“Well, then, it turns out you don’t really know me, do you?”
She straightened a little. “Do you feel like you know me?”
“I see what you’re doing there, Samira.”
“What?”
He winced as his tweezers closed in on a black speck buried in the pulp. “I’m supposed to say, ‘Aye, I feel like I really know you,’ so you can turn around and say, ‘Then why is it so hard to believe that I could know you, too?’”
“Sodoyou?” she said.
“It’s a funny thing, Samira. You don’t say much—unless you’re obsessing about your fears and then,whoa—but I get the feeling you’re not trying to hide anything from anybody. It’s just the way you are. But me—nobody’s ever accused me of being quiet. I talk a lot but...”
“You don’t let people in.”
“It’s not something I’m comfortable with. Nothing personal.”
“Because you’re worried that if they get too close they might realize you’re human and not this kick-ass doctor-soldier guy?”
“I am a kick-ass doctor-soldier guy.”
“You are. But you’re also human.”
“Human? Don’t be ridiculous.”
She let out a huff. “And I see what you’re doing. You’re making this into a game of joke tennis.”
“Joke tennis?”
“Where you lob a comment and I lob a comment and it feels like we’re getting along well and having a lovely time but when you think back you realize it was all superficial and just your way of shutting things down without seeming rude.”
He got ahold of the black thing and yanked. “Got the fucker!” he said, holding up a tiny metal shard. “I love tennis.”
“You see? You just did it.”
He looked at her face, shielding his eyes from the flashlight app. “Jesus, I did, didn’t I?”
“Let me guess,” she said, raising her chin in that way she did when she was confident about something. Her eyes looked smoky beyond the circle of light from her phone. “When things went wrong in your life, you had no one to fall back on, no one to turn to, because you were the guy with a million friends, the most popular guy in the room, but not one of those people truly knew you because you were scared to let anyone see that you had flaws. You were the class clown because people liked you that way, and you learned to give them what they wanted, and not what they didn’t want—what youthoughtthey didn’t want. The real you.”
“Whoa. You might have to write all that down.” Blood dribbled down his arm. He wiped it, and peered into the mirror. There had to be more than one sliver of metal, with all that pain. “Anyway, I’m a guy. I don’t feel the need to have deep and meaningful conversations with my... What do you call them? My BFFs.”
“Everyone needs someone, even just one person. Look, I don’t let many people in either but I can say that the truly close friends I’ve had, including Latif... I let them know the real me and they let me know the real them, flaws and all. And knowing they had insecurities, too, knowing they’d made mistakes, knowing they were fallible, they were imperfect... It didn’t everlowermy opinion of them—it brought us closer. And it meant I could help them when they were struggling and vice versa. Which brought us still closer.” She lowered her voice. “Who helped you when you were struggling, Jamie? Because I’m guessing there was a point in your life that you really struggled. Who did you turn to?”
He swallowed. He’d kept his mouth shut and hightailed it to France. Plenty of his “friends” had known he was using—people whose best interests were served by keeping quiet. He couldn’t talk to his parents about it, obviously. Nicole wouldn’t have understood. She was up to her ears in young children and had never knowingly taken a risk in her life—except unprotected sex as a teenager, obviously. And Samira was right—he hadn’t wanted the shame of facing anybody who knew how fucked up he really was.
“I can hear you thinking, Jamie.”
He chuckled. “I see what you’re doing there.”
She turned to him and laid a finger lightly on his lips. “No tennis. Just talk. No matter how this mess turns out, we probably won’t see each other again.”
We probably won’t see each other again.The truth hurt ten times worse than shrapnel.
“But,” she continued, “why not get some practice at making a friend—a real friend? Who would I tell?” She lifted her finger.
“You’d better sterilize that again,” he said, nodding at her finger. “You don’t know where my lips have been. Well, actually, you d—”
The finger went back on, firmer this time, stifling a laugh he didn’t feel. He glimpsed a parallel universe in which he pulled it aside, pushed her against the tiled wall, took her in a fierce kiss, stripped her clothes off, got the shower running...
