Smooch

A friend of a friend meet-cute.

Margot left the heat running. Isaac was still talking, some story about climbing a water tower in a snowstorm back in Minnesota. She could almost picture him: too tall for the ladder, laughing in a red puffy coat, that full, unbelievable laugh so incongruent to his objectively––annoyingly––obvious beauty. The windows fogged behind him, his hands drawing quick spirals in the condensation; it was in these moments she could picture him as she never knew him: a little kid too smart and fast for his own good, bored out his skull in second grade, reading comic books under the desk and bouncing his leg. She reached beneath her seat for the lever; she wanted to face him for the rest of the story––he’d have to go soon, leave her car for his, and she wanted to hear the ending. Isaac told stories like a musician on a stage singing their most popular song; it always felt like his voice was the thing Margot had been waiting the whole long evening of her life for.

“And then I feel my boot already slipping––whoa, what are you doing?” Isaac said, raising his eyebrow.

“Um, leaning the seat back so I’m not weirdly staring out the front window to concrete?” she said, pulling her purple fuzzy jacket over her hands and her knees to her chest. 

“Oh, I thought we were going to…smooch,” he said, tiny pink clouds rising like weather on the tops of his cheeks. 

“Okay,” Margot said, crossing her arms across her chest, “let’s do it, then.” Her mouth was a straight line. She was, suddenly, in one of those moods her roommates called Bad News Bears.

“Ugh…,” he shifted in his seat to look at her “I––”

“No, I’m so glad you brought it up. Us kissing. Sounds great. Sounds really, really good,” Margot’s voice was frosty, a little manic. It reminded Isaac of his ex-girlfriend. And his other ex-girlfriend. And a little of his ex-boyfriend, but Jack had a French mother so coldness was to be expected. Honestly, it was the same tone his co-worker/hook-up/lesson plan buddy/weed plug/carpool partner had used on the phone last weekend when she said she couldn’t keep sleeping with him if he was to remain ardently committed to not loving her––to which he had honestly said, Bummer, and then heard the swift click of her phone. 

“Am I missing something?” he asked, searching Margot’s face for a hint of the trouble he was––ever more surely––in.  

“I think it’s pretty fucking lame to tease someone who you know likes you,” she said, trying to look into his eyes, which kept sliding away from hers. She put her hands on her heart and tilted her head, “Really I’ve been fine with the little things––saying your mother would love to meet me or calling me out of nowhere like today for breakfast––because, whatever. I like you. I’ll take what I can get. It’s fun to be your friend and I know you are,” she started laughing, “chronically unable to go to Trader Joes without getting someone’s phone number––but that was mean.” She poked his shoulder gently, “You are too smart to not know that was mean.”

“I––ugh,” he fiddled with the heat. Margot twisted her keys and turned her car off. 

“It’s fine. No one has to want to kiss someone they don’t want to kiss––”

“I didn’t––” Isaac started. Margot held up her hand.

“But, when you don’t want to kiss somebody, you should probably not make a joke about kissing them.” 

“What if I didn’t know that you wanted to kiss me?” he said.

“Oh my God. I asked you out. Last year. At the behest of your best friend,” she said, rolling her eyes. 

Sofia––a tall redhead and semi-professional painter––had grown up with Isaac. They were so close that after college graduation, Sofia’s (and Margot’s) a mere hour away, and Isaac’s halfway across the country, the two of them moved in together in the small, northern city they all lived in now. In her first week there, on a walk back from the first day of classes in her PhD program in animal sciences, Margot had run into Sofia on the street. Sofia called her name out in the center square’s park, which was, at that time, in ecstatic, green bloom. 

“Margot? I’m––” Sofia had said, waving her hand like scrubbing a window. 

“Yes! Yeah, don’t we know eachother? College? You went on a date with Annie Green?” 

“Oh my god yes. And we got drunk at student center trivia…”

“And didn’t you have to go to those substance abuse classes? That was the funniest shit I’ve ever heard,” Margot said, remembering how Annie––a close friend from the swim team––had been mandated to Friday night lectures about the importance of sobriety instead of going to the team’s aquatic themed pre-games where blue jello shots were enthusiastically consumed to ironic remixes of the Beach Boys. Sofia covered her face with her hands and laughed.

“Freshman year should never be spoken of though,” she said. 

“Absolutely one thousand percent agree,” said Margot. “I, of all people, do not want to talk about Freshman year…I had a full body rash from my Walmart bed sheets from September to June,” she said. Margot had also had a boyfriend who kissed other girls but, as he said, ‘only when blackout drunk.’ The past, Sofia and Margot both agreed, was good to be past. But since it was rare to have someone else who knew all your university references without needing an explanation, Sofia invited Margot to have a beer at the notoriously dirty dive bar near the cemetery. Sofia, as an artist, was really into ‘character’––and also the 45 year old tattooed bartender who sometimes shared her cigarettes while looking out at the graves. 

