Page 45 of Isn't It Obvious?
“You could just let me out back at your place; I already know the bus route home.” Yael stiffens as soon as he says it, and he must be watching her carefully enough to notice. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to bring it up,” he mutters.
It’s good that you did, she thinks, trying not to notice how the heat of him still clings to the coat, luxurious against the goose bumps on her skin. Trying not to decipher how much of the sandalwood and citrus she inhales comes from his jacket versus fromhim, in the passenger seat next to her. “It’s fine,” she says.I needed the reminder.
She thinks about pulling up a playlist on her phone, but something feels so intimate about it. Like,Here, this is what I like to listen to, you’re in my space, we’re somehow wearing one another’s clothing, and now you get this part of me, too.
It takes less than a minute of silence for Yael’s curiosity to get the better of her. “So, is this what Leo talks to you aboutafter book club?” she asks. She tries to sound bored, like it doesn’t really matter to her if he’s willing to share.
Ravi’s eyes on her feel like a heat gun on shrink tubing. It takes everything in her not to wilt. “Yes,” he says slowly, “only I wasn’t sure until now.”
“Ah,” she says.
“I think he could tell… I don’t know.” Yael sneaks a glance and sees that Ravi is rubbing at the crease in his brow. “I think he could tell that coming out for me was different than for a lot of the kids around him. That maybe it was more like his situation. He was probably right.”
Yael swallows the lump in her throat. It always makes her feel claustrophobic with a specific breed of sadness, or maybe grief, seeing how it is for so many people. Not only for those who are outright rejected or worse, but also for the Leos and Ravis, who have to settle fornot what I feared, but not what I hoped. She thinks of Kevin, how he said it was easier for him to live so far away from home, and suddenly she is holding back tears.
“I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable,” he says.
“You didn’t,” Yael says, and her cheeks may not be wet yet, but anyone can hear it in her voice. “I just really, really hate this world sometimes.” Fuck, now her cheeksarewet.
“Yeah, me too,” he says.
She wipes at her tears with her sleeve. Then, remembering that it is not, in fact, her sleeve, glances down as quickly as she can to check that she hasn’t smeared mascara all over it. She’d been in her pajamas, about to wash her face, when Leo called. “I’m really glad you’re doing the club,” she says earnestly.
“Yeah, me too,” Ravi says again. There’s a short pause, and then he laughs through his nose.
Yael sneaks a look at him, and that incisor is on display,punctuated by his lone dimple. “I mean it,” she says, but she finds herself laughing, too.
Cornell Road finally spits them out of Forest Park, and an idea strikes. “You hungry?” she asks.
“It’s after midnight,” he says.
“I know a place.” They reach a stop sign, and she turns to meet his gaze. It flicks over her every feature, like he’s looking for some sort of trick but there’s none to be found. “Come on, I need to know which way to signal,” she says.
“Alright, yeah. I could eat.”
“Good,” Yael says, signaling left. “Because I could really fuck up a mancake right now.”
“A pancake?”
Yael shakes her head, grinning. “No.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Yael holds open the door to Stepping Stone Cafe for Ravi. He reaches around her to take over the job, silently signaling for her to go in ahead of him. Yael’s eyes flick upward, a half roll, but she doesn’t argue. As Ravi releases the door, several action figures attached to it by pulleys float upward.
“Anywhere you like,” the person behind the counter grunts. Yael shoots them a cheery smile and steps up to a wood-sectioned booth in the corner.
It’s more diner than café—robin’s-egg blue–paneled walls paired with red booth benches, flannel-backed vinyl tablecloths, and checkerboard linoleum flooring. The action figures fit in with the rest of the art, in that none of it really makes sense.
Ravi is instantly charmed.
He slides onto the bench opposite Yael and gestures at the Christmas ornament hanging overhead. “A little early, no?”
“Or late,” she says, “considering it was definitely up last December. And quite possibly every month since the beginning of time.”
A server with a handlebar mustache and a Pride flag trucker hat appears with two cups of water. “Anything else to drink?”
“Decaf coffee for me, please,” Yael says, and looks to Ravi. “You?”
