Love You a Latke

Chapter 16

16

Seth’s friends didn’t have just any regular bar in mind, of course. Like Seth, they had to be a little bit extra.

“I don’t even like gingerbread,” I groused. It was relevant because I was currently surrounded by it: sheets of it spread on the rickety bar table before me; paper cutouts of gingerbread men hanging on the walls around us; even gingerbread spices flavoring Freya’s cocktail, which was sitting right next to me.

Maybe I’d protested too much about my festive gingerbread doodle. Maybe I should’ve let the gingerbread man drown.

“It doesn’t matter if you like it or not,” Seth said. “This is a gingerbread house–building event. You don’t have to eat it. You probably shouldn’t eat it, in fact, since I think it’s been sitting out all day.”

“Stale gingerbread,” I said. “Even better.”

Freya nudged me from the side with an elbow. Even though it was warm inside the bar, she’d kept on her ice blue hat, maybe because it looked so good with her eyes. “I agree with your feelings on gingerbread. It’s never as good as I want it to be.”

The thing was, I didn’t even dislike gingerbread that much. Gingerbread was fine. It was just that suddenly, after what had nearly happened between Seth and me in that alley— had something nearly happened? Was I imagining it?—the world around me seemed to have dialed the brightness up a few notches. It was like a spotlight was trained on Seth, illuminating every move he made. The way he was aware of his surroundings while walking, shifting from left to right to make sure people had enough room to pass by him. How he looked over his shoulder for me when I lagged behind the group, to make sure I hadn’t gotten lost. The way he normally slumped in his seat but, every so often, sat up straight like he’d gotten a jolt from the chair, as if he’d just heard his dad reminding him to maintain good posture or his back would hurt when he got old.

Complaining was my way of trying to revert the world back to its mean. To make me feel more at home in my skin again.

It was not working.

“We can’t come to a gingerbread house–building event and not build a gingerbread house,” Seth said, and he turned his eyes toward me, and if I met them and committed to sitting right next to him and reaching past him for pieces of decorative candy and feeling the heat of his body every time, I wasn’t sure the world would ever go back to its equilibrium.

So, as usual, I fled. Metaphorically, because I think I would’ve attracted some strange looks if I’d literally fled the bar. My metaphorical fleeing involved clamping onto Freya’s fluffy shoulder like she was the hook and I was the fish. “I already said I’d help Freya with hers,” I blurted.

Freya glanced at me sidelong. “You did?”

“Yeah, you must not have heard me.” It was believable, considering how loud it was in here; “Jingle Bells” was currently blasting from the bar speakers.

She shrugged. “Okay.”

As Freya and I gathered materials for our construction, I couldn’t stop sneaking glances over at Seth. He had, without much fuss, teamed up with Dan, and the two were currently bending their heads together over what appeared to be an experiment on how high they could build a gingerbread tower without it collapsing into a pile of cinnamon crumbs. He kept throwing his head back with laughter. I wondered what was making him laugh like that.

“Ooh, I didn’t even see the snowflake sprinkles,” Freya said, peering at the pile of candy I’d assembled. “Those will be so cute.”

“And I missed the Nerds,” I said, looking at hers. “Those will be…so cute, too.”

She didn’t seem bothered by my stealing her compliment because I hadn’t been able to think of anything else. “What do you want to build?”

“Um,” I said. “A…house?”

“No, I mean, what kind?” she said. “Usually, people decorate theirs in, like, red and green for Christmas, but maybe we could do something for Hanukkah? Since you were saying you guys kind of get the short end of the stick around the holidays.”

I was surprised at how much her words touched me. I mean, it was just a stupid gingerbread house that I didn’t care about at all, but I felt seen. “Wow. Okay, sure. That sounds cool.”

She pushed all the red and green stuff to one side, then reconsidered and picked out some green M there were two Passover seders and eight nights of Hanukkah. And two, because I wouldn’t be celebrating with my family. Seth and I could spend all of the holidays with his family. I could see it now: Bev moaning about being starving on Yom Kippur while Benjamin mused about how maybe he should try intermittent fasting every day; Bev making Seth sing the Four Questions every year at Passover because he was the youngest person at the table and telling him that if he no longer wanted to be the youngest he was welcome to make someone younger.

I glanced back at Seth again. He and Dan had managed to construct a wobbly tower that was at least two feet high; Seth’s shoulder flexed as he reached up to stick a gumdrop on the roof.

“How’s the fake relationship going?” Freya said in my ear. My eyes instinctually darted around to make sure nobody had overheard, but she’d judged correctly; the music was too loud. “Is it weird that I’m rooting for you guys?”

“Rooting for what?” Somehow the mischief in her voice didn’t point toward the answer being to pull a successful one over on Bev and Benjamin .

Her eyes twinkled, not unlike Santa Claus in every Christmas movie ever. “No reason.”

That was clearly a lie, but I didn’t want to push it. Okay, that was also a lie—I did want to push it, but something was stopping me. Maybe I was afraid of hearing the answer.

So I changed the subject. “Are you dating anyone right now?”

