Rae swatted him with the ladle.
It was mid-May now. After weeks of silence, Dustin had texted Rae asking if she wanted to come over for dinner with his friends John and Jenn, one of the engaged couples Rae had met at the Christmas party. Rae had agreed and thought it better to call the gathering a dinner party, which it nearly was, than a double date, which it barely wasn’t.
It was just Rae and Dustin right now, plus Phyllis the philodendron, alive and well in the window, sprawling wide but not tall.
Rae had written a list of things she planned to ask him—why he kept shutting her out in long stretches, if he’d still been going to therapy, whether he might reconsider his anti-meds philosophy, how his dark thoughts now compared to what he’d felt last year, what she could do to better support him, etc. The index card was folded in the pocket of her jeans. But now, looking into his hazel eyes, bright tonight, she didn’t want to teeter the balance of the evening.
“Close your eyes and open your mouth,” Dustin said.
A hopeful fear or fearful hope passed that she would feel his lips on hers. Instead, she tasted marinara.
“You don’t like it?” Dustin asked.
“It’s good,” she said, opening her eyes. “Distinctive.”
“My grandmother’s recipe,” Dustin said. “A dash of cinnamon as the secret ingredient.”
“Cinnamon,” Rae repeated, wondering how his grandmother had realized this unlikely pairing belonged together.
She set the table, folding the napkins into crisp triangles. Dustin made a batch of margaritas. She remembered how he’d said drinking worsened his depression but stayed quiet as she salted the rims, following instructions she’d found online—turn the glasses upside down and dip them in lemon juice before the salt to make it stick. They drank in the kitchen, taking turns stirring the sauce.
“They’re here,” Dustin said, when the apartment buzzer rang. As an afterthought, he added, “They might think we’re dating.”
Rae’s margarita sloshed. She hoped she hadn’t misheard him. “And why might they think that?”
“I think they just assumed.”
Even more than she liked their assumption, she liked that Dustin hadn’t debunked it. “Why didn’t you set them straight?” she asked in a way that she hoped would open the door to him opening up about his feelings.
Dustin looked down at the rim of his glass, which had already shed most of its salt. “I guess I didn’t want to.”
The sentence sounded like a full song. Rae tried to temper her expectations and remind herself that Dustin wasn’t better yet so they couldn’t be together yet, but her expectations soared upward anyway, higher and higher until she was flying in that marshmallow-cloud dreamland she’d thought they wouldn’t reach for a while yet.
And just like that, their carefully defined friendship lines blurred into the romantic sector. She wanted to spin him around right there in the kitchen, leap into his arms and kiss him.
Instead, she made herself walk to the door to let in their guests.
“Your fettuccini was a hit,” Dustin said, loading the dishwasher after John and Jenn had left. “You’ve mastered the art of al dente.”
He’d draped his arm around her as the four of them had talked in the kitchen, discussing the short list of wedding venues for John and Jenn’s upcoming nuptials, and even as they’d eaten, he’d kept a hand on Rae’s knee.
She hadn’t put her hand on top of his, but she hadn’t moved it, either. It had been easy, delightfully easy, to pretend they were a couple, to picture them following in John and Jenn’s footsteps and getting engaged in a couple years, tying the knot at the charming chalet upstate that Jenn had shown photos of, and going on fabulous double dates every week with their married friends, just like a movie.
But as much as Rae held on to hope that this might be their future, she was forced to acknowledge that it wasn’t their present or anything close to it. There had been a ruinous whisper in Rae’s ear all through the meal, cautioning her that perhaps Dustin wasn’t actually professing his love to her at all, that maybe he was just using her as his fake girlfriend so he wouldn’t feel left out with his friends.
She willed these fears to be nothing but overdramatic party crashers, but she wanted to hear it straight from him to be reassured. “So we’re dating now?” she asked, as nonchalantly as she could, trying to keep him from clamping up.
He clamped up anyway. Rae saw it in the way his whole jaw hardened and his eyes looked cut from the same stone. “You know we’re not,” he said.
The words scraped her from top to bottom, then bottom to top. She was left with the raw sensation that she was a pawn in a game of chess she didn’t know the rules to. “Then why were you acting like it?” she asked.
“I’m sorry,” he said, in a disapproving voice that seemed directed inward more than outward. “I just thought it would be easier to go along with it.”
“Easier?” Rae asked, sure she’d never done anything harder than preserving this fragile friendship act.
Dustin kept his head down as he answered. “It won’t happen again.”
She probably wouldn’t have been brave enough to say anything more if she hadn’t had multiple margaritas, but she had. “You can’t ignore my texts and calls and then use me as a prop so your friends think you’re living some blissful, coupled-up life,” she said, all in one breath so she wouldn’t pause and lose her resolve.