As Margot was getting ready to meet Sofia, throwing on a bleach stained t-shirt that said Chicks Dig Cows with a picture of a chicken on top of a cow, which was one of the only items of clothing out from her moving boxes, Sofia sent her a text, “my best friend is going to join too, btw!!!!” Margot rolled her eyes––she really did not need to be the third wheel when she could instead eat boxed mac and cheese and build her cheap, Swedish dresser while half-listening to a recorded lecture on big agriculture. But, hey, maybe it would be two new friends––maybe the people who said making community was hard post-grad were just unlucky. Maybe, just maybe, she thought, grabbing her keys and running out the door, she’d have a friend group. 

By the time Sofia finally texted “sorry sorry sorry we’re coming ahh!” Margot had been nursing a light beer for forty-five minutes, dodging the eye of the bartender. Margot was so desperately committed to only spending fifteen dollars that that’s all she had brought––cash stuffed into the back of her too big jean shorts’ pocket. Her grad school stipend wouldn’t come for another two weeks––something about the fiscal year and the academic year being not the same thing. She’d worked over the summer, selling strawberry milk at a small dairy, but it was less of a money making opportunity and more of a chance to lay in a field with cows, smell constantly like chicken poop, and get sunburned. It was a beautiful place to be lonely and underpaid. She missed it, actually, and most acutely in the classroom, where everyone else seemed more interested in animals writ large than in the animals she’d known the names of by heart on the farm: Nutmeg, a soft brown heifer; Dandelion, the cow that always led escapes into the dirt road; Boots, the cow that would kick you during milking unless you hummed. 

Suddenly, she felt Sofia’s arms around her, hugging her from behind and around the kitschy barstool, her denim jacket smelling like cardamon and car oil. 

“Hey,” she said, “this is Isaac,” and a tall man, kind of teetering back and forth, tilted his head at Margot and gave her a ‘I’m very used to being charming’ smile. 

“Otherwise known as the reason we’re late,” he said and Sofia hip checked him. 

“No, no worries! I’m loving the atmosphere,” Margot said, gesturing towards the only other clientele on that fine, humid Wednesday afternoon––a man with grey hair, fast asleep in a plate of microwaved buffalo chicken tenders (the house special, according to the cobwebbed chalkboard hanging behind them.) Sofia winked at Isaac and then scurried to the bathroom. Isaac leaned over on the bar, and slid up very close to Margot until their faces were close. 

“Do you have a tab open?” he asked, his thick eye lashes reminding Margot of Nutmeg the cow, who would let her lay on her soft fur after milking. He had the smallest bit of spinach in his teeth. 

“Uh, I’m not really sure––you, um, you have––” and Margot pointed to her teeth. 

“No you’re good,” he said, waving to get the bartender’s attention. Margot laughed.

“You have––” she said, touching his elbow, “spinach in your teeth.” He looked down at her and laughed; his whole head tipped back. His laugh was an ancient laugh––one seemingly from another, better time. Back when people laughed with their whole bodies. 

“Can you get it,” he asked, standing up to his full height, opening his mouth. Margot looked up at him, grabbed a maraschino cherry from the open container on the other side of the bar and climbed to stand on top of her seat. She bit the cherry off from its stem and used it to swipe the spinach out of his teeth.

“Okay,” he said smiling, “that’s one strategy.” 

“I know my way around a cherry stem,” Margot said, taking the hand he offered to jump down to the ground. He raised his eyebrows.

“Oh?” he said. Margot held up a finger, flicked off the piece of spinach, popped the stem into her mouth, and spit it out tied in a bow into her palm. “Oh my god,” Isaac said, grabbing her wrist to lift her palm closer to his eyes. “I think Sofia undersold you.” 

“Someone say my name,” Sofia said, putting her arms around both of them. “Are you best friends yet?” she asked, looking back and forth between Isaac and Margot. 

“Definitely,” he said. 

They played darts. Isaac and Sofia talked to each other about highschool in some weird language of inside jokes and Minnesota words until Margot felt so profoundly incidental that she faked a yawn, grabbed her jacket and gave both of them a weird handshake. 

“Nice to meet you,” Isaac said, barely looking up from his beer. Margot gave a little salute to them both.

“I’ll see ya, Sofia,” she said, pushing her way through the squeaky front door. 