She glued a gumdrop to the wall of our house with frosting, then grimaced as it fell right off, displacing a Life Savers candy porthole (we’d decided our house would have portholes rather than windows, because they were a lot easier to make). “Ugh, dating in New York is the worst. I swear they’re holding a Worst Guys Ever convention at the Javits every week. That’s the only thing to explain the quality of my matches.” She shrugged. “But it’s okay. I have enough going on where a boyfriend would probably just complicate things anyway.” She cocked her head. “Unless you know anyone you want to set me up with?”

I snorted. “Fat chance there.” The only guys I knew well enough for that were my fake boyfriend and my ex-boyfriend.

“Have you dated much? Like, for real, I mean?” she asked, and her voice was so nonjudgmental, I found myself spilling the whole story of my relationship with Connor, from those painful stand-up days to our even more painful breakup.

Somehow, among all the word vomit, I found it in myself to marvel at how good she was at listening. She gave sympathetic nods at all the right times, frowned angrily at the moments where Connor was a douche, made mmm s of agreement when I told her what I’d done and said in response. It was a skill I’d never had. I was not the sympathetic café worker who listened to all her customers’ problems and gave them free coffee when they’d had an especially bad day; I was the problem they talked about.

The funny thing about growing up with parents like mine is that I became hyperaware of how the people around me were acting and listening and behaving so that I could be careful not to set them off by doing anything bad, but I never got to figure out the right way to do things instead.

But it didn’t seem to bother Freya that I wasn’t reacting properly, whatever reacting properly meant, which was another thing that touched me. “What a douchebag,” she said. “Good riddance to him.”

I had no idea why that made me so defensive. Connor had called me a frigid bitch, for god’s sake. “I don’t know. It wasn’t totally his fault.”

“There’s no excuse for the things he said to you, whether or not you were a good fit as a couple,” she said firmly. Then cracked a smile. “You deserve better. Can you hand me one of those boxes of Nerds? I’m going to make a gravel path to the front door.”

I handed over a box of Nerds, thankful that she hadn’t lingered on the nice thing she’d said to me. Compliments made me want to puke.

As she laid out a winding rainbow path that looked like something a fairy might walk down, she launched into some stories of recent first dates, one of which was apparently a taxidermy enthusiast who’d worn a stuffed mouse on his shirt like a brooch. “I thought it was real at first. Like, that a real mouse was crawling up his shirt. I screamed and jumped away from the table, and the table next to us saw it, too, and after that, forget it. It was a stampede.” She paused and considered. “He was very nice, though. Are my standards too low?”

After what she’d said to me earlier about deserving better, I felt we’d crossed into that level of friendship (?) where I could be honest. “Sorry, but maybe.”

I braced myself for her to get insulted, but she only sighed good-naturedly. “And that’s not even mentioning the guy who came prepared with a questionnaire aimed at finding out how fertile I am.”

Soon enough, our gingerbread house was finished. Freya handed over the tube of frosting with the smallest tip. “You do the honors.”

Bending forward and squinting like I was competing at the highest levels of latte art (a real competition I’d once entertained the thought of entering before realizing I couldn’t afford the time off and the travel), I frosted a tiny menorah into our house’s front porthole. It was so small you could barely see it, but that was okay. Freya and I would both know it was there.

I backed off feeling satisfied, but a crash from behind us told me my fake boyfriend wasn’t doing quite as well. Seth and Dan’s tower had finally collapsed like a Jenga game, scattering their table with gingery debris and smashed bits of candy. Both Seth and Dan were laughing, showing they weren’t too devastated. Seth glanced back at me, mid-laugh, and our eyes met.

Before I could think about it, I leaned in and went to pat him on the back, but somehow that pat on the back turned into a half hug, but he turned just as I was squeezing him to make it into a full hug. My mind blanked for a moment as he held me close, the heat of his body as cozy as a fireplace on a cold day, and then I was right back there at the festival, the smell of hot chocolate on his breath, his lips so close to mine…

I pulled away, cheeks hot. He looked down at me for a second with what might have been concern, but Dan slapped him on the back and pulled him away to demonstrate how they’d reacted to the falling of the tower for Kylie, who must have missed it. That gave me the opportunity to back away and rejoin Freya, who was also looking at me with something like concern. “I just want to make sure you know it’s okay,” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

“If there’s something there,” she said, waving her hand vaguely in the air, but I knew exactly what she meant. If there was something there between Seth and me. Something more than a fake relationship.

I opened my mouth, ready to tell her that she had nothing to worry about, but the words stalled in my throat. Because I hadn’t totally imagined what had happened between us at the festival, had I? Not that look in his eye, not how close he was leaning toward me, and definitely not how much I wanted him to lean all the way in.

Oh. This was very, very dangerous. I couldn’t have feelings for someone like Seth. He’d crack me right open and throw away the key.

Besides, I’d learned that being in a relationship with me was too hard. He’d learn that, too, after a little while, and we’d have a terrible breakup like Connor and me, and I’d lose my friend. My friend who I cared about.

And maybe wanted to kiss.

I took a deep, shaky breath. “I think our Hanukkah house turned out really nice. If I was a gingerbread man, I’d totally live there.”

She eyed me for an extra moment before responding. “Sure. I would, too.”

And so I busied myself for the rest of the night with creating a tiny gingerbread friend with a kippah and tzitzit, spending all my effort working on something that would go poof when the night was over.

Not that that was a metaphor for anything in my real life.