Can't Think Straight:. Kiri Blakeley
belongings. I rouse myself enough to get in a couple of digs at him.
“I met an A&R guy last night,” I say. “Ordinarily, I would have told him about your band. But I told him about a different one instead.” Aaron swallows this in silence.
I pick up the International Baptist Church flyer the Bible thumpers had left under the door that morning.
“Babe, you might want this,” I say, brandishing the flyer with its “God Loves You” message printed on the front. “You could use God in your life.”
No reaction. Aaron is nothing if not good at shutting down.
Once his stuff is ready, he stands by the door, looking at me with his tender brown eyes. I’m not sure if they reflect love or pity. I’m sad and steely at the same time. He moves in to kiss me goodbye and I feel his lips for what might be the last time ever, who knows.
After he leaves, I walk in tight circles around the apartment, trying to catch my breath.
That night, I go out with Jocelyn, a friend from college, to Cafe Improv to see a comedienne friend of hers perform. I thought I handily won the award for most juicy life at the moment, but Jocelyn doesn’t ask many questions about my situation. She’s too focused on her own boyfriend issues: he makes no money; she pays for everything; he’s leaving for the summer to work in a little theater in Rhode Island. How any of this was remotely as interesting as my gay boyfriend I didn’t know, but I was tired of talking about myself anyway.
We meet up with her comedienne friend at McGee’s, a nearby pub. But after a while, I’m restless. I’d had ten years of conversation with my friends, and I’d have ten more. What I hadn’t had in ten years was male attention I was free to reciprocate, and it was all I craved right now. These girls weren’t interested in flirting.
I step outside and call Julie. “Why are you home?” I ask. “Isn’t Jake out of town and you should be out getting into trouble?” Then I apologize. It’s the kind of thing Jake probably fears I’m saying to Julie when he’s out of town.
“Don’t be ridiculous. I was planning on going out anyway. I’m meeting some friends at Loki first, then Gate.”
Loki—where I keep running into Rahil. The evening is looking up.
Julie tells me she’ll already be at Gate by the time I get back into Brooklyn, but I direct the cab to Loki anyway. Fuck it. I’m looking for him. I admit it.
Inside the dim bar, a man passes me and we lock eyes, recognition taking a moment to sink in. We laugh. It’s Rahil. I stammer something about looking for Julie, but maybe, now that I think twice about it, she’s somewhere else.
He tells me he’s headed into the city to see his friend, who is visiting from London, but he doesn’t seem in a rush to leave.
At Gate, Julie is surprised to see Rahil trailing me, and we chuckle over the “coincidence” of it. I don’t volunteer that it was self-determined.
Julie moves to a back table.
“I think she’s giving us some alone time,” Rahil says.
“Alone for what?” I ask, moving my hand to his waist.
Within moments, he’s on his BlackBerry, telling his friend to meet him in Brooklyn instead.
We make out at the bar. We move to the back table and make out there. Rahil’s friend from London arrives and we ignore him and make out. People come and go and still we make out. I go to the bathroom and return and we make out even more intensely because I’d been away for two minutes. We joke about my bothering to put on lipstick, because he’s going to eat it off anyway. If he turns for a moment to speak to someone, I suck on his earlobe. If I talk to someone, his hand travels to the inside of my thigh or up the back of my shirt. It’s that kind of thing, the thing that when you’re in a good, solid, long-term relationship, makes you want to cheat. It’s better than sex—it’s the anticipation of sex.
Luckily, Julie’s with me that night. Any of my other friends would have lost their stomach for it and left by now.
Someone brings up the idea of relationships, what men and women want from each other.
“Women want safety,” says Julie, who writes about sex for magazines and has lots of theories on the topic.
“I just want heterosexuality,” I volunteer. “It’s my one requirement right now.”
“Don’t you think what you want out of a person changes depending on where you are in your life?” Rahil asks, reasonably enough.
“No!” Julie snaps. “Women want safety.”
“I agree with Rahil,” I announce, thumbing his palm. I’d agree with whatever the fucker had to say right now. There was WMD in Iraq? You said it, buddy. Nuclear war has its advantages? Sure enough, pal.
At four in the morning, Rahil and I are alone on the couches downstairs in the dark recesses of a different bar. Everyone else had gradually drifted away. Rahil’s hand is up my shirt and under my bra.
I decide I’m going to tell this person whatever I’m thinking at any moment in time. Games are for long-term relationships. I don’t have to play games with this one.
“You’re goddamn sexy,” I say. “I love your eyes.”
“I think we should still meet up tomorrow,” he says, referring to our plan to “play pool” on Sunday.
“You might be sick of kissing me by then.”
“Kiri, I am only going to say this once, so you better listen. I am dead attracted to you. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t. And I am not going to get sick of kissing you. So if you want to meet up, let’s meet up. And stop thinking so much.”
I push him off me, sit up, and meet his gaze. “I want to be totally honest with you about something,” I say. “I am not ready for any kind of relationship and it sounds like you aren’t either.”
Somewhere during our nights together it had come out that Rahil’s ex-girlfriend was in the process of moving out of his apartment. “She likes to do her thing and I like to do mine,” was the only explanation he’d offered. I didn’t want or need to know more.
I continue: “I just want that out there, because I know how guys are. They think all women are dying to marry them and start spitting out their babies. And that’s not the case here. You are free to do what you want and so am I. So don’t freak out if I call you, and I won’t freak out if you call me.”
“You won’t fall in love with me, and I won’t fall in love with you. I get it.”
I cover his eyes while I kiss him. “Have you ever been blindfolded?”
He laughs, as if I’d asked if he’d ever watched television. “Of course I have!”
When the bar shuts down, we get kicked out. I hadn’t been out this late in God knows when. I’d forgotten what the color of light looks like this early in the morning: glassy gray.
“Can I at least show you the outside of my apartment?” Rahil asks.
“I am not going up to your apartment.”
“I know. I just want to show it to you.”
We walk a block and he points to it. “See? The one with the fire escape.”
When the sight of his fire escape doesn’t get me any closer to coming upstairs, he hails me a cab.
I call Rahil late in the afternoon to beg off meeting him. One, I have another nauseating hangover. Two, I’m worried we’re going to overdose on each other. I want to keep up the excitement and mystery. But he’s the most persuasive man in the world. Or maybe it’s easy