And that was supposed to be it––a handsome, weird, kind of dismissive friend of a friend. An evening between many kinds of evenings. Until Sofia, after about two months of radio silence, texted Margot, the message popping up on her computer during a night class that was mostly just passing notes to her friend Sam. “heyy!!! long time no see…but I was just thinking…have you ever met my friend isaac?? I think you two would really vibe (;” 

Margot rolled her eyes. Was Sofia so forgetful that she hadn’t remembered the only time they’d hung out was with Isaac as a…buffer? A fail safe in case Margot was a dud? But then she looked back up at the thirty-five year old lecturer of her Animal Nutrition course who had asked her out during office hours the day before, after ten minutes of pressing both of his knees against hers while she asked questions for the midterm. She texted back, “Yeah! Send me his number, sounds fun. Always could always use more friends! Speaking of…let me know if you want to hang!” Sofia hearted the message, sent Isaac’s contact info, and never texted Margot again. 

Isaac and Margot got coffee. He showed up stoned; she bought their drinks and a turkey croissant for him. They talked about teaching––him as a highschool economics teacher and her as part of her PhD funding, teaching the university’s required science elective to humanities kids (who regularly petitioned to be exempt from animal dissections on account of real or aspirational vegetarianism). They talked about books––fiction for her, biographies about historical dictators for him. They went on hikes and walks, and so what if he never answered a text message on time––he called, sometimes, for two hours at nine p.m. and was the voice Margot heard most often before she went to sleep. If he never paid for his half of the meal, he made up for it by picking an emerald bug out of her hair, or sitting on the same side of the booth as her. So what if, after two months of coffee and walks and hikes, she asked him out and he never responded––prompting her to fail an exam and cut off all her hair. And if he invited her to dinner with the girl he was hooking up with, as apparently an answer to that unanswered text, at least he talked only to Margot the whole time––to the point where Margot felt bad for the girl until the two of them got into the same car, his hands all over her. At least he, unlike her Animal Nutrition lecturer, never told her to get over herself or I didn’t like you that much anyway. And wasn’t being twenty three enough of a reason to have a stupid, terrible crush that left her lying on the floor listening to the Velvet Underground every time she saw him? Was love supposed to feel all the way good? This was a genuine question––Margot asked herself it all the time. But sitting in the freezing parking garage after a year of maybe flirting and definite feelings on her part––and a relatively perfect day of breakfast and a bookstore and laughing at him for being categorically unable to handle the cold––was too much. 

“You knew!” Margot said. “You definitely knew.”

“Okay, so I remember you asking me out––” he said, slowly. 

“And, again, it’s fine to not want to go out, but you never said no! And you never stopped doing any of the things that made it seem like maybe you wanted to go out too, but yeah now that I know you and Claire are dating, that’s fine. But it was confusing! I can take a no, I really can,” she said. 

“Not answering was my no,” he said.

“For the record, not answering is not answering,” she said. 

“In Minnesota, that’s like a nice no,” he said, laughing.

“Well,” she said, “on planet earth, being a good friend is not leading somebody on while simultaneously having a kind of girlfriend.” 

“For the record,” he said in an imitation of her voice while tapping Margot on the forehead with his finger, “Claire and I were never dating. But we are…less so dating now than before. I actually don’t think we’re friends anymore, either, which keeps happening,” he said. 

“Number one,” Margot said counting on her fingers, “you were dating. Number two, if you weren’t, why did you not want to, like, hit it and quit it with me? I mean we get along, you’re a bit of an…enjoyer of sex, from what I can tell,” Isaac laughed, “and I think you like me? A little?” 

“I do like you,” he said. “A lot.” 

“Then why, if you were so very available and so very into flirting with me, didn’t we just hook up and never talk again?”

“I didn’t want to do that,” he said, “I didn’t want to stop talking to you. I love talking to you.” He looked her full on––almost exactly as he had the first time they’d met.

“To be clear, I am entirely capable of being your friend. I’m not some weird frat boy or like a man on reddit––but You. Need. To. Stop. Flirting.” They were both quiet, until Margot whispered, “I actually don’t know if I want to be friends with someone who treats his friends like you treat me.” Isaac adjusted his hat, and zipped up his coat. 

“So…” he said.

“So, I guess, have a safe drive home,” Margot said, turning her car back on. She faced forward, but she could feel his eyes on her, hear his shaky intake of breath before he opened her door. 

“This is exactly what I didn’t want to happen,” he said. “And I’ll miss you. Just so you know,” he said. Margot didn’t say anything, but she wiped the corner of her eye with the back of her hand. There’d be no way of explaining why she was crying or even who he was to her. 

But she would miss him too.