Chapter Three
Harley
A gigantic coffee cup beckons us, the sign for Big Cup Coffee.
I’m not so sure coffee is the best idea right now, since I’m more nervous than I ever was walking into a hotel lobby to meet a client. I knew what to do then. There were guidelines, expectations. Different for each man because they all had different preferences. But the rules of the road were ironclad – nothing below the waist, you paid your money, you got your kicks. Everything was prescribed and then delivered according to the order.
With Trey I’m going off the menu. So far off that we’re having a different kind of cuisine. Something I’ve never tasted or tried. Because I’ve never gone on a date with someone I wanted to date. Someone I chose to date.
He’s the first guy I want to sit down with, have a cup of coffee with, get to know. I want to flirt, I want to talk, I want to feel his hands on my body again. This might be the last time, or maybe the only time, I have this chance.
He holds open the bright yellow door to the coffee shop and I head in first, shucking off my jacket quickly since it’s warm inside. He does the same and I like when he doesn’t wear a jacket because his arms are amazing. Not just the artwork, but the shape of them, the firm, taut muscles, the way t-shirts were made for guys like Trey.
At the counter, we peruse the chalkboard menu, and he stands close to me. Shoulder to shoulder, his bicep touching my skin. A ribbon of heat runs through me, sweeping across my body, and it’s a foreign feeling – this very first inkling of want. But I like it, this want. I want more of it, and I’m dying to know how nights unfold when they aren’t bought, sold or arranged in advance.
After our drinks are ready, we sink down onto a red couch, my espresso and his coffee on the wooden table. There’s an awkward silence, and I don’t know if I should go first, or if he will. It’s uncomfortable, but I also kind of love it because I think it’s normal. Right? That great unknown of what to do or say.
“So,” he begins, then clears his throat.
“So,” I repeat, and the silence expands, spreads between us.
“So you go to school?”
“Yeah. You too?”
“Yeah. Senior year.”
“I’m a sophomore,” I say, even though we’ve had this conversation already.
“Cool.”
There’s another pause and it’s like we’re on the radio and we’ve created dead air.
“And you’re studying English?”
“Yep. And history for you?”
“Yeah.”
Another bout of nothing to say. Another round of meaningless chatter.
“Do you like it?”
“Definitely. You?”
“Yep,” I say, and it feels like we’re simply repeating our chat from earlier, only this time it’s because we have nothing to say. Maybe this is how dates go.
Dully.
I better drink this espresso stat and get the hell out of here. Because this night is sliding downhill as we retread the same terrain. “I’m so thirsty,” I say. I take a hearty gulp of my espresso and it scalds my mouth. “Ouch.”
He quirks up his eyebrows. “You okay?”
“I think I burned my tongue,” I say, wincing.
“Let me check for you,” he says, all deadpan and toneless
I raise an eyebrow, shooting him a skeptical look.
“C’mon. I’ve had a needle in your skin. You won’t let me inspect your tongue for burns?”
“You’re going to inspect my tongue for espresso burns?”
He nods seriously. “It’s part of our secondary training as tattoo artists. Needles, ink and tongue burns. Now, let me see that tongue, Harley.”
When I stick out my tongue and say “Ah” the date that had been crash landing pulls out of the nosedive. He touches the tip of my tongue with his finger as if he’s inspecting it. It tickles and I laugh more.
He parks his hands on his hips. “If you’re laughing I can’t check out your tongue properly.”
I adopt a serious look and stick out my tongue again. He pretends to examine it. “I’ve arrived at a diagnosis.”
“Okay. Tell me.”
“You do not have a burned tongue. What you have is a desire to end this coffee date as soon as possible.” His eyes pin me and his words are so searingly honestly that I blush, look away, then back.
“Was it that obvious?”
He nods. “Yeah. But it was kinda going downhill fast, right?”
“Coding big time.”
“Do you think we pulled it out?”
I shrug playfully. “I don’t know. Do you?”
“I think if we stop talking about pointless things like school and majors – which is my fault,” he says, tapping his chest, taking ownership of it. “Because I have to be honest here, I don’t usually have coffee with girls who walk into my shop, and I don’t usually talk about school, and I’m a little bit nervous because I think you’re both badass and beautiful. So can we make a pact for tonight to get rid of the bullshit and just talk about stuff that matters? Like why you want to go to the beach, and how it feels to listen to Arcade Fire, and whether you love or hate New York as much as I do, and what you want out of life.”
