Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [67]
Forty minutes later, Tommy bounded off the stage, sweaty and smelling of beer and cigarette smoke. I introduced them, and my brother and Darren exchanged “hey, mans” and handshakes. Then I asked Darren to excuse us and walked Tommy to the bar, where I pulled Kate Klein’s folder out of my purse. “It’s about India,” I hollered into my brother’s ear. Tommy looked inside the folder for a minute, then looked over at the blonde in a ridiculously tiny T-shirt making eyes at him from the corner. After a minute, he sighed and pushed his beer at me. I pushed it right back.
“You know what, Betts?” His voice was raspy after shouting into the microphone. “This is none of our business.”
I drew back as if he’d slapped me. “Of course it’s our business! He’s being used. This woman is taking advantage of him.” My voice trailed off. Tommy patted my shoulder the way he would a puppy’s head. “Let it go,” he whispered in my ear. Then he lifted his head. “Hey, you and Derek want to hang out?”
I glared at him. “His name is Darren. And it is two o’clock in the morning, so no, we do not want to hang out.” He shrugged. I watched him go, standing like I was frozen on the sticky floor of the bar in Hoboken—Hoboken! I’d gone all the way to Hoboken!—before pushing the folder into my bag and stomping out the door in the jeans I’d bought for the occasion. Not that they made any difference. Even my jeans were wrong—too loose, too new, too dark, the wrong cut, the wrong brand, the wrong something.
“Hey, you okay?” Darren asked, following me into the darkness, toward the train that would take us back to the city. I could feel sweat gluing my blouse to the small of my back, where I would never have a tattoo. “Not great,” I’d said.
“Can I help?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Thank you for coming,” I said. We rode home in silence. He escorted me up the subway stairs, bought me a bottle of water at the Korean grocery store on my corner, and walked me to my door.
“If you want to talk about it . . .” He looked sweet and hopeful, even cute, if you could ignore the glasses, but all I wanted was to be alone.
“I don’t,” I said. He handed me the water. Then he set his hands on my shoulders. Surprised, I stumbled backward, catching my heel on the curb. I would have fallen if he hadn’t been holding me . . . but, of course, if he hadn’t been holding me I wouldn’t have tripped in the first place. Then, just like that, his lips were on mine, warm and gentle, and he’d pulled my body against his so that we were chest to chest, hip to hip. In that instant, I wasn’t hot, wasn’t tired, wasn’t irritated at the way the night had gone or worried about how exhausted I’d be the next day. I wanted to keep kissing him, to have him keep kissing me, even though I’d never approved of couples who kissed on the street. Then, as suddenly as he’d started, he stopped, releasing my shoulders, stepping back onto the sidewalk. “Betsy,” he said.
“Don’t call me that.”
“Tina?”
“Family only.”
“Betts?”
“Only if I get to call you Dare.”
He grinned, tipped an imaginary hat, and set off in the direction of the subway, hands in his pockets, whistling.
Upstairs, I got out of my clothes and into the shower and stood there, letting the cool water wash over me. It was almost three in the morning, and I’d met with nothing but frustration as I’d tried to make my family see the absurdity of what my father and India were attempting ... but still I fell asleep with a smile.
The following weekend I went to the one person I thought would see the gravity of the situation; I made my first trip ever to my mother’s ashram. I booked a ticket to New Mexico and flew out from LaGuardia on Saturday morning. I rented a car at the airport and followed the GPS’s directions through forty-five miles of blasted-looking desert interrupted by gas stations, the occasional casino, and clusters of Native Americans