He played along, waving his arms to and fro high above his head and shouting, “I’m over here!”
This was a good man.
After we were seated and starting on some wine, Kevin ordered for us—from the tasting menu, which turned out to be an unexpectedly large amount of food considering it sounded like a practice dinner before the real one.
The last guy I had gone on a date with (more than a year ago, a guy I met at my corner bodega while debating between a pint of Cake Batter Ben & Jerry’s and Birthday Cake Oreos) had brought me to a restaurant / bowling alley called Bowlmor. Yes, it was a restaurant literally inside a bowling alley. We could hear pins crashing around while we chewed. He did not pay for my chicken wings and then got pissed when I beat him by a spare. So you could definitely say I was trading up.
Kevin’s dark hair looked so thick and healthy beneath the restaurant’s fine lighting that it took all the self-control I had to not reach out and run my fingers through it. I wondered what he washed it with. Certainly not the no-frills brand I used. This had to be some sulfate-and-paraben-free stuff they didn’t even carry at Duane Reade. And his teeth were so white and clean, and perfectly straight. I could have watched him eat for hours.
“So tell me more about this project of yours,” he said, after plate number eleven was set down before us.
“Let’s not talk about that,” I replied, striving to appear coy.
“Are you kidding? That’s all I want to talk about. I was just being polite by waiting till now to bring it up.”
I giggled the way I hated when other girls did it. Between my first-date-with-a-beautiful-man jitters and the all-encompassing dread related to my recent embezzlement habit, I couldn’t control any of the words or sounds coming out of my mouth.
“You’re just trying to flatter me, aren’t you, ha ha ha, no really though, let’s not talk about that, tell me more about your folks. Are they still in DC?”
What was I saying? Folks? Why was I talking like Pa from Little House on the Prairie?
Kevin blinked his long eyelashes twice, maybe three times, in rapid succession and then nodded.
“What do they do?” I reached for my wine.
He craned his neck sideways and smiled at me. “Don’t you know it’s rude to ask?”
I was about to catapult into a motormouthed apology when Kevin said, “I’m kidding. It’s fine. My father’s also a lawyer, actually. So is my older brother. And my mother’s in politics.”
“Politics?” (Is it rude to ask one-worded questions that aren’t actually questions?)
“She had been a social worker,” Kevin said. “But she got frustrated and decided to take matters into her own hands.”
“Is she, like, secretary, of state or something?”
“Ha.” (That laugh of his. I could die.) “No, but she does work for the State Department, and people are always comparing her to Hillary Clinton. So I guess you can say I’m used to having a strong woman around telling me what to do.”
I choked on my Chablis.
“Sorry,” he said. “That was supposed to be a come-on, but it sounded more like I was flirting with my mother.”
A come-on? Was he implying that I was a strong woman who would tell him what to do? Man, was he way off. My cheeks were turning red; I could feel them burning up, the bastards.
At least Kevin was also blushing. “Seriously though,” he said, “I want to hear all about this nonprofit you’re working on. Talking with you the other day reminded me how stupid my job is, and how much happier I’d be doing something meaningful.”
“You do remember my real job is being Robert Barlow’s slave, right?”
“Aside from that, though. You give a fuck.” He stunned me with his sudden use of profanity. “That’s not something I’ve found in most of the women I’ve met.”
He was really going for it.
I smiled and looked down modestly.
“So come on,” he said. “Tell me more about it.”
When I looked up, he was pitched forward with his eyes wide. His whole demeanor seemed to be crying out, Touch me, pet me, love me. He was obviously a mama’s boy and possibly part Labrador retriever, but so what? This guy really liked me, or the idea he had of me. I had to keep that idea alive.
“Well . . .” I found myself stuttering as I searched my brain for all those smart-sounding words I learned at NYU’s Women’s Center meetings. “The thing is, we, as in our generation, we’ve tried to do everything right but we’re still . . .”
Kevin was holding his wineglass suspended in midair, so rapt he was by my manifesto.
“. . . People say we’re lazy and entitled. But the truth is, the deal we were promised growing up, if we work hard and get a good education, it’s really not working out. The dream we were sold, and the job market we encountered . . .”
I was killing it and not in a good way, but Kevin didn’t seem to notice.