My heart thumps loudly, and I half wonder if he can hear it because that is the coolest, most real thing anyone has ever said to me. It might be a line, but it doesn’t feel like a line, it feels like the truth of one night and this is all I want. A night without lies or lines or pretending.
“I’ve never had coffee after a tattoo either. Since you know, first tattoo. Second, I’d love to talk about the beach and why I love it especially because I never get the chance. Third, Arcade Fire’s music makes me feel as if I can feel. Like I’m feeling everything inside me that I don’t usually let myself experience. The music does that to me, like it’s turning me inside out.”
Trey’s shoulders relax and he grins. “I love that. I think music can be like that. That when you don’t know what to do or say, sometimes you listen to a song and it makes you, I don’t know, brave or crazy or just makes it seem like a bad day isn’t so bad.”
That’s all it takes. The weirdness dissolves. We took the elephant in the room, and we turned it into a mouse and then scurried it on out of here. We spend the next thirty minutes talking about music that hits us hard in the heart, from Dave Matthews Band to Screaming Trees, from Natasha Bedingfeld to Nirvana.
“So, can I ask you another question?” Trey says as he sets down his drained coffee cup. “Why did you picture the beach?”
Memories flash by. Days when I was younger. Running through the sand. Falling asleep to the ocean waves. Eating pizza on the deck as the sun set over the water. Just a few weeks a year, but they were the best days.
They were the only ones that ever seemed normal in my life, the only time I remember being a family, and I haven’t been back to the beach since my parents split. I’m not really sure how to say all that. I’m not accustomed to speaking the truth. Not to men. Not to friends. Not to my mom. Not to anyone. But right now I don’t feel like a jaded teenage girl. I feel like a real girl. Like a 19-year-old who doesn’t know what her future holds, and even though I know what tomorrow will bring – an end to this, an end to him, an end to the fluttery possibility of a real date, I decide to tell him some of my truths. To see how it feels to be Harley and not the girl I was with all those other men.
“I used to go to the beach when I was young,” I say. “My dad’s parents lived in Southern California. San Diego. I don’t remember much of it, or of them. I don’t even have their last name. My mom changed my name to hers when they split. Anyway, I can’t tell you the specifics of what it was like to be there at the beach with them. It was more like a feel. I close my eyes and the warm breeze skims over my arms. I hear the waves rolling in at night. I smell the saltiness of the ocean. And I have this sort of fuzzy hazy memory of being happy. I mean I was six, right? You’re supposed to be happy? What could possibly even make you unhappy at age six?”
“An ice cream cone spilling on the ground is about all I can think of,” he answers immediately and I smile and point at him.
“Exactly! You have no worries. No cares and I guess the beach always seemed that way to me. Not so much that it’s an escape. But I think it’s impossible to be stressed if you’re there.”
“I think it’s a logical fallacy to be stressed at the beach. Worry disappears when your toes touch the sand.”
“I believe that. But then I don’t know if we’re ever really as happy as we were when we were six.”
“When we were six,” he says, musing on the words. “Isn’t that the name of a book?”
I elbow him. “Yes. A Winnie the Pooh book of poems. When We Were Six. I like that book. So what about you? If you could go anywhere where would it be?
“I would leave New York in a heartbeat. Put me on the next train out of here.”
“Why?”
“New York is too dirty, too smoky, too f*cking claustrophobic. I’d get on a train to Florida. To Virginia. To California. I don’t care. I’d ride it across the country and not look back.”
“You don’t like New York?”
“It’s fine. But too much shit happened here,” he mutters as he rubs his hand against the ink on his forearm. Swirling lines, tribal art, all in threes. I bet it means something to him.
“Like what, Trey?” I ask, wishing I could touch his arm gently to reassure, let him know I want to listen. “What happened here?”
He shrugs, swallows, looks away. “I don’t know,” he says in an offhand voice that makes me wonder if he’s trying to play it cool. “Crazy stuff. Things you don’t want to know.”
There are things I don’t want him to know either. Parents, family, that kind of thing. So I don’t press. I respect secrets. “It’s always that way, isn’t it? Too much happens here.”
He nods several times and even though neither one of us is admitting anything, we at least have some kind of common ground.
“Right? It’s like, is anyone ever really happy with the way they grew up?”
I shake my head. “I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s possible. I don’t understand what it would be like to be one of those kids who had a white picket fence life, you know?”
“So are we just jaded hipsters?”
“Hey! Do I look like a hipster?”
“Prepster maybe,” he teases.
“I don’t feel jaded right now.”
