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I smiled widely at her. She blushed as we walked along.
“Any other details I should know?” she asked. She took on the haughty tone of a daytime soap opera star. “Tell me about my character. What’s my motivation for this scene?”
I chuckled. “Your motivation is you want to procreate with all of this.” I gestured down at my body.
“Oh, so we want kids?” she asked.
I pointed. “You do. I’m going to need some convincing, but eventually I’ll cave because I want to make you happy.”
“How sweet of you.”
“That’s at least two years into our marriage,” I added. “We’ve got a lot of traveling to do before then. First our honeymoon cruise along the Seine River, then hopping along the coastal cities on the Mediterranean. You want to spend more time in Italy, but I convince you that the Greek islands are a better use of our time, and in the end you admit I’m right.”
She glanced up at me while we waited to cross the street. “You’ve thought pretty hard about this, huh?”
I realized that I’d elaborated a bit too much. That was the kind of future I fantasized about when I was bored. With whoever my wife would someday be, not Nadia.
But imagining it with Nadia copied-and-pasted into the role was easy. It felt right. I’d always been the kind of guy who struggled with commitment. I threw myself into relationships with an addictive personality, and then got burned out and sick of the person after a few weeks. That was the bigger reason why my parents thought I was gay: because I never dated women long enough to bring them home. That’s just who I was. I’d probably never find a long-term relationship that stuck.
Yet Nadia made me wonder…
“Like you said, the devil’s in the details,” I said awkwardly. Hopefully she didn’t think it was too weird.
“So where are we having brunch?” Nadia asked.
Thank God, a change of subject. “A place called Ernesto’s. It’s two more blocks away.”
She scrunched her face. “Ernesto’s… Isn’t that the place with the big pink sign? And the name written in cursive?”
“That’s the one.”
She gawked at me. “I thought that place was fancy!”
“It’s not.”
But when we got to the restaurant and went inside, Nadia groaned even louder. “This is super fucking fancy!” she hissed at me while we approached the hostess station. “I’m totally under-dressed!”
“Reservation for Braden Williams,” I told the hostess, then lowered my voice for Nadia. “It looks nice, but all the hip people dress casually. See that guy over there?”
A 20-something guy with messy hair and a dirty t-shirt was typing on his laptop from a nearby table, ignoring his poached egg sandwich.
“I still feel weird about it,” Nadia insisted as the hostess led us to our table. “And now I’m all flustered right before meeting your sister…”
“We’re early,” I told her. “You have time to relax, and practice some of the things we’ll say. Just…”
I trailed off as I saw our table.
22
Nadia
I was the kind of actor who fed off of other people’s emotions. That’s how I was as a person, too. If my friend was in a bad mood, I would quickly mirror their emotion. If my acting partner felt uncomfortable, it made me uncomfortable.
And now Braden was acting weird and awkward. Like he’d said something he hadn’t meant to say, and now he wished he wasn’t here. Which, in turn, made my own anxiety increase.
Being totally under-dressed for a nice restaurant didn’t help.
“We’re early,” Braden said absently. “You have time to relax, and practice some of the things we’ll say. Just…”
