her the line he’d fed to every other person who had asked, then thought better of it. He wanted to be honest with Shea.
“My mother,” he said, then paused for seconds, not knowing where to start. “My mother overate. Not only that, she died of a heart attack when she was thirty-five.”
Shea nodded, listening intently.
“I turned thirty-five in June,” he said.
Understanding dawned in Shea’s eyes. “So you’re paranoid,” she concluded.
He nodded and portioned out another forkful of cake. “Yeah.”
He took another large bite, because the cake really was amazing and he didn’t mind eating with Shea, even if his morbid thoughts had infiltrated their conversation. Something about being with her made him feel everything would be alright. At least if he had a heart attack right then in that moment, he’d die happy.
“I grew up overeating,” he continued between bites. “Delilah and I were fat kids and we didn’t need to be. Learning how to eat right wasn’t something I figured out ‘til I was an adult.”
Shea nodded and chewed around her own bite, something she tended to do rather slowly, which gave her an air of deep thinking.
“I grew up overeating too.” Shea revealed after a minute. “My family was all, “food is love,” which it is, but that’s not a license to go crazy. The only reason why I wasn’t heavy was because of how much I worked. I was up and down stairs and waiting tables on my feet. Same thing when I moved to New York—that first year, I walked a lot.”
Dev got that, too. Becoming athletic as an adult had a lot to do with controlling his weight.
“I think once my birthday comes and goes and I don’t drop dead…” Dev smiled at his own choice of words. “I think it’ll stop messing me up. Delilah says I’m going through a phase.”
“Food is complicated,” she said, as if somebody had to.
Both of their voices had gone soft.
“So if you don’t get your love from food, where do you get it from?” she asked a minute later with a little smile.
“Music. It pretty much saved my life. My mom loved Stevie Wonder. My mom also loved James Taylor and Lou Reed, but after she died, I needed something that reminded me of her that didn’t’ make it worse. You can’t listen to Overjoyed or Isn’t She Lovely and want to kill yourself. Music is where I get my love.”
She smiled in a way that told him she liked the idea. “Have you ever seen him in concert?” she asked.
Dev scoffed. “Like, twenty times. That’s one thing I miss about the city.”
There was something he’d been wondering.
“Do you miss it? The city, I mean.”
She threw him a sad smile. “I miss the food. Where else can you get a bagel for breakfast, borscht for lunch and doro wat for dinner?”
Dev chose that moment to bridge the gap between them. When he reached his hand out across the back of the sofa, she took it. They threaded fingers and there was something familiar about the gesture, as if holding one another was where their hands belonged.
“I miss the smell of food—all the street vendors and holes in the wall and kiosks in the park…it’s all about the sensual pleasures, you know?”
Dev raised an eyebrow. “Is it, now?”
She didn’t break his gaze. “It is.”
“Music comes with sensual pleasures, you know.” He mentioned. “Not just the auditory ones.”
Dancing was an underrated art, and one that Dev was good at—yet another thing he had learned in his mother’s house. They’d danced to everything from Elvis Presley to Elvis Costello. He remembered spinning around the living room with her as a child small enough to be carried on her hip, then her teaching him how to dance with girls when he was older.
Dev stood and held his hand out, waiting for her to accept. Something stirred inside him when she did. Coming in half next to her, half behind her, he slid an arm around her waist. He guided them behind where they’d sat on the sofa to the wide-open area of the floor and collected her in his arms.
And, there it was: the feeling of rightness that defied all sanity and logic. Except, this time it was stronger than ever before. Dev had been on dates. He had danced with women. He’d come out of dry spells and known what it felt like to wet his whistle. But this…this, he had never done.
The music was just right. The first song was