He smiles. “Me neither. It’s weird. But I don’t feel cynical this second. And trust me, I usually do. I usually feel like I’ve seen too much or whatever. I’m going to be totally blunt. I’m having an awesome time with you. Something about this night just feels…I don’t know…right?”
Right. Nothing I’ve ever done with a member of the opposite sex has ever been right. But yet, as butterflies swoop through me, I might be learning what the word means.
“Yes. It does. It does feel right.”
Then he tilts his head to the side, watching, waiting and the moment feels suspended, like it’s a line in the sand, and we’re going somewhere, over, under around, and I’m not sure what’s next, but we’re inching closer, our legs almost touching, our shoulders near to each other.
He taps my leg once with his fingertips, and electricity sparks across my skin. “This is better, much better, right?”
My mouth feels dry. I’m not even sure what he’s asking. Or why he’s asking. But I don’t entirely care what the question is – with him, the answer seems to be yes.
“Yes,” I say, my voice like a dry husk on a hot summer day. I wish I had water.
He inches closer, lifts his hand, and brushes a strand of hair from my face. My belly flips wildly, and holy f*ck, that feels good. Just the slightest touch and I am buzzed. I want more so I move closer. He picks up on my cues and fingers a strand of my hair, and I’m soaring with one touch. I might float off on a cloud of lust this second.
“You have nice hair. Harley,” he says and his voice is low and smoky now. Everything in me stills. Is he going to kiss me? Is that a prelude to a kiss? I have no clue how boys kiss girls when money doesn’t change hands.
But he pulls back and clearly his lips aren’t about to lock with mine. Instead, he quirks up his eyebrows. “This is going to sound crazy, but do you want to get on the train? Just ride around and talk?”
Maybe it’s crazy to get on a train with a stranger, but Trey doesn’t feel like a stranger, and for tonight he’s the closest person in my life. He knows more about me already than many people do. And that’s because I know I’ll never see him again. We can never be together. We would never work.
But I can get on a train with this guy who wants an unscripted night.
My first unplanned evening.
“That doesn’t sound the least bit crazy. Let’s go.”
We leave the coffee shop and turn onto Eighth Avenue. “So now that we’re not six and happiness isn’t about whether ice cream cones stay upright or not, do you believe in happiness anymore?” I ask him. It’s a bold question for me. I don’t usually dive into serious stuff. But I feel like that’s the point of us. To strip away the veneers.
He gives me a look like I’m crazy as I zip up my jacket.
“What do you mean? Do I believe in happiness?”
“Is it possible? Is happiness possible?”
“I don’t know. I mean, how do you define happiness? Is it some kind of euphoria? Like a high?”
A high. I know something about that. I know too much about that. I need to stop feeling high.
I shake my head. “No, the opposite. Well, not the opposite. Not sadness or depression because that sucks. But more of an even keel. A general sort of shiny, happy, serene feeling. Like all is right in the world. Like you can roll with the punches?”
We stop at the crosswalk. The light is red. Trey looks at me, his gaze honing into mine in a way that sends my blood racing. “You know what I believe in? This moment. I’m happy right now. I’m having a good time right now.”
“Me too,” I say, and my body is tingling and lit up from his words. Words that feel true and honest. Words that don’t come with a price tag or with an order. I don’t entirely know what to make of us, but it’s as if I’m spending the night in an alternate reality, one where my mom is normal, where my past is clean, where my future is bright, and where moments like this are possible. Then the light changes, and he reaches for my hand, linking his fingers through mine.
“Is this okay?” he asks in a nervous tone.
Moments that aren’t just possible. That border on perfect. Heat shoots through my body. I never knew holding hands could be so good.
“Yes. It’s more than okay.”
We walk several blocks to Penn Station, talking all the way about happiness, and music, and life, and then we head down the escalator into the train station. He buys two tickets to the eleven-thirty train to Long Island.
I’m getting on a train to frigging Long Island. But it feels like I’m in Europe. Like I met him on a train from Vienna to Paris, and we’ve agreed to spend one more day together before we go our separate ways. Because we will part. We will say goodbye. No matter how natural this night feels, it all ends in the morning.
We head to the platform as the train rumbles into the station.
“Are we going all the way to Montauk? Ride to the Hamptons?”
He shrugs. “Only if you want to.”
I shrug back. “I don’t know. Depends how interesting the train ride is.”
“I can definitely make it interesting,” he says as he squeezes my hand, his calloused fingertips pressing into my palm. His fingers feel so damn good that I hope and I wish that he’s going to kiss me on the train.