hands, never been on a real date.
Suddenly, I felt hot. I looked at Nate out of the corner of my eye and saw that he was gazing at me with an odd look in his eyes, like he was seeing me for the first time. My face burned, my hands trembled. I wanted to be near Nate and far away from him at the same time.
To avoid his keen gaze, I looked away and noticed Jim looking at us with surprise writ all over his face. His pizza slice was held in his hand, dangled before his mouth. It made me feel even more uncomfortable. That look in his eyes, part surprise and part something else, was extremely disconcerting.
Finally, I excused myself on the pretext of needing to use the bathroom. I stayed in there until I heard the two of them leave.
This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon 2.0
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