I freeze. I’d honestly forgotten about that until now. “I didn’t have time to make it.”
“It’s my fault. I should have brewed it myself before you left the apartment this morning.”
“This morning?” Jimmy mouths to Carlos.
Blade shoots a sharp look Nat’s way.
“Do you still have a headache?” Nat asks, seemingly oblivious to my mechanics’ increasing discomfort.
“Just a little, but it’s manageable.”
“I’ll buy you some Tylenol.”
“You don’t have that long for lunch, Nat.”
“I don’t care if I have to starve. I don’t like the thought of you in pain, Riles.”
“It’s really not that bad,” I assure him.
Carlos drops his fork into his tamales. “Are you two going to keep being like this? You’re ruining my mother’s tamales.”
Jimmy shushes him half-heartedly, but I can tell that he agrees.
Nat and I exchange looks.
“I have a question,” Jimmy says, staring at us.
“You can have all the questions you want. We can choose whether or not we want to answer,” I warn him.
Jimmy waves away my words. “When you said you two were ‘like brother and sister’, did you really mean that you’re childhood sweethearts? Is this some kind of ‘arranged marriage at birth’ deal?”
“We weren’t childhood sweethearts,” I say.
“Riley was twelve when I was eighteen,” Nat frowns. “So that wouldn’t be right either.”
“I had a childhood sweetheart,” Carlos says, taking a big bite of his tamales. “Gloria.” He says her name reverently. “She had the longest, black hair and the shiniest eyes. They say your firstlove is special and they were right. I still think about her from time to time.”
“I had a crush on this girl at summer camp,” Jimmy confesses. “But I never told her how I felt. I went back to the camp the next year determined to tell her, but she never came back. I went there four years in a row looking for her before I eventually gave up.”
“That’s so sweet,” I say and then I wipe the corner of my mouth with a napkin.
Normally, I’d tear into a meal like this, but Nat is here and I can’t bring myself to be as messy as usual.
“If Riley wasn’t your first love, who was?” Blade asks, staring darkly at Nat. He hasn’t touched his food yet.
Nat lifts one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. “Probably someone from school.”
“You don’t remember?” Blade scoffs. “I don’t believe that.”
“First loves aren’t something I romanticize.”
The fork, that was about halfway to my mouth, freezes.
“How can you call someone your ‘first love’ when you’re that young?” Nat argues, glancing at me and nodding as if he’s making a point that he’s sure I’ll agree with. “You don’t know who you are at that age and the other person doesn’t know who they are either. It’s like falling in love with a half-finished painting. Can you say that’s love when you don’t even see the full picture?”
I swallow hard.
“Maybe it’s not love in that sense, but it’s strong, man. First loves are special,” Carlos argues.
