Page 71 of Knights Like These
“Yeah?”
“Don’t fish.”
“I’m not fishing. I’m, uh—” He picks up his water glass, takes a sip, and sets it down. “I’m nervous.”
“You’re nervous.”
“Yeah.”
“Archer Lockwood, starting goalie for the New York Knights—a man who stands in front of ninety-mile-an-hour slap shots for a living—is nervous about dinner.”
“Those are pucks. This is you. You’re scarier than pucks.”
The wine arrives, and the waiter pours it. We both take a sip at the same time, and I watch him over the rim of my glass. He’swatching me back. We’re two people who know everything about each other, sitting in a dim restaurant, trying to figure out how to be on a first date when that first date is approximately a decade overdue.
“This is weird,” I say.
“It’s a little weird.”
“We should just be normal.”
“Agreed.”
“Tell me something I don’t know about you.”
He thinks. “Can’t. I’m pretty sure you know everything about me.”
He smiles, and the weirdness melts away. We order food—he gets the bolognese, I get the cacio e pepe—and we talk the way we’ve always talked, easy and winding, bouncing between serious and silly. He tells me about a rookie hazing tradition involving duct tape that I’m fairly certain violates several labor laws. I tell him about Maryann’s new move at the senior center, which involves a hip thrust that Gerald tried to copy and ended up throwing out his back.
His phone buzzes on the table. He flips it over.
Logan:Lily informed me that I’m doing bedtime wrong. She says the moon nightlight goes on BEFORE the overhead light goes off. I have been corrected.
He shows me the screen, and I laugh. Then another text comes through.
Logan:Also, Luke asked me if I know what the largest invertebrate is. I said a squid. He said “close” and then didn’t tell me the answer. Is he always like this?
Archer:Yes. The answer is the colossal squid. Don’t tell him I told you.
Logan:Too late. He’s disappointed in me.
I’m laughing hard enough that the couple at the next table glances over, and Archer is grinning. The candle flickersbetween us, our knees touching under the table. I don’t know when that happened, but neither of us is moving.
The food arrives. We eat. He steals a bite of my cacio e pepe, and I steal a bite of his bolognese. Neither of us acknowledges that we’re sharing food because we’ve always shared food, except now his fork is in my pasta, and his eyes are on my mouth. Sharing food means something different when you’ve had someone’s tongue in your mouth forty-eight hours ago.
“Can I ask you something?” he says, twirling spaghetti around his fork.
“You’re going to anyway.”
“When did you know? About, uh—about me. About how you felt.”
I set my fork down. “Freshman year. You came back to ballet class after Christmas break, and you’d grown like three inches over the holidays. You couldn’t do any of the combinations because your legs were too long, and you were so frustrated. I was showing you the tendu for the hundredth time when you looked at me and said, ‘I’m never going to get this.’ I said, ‘Yes, you will,’ and you believed me.” I take a sip of wine. “Your eyes met mine, and I felt this—I don’t know, zing. That’s when I knew. Because you believed me when I said you could do something you thought you couldn’t, and I thought, this is the person I want to believe in me for the rest of my life.”
He’s quiet. His fork is still, with pasta wound around it, forgotten.
“Your turn,” I say. “When did you know?”
“I’m still figuring that out.”
