Perfect Tunes - Emily Gould Page 0,55
don’t know. Is that so unrealistic?”
Matt shrugged. “Maybe not for you. You seem like the kind of person who makes stuff happen, even though you get in your own way a lot. I’m the kind of person who is just satisfied to watch other people make stuff happen. For which I thank my lucky stars every day.” He smiled at her. “I have to say, it’s a trip to be around someone like you. I mean, I’m really enjoying it. I hope it doesn’t ruin it that I just said that.”
Laura couldn’t resist the opportunity to insult herself again. “Someone as fucked up as me?”
This time, he took the bait; he would have been an idiot not to. “Someone as cool and smart and … uh, as beautiful. As you,” he said quietly. They both looked to make sure the girls weren’t looking at them, and then, as she’d known he was going to for a few minutes already, he furtively leaned over and kissed her.
Just once, no tongue. But it wasn’t a friendly, reassuring back-pat of a kiss. It was a real kiss, and to the extent that Laura could stop herself from worrying immediately about what to do about it and how she might explain it to Marie if she had happened to be watching, Laura enjoyed it.
They sat back and made sure they had gotten away with it.
“Do you guys want to come over for dinner?” Matt asked after a minute. “We’re going to order pizza and watch a movie.”
“Are you sure it wouldn’t make your life harder?” Laura said, watching the girls run as an excuse to avoid eye contact with Matt. She was afraid that if she looked at him she would start laughing and lose her nerve.
“It would make it easier,” he said. It would make Laura’s life easier, too, she thought. She sat and watched while he rounded the girls up to go.
* * *
Laura ordered the burger, and Matt ordered the mac and cheese, which were the things you were supposed to order at DuMont. It was the known fancy restaurant of their neighborhood, but Laura had never been there before. She had never actually been on a “date” in New York during the four years she’d lived there; this had occurred to her only as she was getting ready to go on this date with Matt. She had been on dates in college and high school, but they seemed to have taken place during a previous lifetime. What she’d done with Dylan had involved meeting at places, usually his apartment, but restaurants had never been involved. The babysitter had asked her when she’d be home and she’d been briefly flummoxed. It was possible that she would go back to Matt’s after this, but it also seemed so gross to have to tacitly tell Caroline that she would be home at either ten or midnight, depending on whether she ended up getting laid. She’d said she would call to check in and left it at that.
The waiter left, and Laura tried to just relax and have a normal conversation without constantly monitoring the fluctuating levels of her attraction to Matt, and worse, the likelihood that he was doing the same thing. The date had been his idea, which was reassuring. She kept losing track of what they were talking about because she was staring at his face, the shape of his shoulders and the way he sipped his wine, the way he held his wineglass, evaluating the erotic potential in each feature, each gesture. The way he sipped was greedy in a way that could have seemed gross but wasn’t; he had big, full lips, and at one point, briefly, she saw the tip of his tongue flick unintentionally against the rim of the glass. It had been so long since she’d had sex that the whole enterprise seemed kind of improbable and disgusting. But there was also the possibility that once presented with the opportunity she’d actually feel ravenous, insatiable, like when you go too long without eating and don’t actually feel hunger anymore until you’re presented with a plate of food. She forced herself to snap back to attention.
“Delaware,” he was saying. “Like, the very most boring place in the world. Do you even have a stereotype in your mind about what people from Delaware are like?”
Laura thought about it. “Not into paying sales tax?”
Matt laughed, a little too long and hard, but still sincerely, and Laura felt her whole