Dating Makes Perfect - Pintip Dunn Page 0,60

I hear before I fall asleep, and his face is the first one I imagine when I wake up.

But we don’t touch. Not a friendly hand on the shoulder. Not the inadvertent bumping of hips. Not even a graze of our fingers.

One day, he grabs the loop on my backpack strap, inches from my collarbone, when we turn the corner and enter an empty corridor.

“Is this private?” he murmurs.

The backpack strap rubs against my shoulder, and I imagine the pressure as his hand. “I wish.”

The look he gives me is so molten that I nearly combust.

Another day, he boxes me against a tree on the edge of the school’s property, my back pressed against the bark, his hands on the trunk on either side of my head. I’m cradled inside his embrace—but we’re not technically touching.

“What about now?” he demands. “Is this private?”

He’s so close that I can feel the warmth emanating from his skin. If I moved my hand an inch, I could feel the softness of his T-shirt against the hardness of his torso. I want—but I refrain.

“I hear people laughing on the other side of this tree,” I say.

“I can’t see them,” he retorts. “So they must not exist.”

Now it’s my turn to giggle. “You don’t see them because you’re only looking at me.”

“Let’s find an empty classroom,” he begs. “A supply closet.”

I regard him sternly, which isn’t easy, because what I really want to do is take his face between my hands and kiss him. “No, Mat. Nowhere at school is private.”

He walks his hands closer to my head, which should make no difference. An inch between us might as well be a hundred if we don’t actually touch. But his fingers brush a few strands of my hair, and the heat flares between us.

“See me outside of school, then,” he suggests.

“You know we can’t.” We’ve been over this a dozen times. My parents can’t know that our dating has crossed the line from fake into real. They can’t suspect that we’re actually interested in each other. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be allowed within a football field of one another—a restraining order à la Mama and Papa Tech.

So we just have to wait patiently until Mama arranges another date.

“Saturday,” I say. “You can wait until Saturday. That’s two days away.”

“If she sets us up then.”

“She will,” I say, more confidently than I feel. “We’ve had pretend dates each of the last two Saturdays. You know how Mama likes her routines.”

Sighing, he drops his hands from the tree, releasing me. “The least you can do is send me photos to get me through the next two days.”

“Um.” This is a new one. I’ve never—and will never—send nudes. No matter what Bunny says. “What do you mean?”

“I want one with your eyes crossed. And flat on your ass in the middle of the sidewalk, after you’ve tripped on nothing. And oh! If you can get one where you’re laughing so hard, you’re squirting milk out your nose, that would be super.”

“You’re such a dork.” I raise my hand to smack him, and he ducks out of range.

“No touching, remember?” he says, his eyes bright.

I shake my head, pretending to be exasperated, but I can’t quite stop my lips from curving. Saturday can’t come soon enough.

…

Saturday morning finally arrives, and we sit down to our monthly Family Breakfast—Mama, Papa, my sisters, and me. Well, my parents and I are at our oval kitchen table, and my sisters are in their dorm room in St. Louis, since they won’t move into their sorority house until next year. Propped at the edge of our table is an iPad, where we’ve set up the video call.

The tradition started when the twins left for college. Mama complained bitterly about missing my sisters, about the absence of family meals, about the split in our lives reflecting the fracture in her heart. So Ari proposed Family Breakfast as a way to appease her—but it’s become my favorite morning of the month.

For starters, Mama always prepares an enormous spread of khao tom (boiled rice soup) and side dishes, and today is no exception. The table is crowded with a Thai omelet, chicken stir-fried with ginger, palo (five-spice stew), deep-fried catfish, pickled mustard greens, kunchieng (Chinese sausage), and sautéed bean sprouts.

On the other side of our call, my sisters have created their own spread, although it’s much less impressive. Just regular steamed rice with various pickled vegetables from the can and a selection of store-bought nam phriks, which