Page 16 of The Fake Dating War

I freeze, mentally staggering back. He never uses my first name. Looking out the window, I can tell his breathing is more agitated than normal. So is mine.

Does he care that I, Reema, collapsed? Or is he just a good fucking Samaritan?

Did he really offer to drive me? To take me to see a doctor? Would he wait while I got checked out?

I want to get out of this car and go back into his arms. They felt warm. I want him to hold me and tell me that everything is okay. I want to thank him for catching me.

Those needs balloon inside me, and they scare me more than anything. Once upon a time, I let myself think another person could be my sense of security. I poured my everything into that relationship, and then it all went to shit, and I haven’t felt truly safe ever since.

Forcing myself to smirk, I give Coleman the finger.

The green in his eyes pitches dark.

Good. Hate me.

I put my car in reverse and head straight out of the parking lot.

Truly, that was a horrible thing to do, but there is no way I’m letting him drive me home. I don’t let anyone see where I live, and there’s no way he’s going to be the first one.

Think of the pity and laughter you would get.

12

REEMA

It’s not a far drive home, but I go slowly. At the first sign of those dots coming back or anything going fuzzy, I’m going to pull over to the side. Getting behind a wheel was a stupid thing to do, but I had to get away from Coleman.

He called me Reema.

Absolutely refusing to dwell on that, I pull up to the apartment building I’ve been calling home. I don’t have a designated parking spot, but luck is on my side today. There is an empty space right out front. Turning the engine off, I find and eat another granola bar, plus a stale croissant I must have left on the back seat last week sometime. My stomach gurgles in satisfaction. Then I check twice to make sure nothing that looks valuable is left around me before I get out and lock the doors. Smashing car windows is common in this area. The first time I moved here, someone broke mine because they thought my charging wire was connected to a phone.

I had sobbedWhy methe whole day, back when I was still a crier.

Now I keep my car unwashed and looking dumpy. The mud on it is an eyesore, and kind of matches the eye-soreness of my entire aesthetic if you think about it. We match without trying. Silver linings; dig deep and they exist.

More small blessings. The front door of the building has a new security lock. These days we only get a few strangers wandering the hallways, and our building manager usually threatens them out fairly quickly.

The whole complex is about ten floors high, but each unit is tightly packed against its neighbors because a greedy real-estate developer in the sixties wanted to maximize space, or perhaps laws weren’t as strict back then and paper-thin walls pushed up against each other were the norm. It’s one of those places you could never renovate properly because the amount of work needed to bring it properly up to code would require the whole place to be demolished first and then built back up. That’s probably why the main demographics living here are elderly people whose pensions only cover so much or new immigrants still looking for better jobs. At least the invasive moss climbing up the outside gives the building a whiff of elegance. If you stand back far enough and chug a few drinks, you might mistake the blocky rectangular structure as some fancy Regency estate. The painted on-brick texture certainly helps.

Inside and to my right is an elevator. Getting into one of those will remind me of what just happened, but for once I’m glad ours is permanently under maintenance.

He picked me up like I was important and needed saving.

After climbing seven floors of stairs, my eyes feel heavy on my face. Before I unlock the apartment door, I call out, “It’s Reema.”

That way, Ms.Beatrice knows it’s me coming in and no one else. Like always, I’m greeted with her warm smile and the smell of food.

She is a wonderful and kind eighty-three-year-old woman with brown spots covering the skin of her cheeks, hands, and feet. And no matter how many times she washes her hair, it’s so thin it becomes matted, so that’s what I’m used to seeing: white, slicked back strands, always pulled into a lovely thin braid. Today she’s wearing a fuzzy cardigan, but other days she wears fuzzy shirts, or fuzzy pants, or fuzzy socks, and sometimes, when it’s winter, all of them layered together. She says the texture feels the same as her late-husband’s hugs after he used to come home from the furniture packing store covered in white fluff.

In her youth, Ms. Beatrice easily dwarfed my five-foot-three height, but age has stooped her shoulders and back, so when we hug, her head rests on my arm.

“Did you want some dinner?” she asks, helping me out of my jacket. “I made soup.”

“I already ate,” I say, lying like I always do. “They feed us at work, remember?”

Lunch, not dinner. A small detail.

Ms.Beatrice lives on a criminally low pension. I’ve seen the numbers. With everything added up, she can afford to feed herself, but she can’t afford another mouth. Whatever she doesn’t eat today is saved for leftovers tomorrow. That’s why I don’t let myself eat it. Taking what she doesn’t have to give would damage the little self-respect I have left inside me.

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