"What?!" he finally blurted out.
Kelly just looked at him innocently, as if she had no idea what she had been doing all evening. "What do you mean, what?" she repeated. "Is something wrong with the cheesecake?" she asked, her mouth full.
"No!" he said, lowering his voice so that only she could hear him, without losing the intensity. "You're giving me that look again."
She set down her fork before asking, "What look is that?" she said calmly. He hated that tone. She was like a flight attendant in that way; the calmer she got, the worse the situation was apt to be.
"You know," he fumed. "That disappointment. That wishing you were with someone else."
Kelly sighed the sigh of a long-suffering girlfriend, even though they had only been going out for shy of three months. "I never said anything like that, ‘Noj."
He shook his head, poking with his fork at his side of the single slice of cheesecake they were sharing. "I told you before, Kell, I'm just not this kind of person."
She had long stopped trying to smile and console him, instead just said, "I'm not expecting you to be someone else. I've told you a thousand times, this weekend is my way of telling you something about who *I* am."
"I saw the way you were looking at him," Manoj said, finally looking down. He didn't want to lift his head, but watched her face go blurry as he looked up at her through his eyebrows.
"Who?" Kelly asked, dumbfounded.
"That old man in the bar."
"*What*?" Kelly said, a little louder than she should have. "How could you possibly think I could be attracted to--"
Manoj shook his head again, dropped his fork so that it rang against the china. "I'm not saying you're attracted to him. You're attracted to his way of life."
She say back now, crossing her arms. "So you're jealous of--"
"Rapt." Manoj said it flatly, with as much contempt as he could cram into it. "That's what you were. He was telling these stories about being chased by bears and zipping through raw forest by moonlight, and you couldn't get enough of it."
Kelly rolled her eyes. "I thought they were great stories, yes, but it doesn't mean that's the kind of man I want to be with."
Manoj rested his elbows on the table, leaning forward to match the way she had moved back. "Of course you do. Kelly, you're an athlete, body and soul. I get that. But I'm just... not."
"And you don't have to be!" she responded, getting fed up. Manoj had to toe a bit of a line now, or she was apt to storm off. It was her secondary mode of defense. "I don't know why you can't accept the fact that I don't need you to even care about sports in order for me to find you interesting. I'm here with *you*, Manoj. I dragged you halfway up a mountain so that I could give you an introduction to who I am, what's important to me. Think about it from the other side... Do you think I'm jealous of the women at your office? That I assume you have to want them just because they're more like you than I am?"
Manoj looked up at her now, comprehension just starting to dawn. He had lost this argument before he had even started it. He should have known that. "No," he had to grumble.
"That's right," Kelly said. "I thought you and I liked each other because of our differences. You're of the brains, I'm of the body." She leaned forward again, so they were equally tilted forward over their dessert. "You find that intriguing. Don't say you don't. And I love that mind." She lifted a closely-clipped fingernail to hover tantalizingly before his third eye.
He found himself smiling, in spite of himself. "This mind can be quite stupid sometimes." He let his accent, which he had never really had but sometimes used as a charm crutch, creep the slightest bit back into his voice, knowing how she would react to it.
"It's not so bad," she said, smiling. "Now, I think we should finish our dessert, go upstairs, and see what we can come up with when your mind and my body get together."
He smiled, even though he knew she was deflecting the argument in a direction he couldn't resist. Was that the way all athletic people were, he wondered, always trying to resolve conflicts through some manner of physical achievement? At this point, he didn't even care, which sent his rational Vulcan undermind deeper into fury because it was bring ignored.
Deep down, though, he knew he was going to end up enjoying this weekend. If she continued to take these wedges he was passively-aggressively trying to drive into their relationship and turn them from log-splitters into tent pegs, they might even come down from the heights an even stronger couple than they had been coming up.
---
Manoj was lucky, and he knew it. They had met when she was hired as a sport consultant at the game company he worked for. Their first meeting had been filled with a kind of chemistry he had never experienced before. The conversation had quickly turned away from the borderline-ludicrous extreme hang-gliding game he had been doing research for into more personal territory.
She had been the one to launch the first playful volley: "You know, for a person who spends their time trying to replicate the way people move, you're a very still person."
"Still?" he asked, his pen hovering over the pad he had been taking aerodynamic notes on.
"Yeah," she said, smiling. "I tend to notice these things. You don't make a move you don't have to."
He shrugged. "That's just economy, I guess."
"Even so," she continued, "still waters..." The silence between them drew out. Finally, she said, "Are you really into sports, or are you just interested in recreating them?"
With any other consultant, he would have felt threatened by such a question, but this woman was surprisingly easy to talk to. "I like the physics of motion, I guess. It's so simple, but so complex, trying to figure out how people are thinking by the way they move."
She nodded. "Huh. So you're, like, reverse engineering the player's brain. I like that."
He smiled back at her now, which just made hers intensify. His mouth got away from him. "It all figures into what I ultimately want to do," he said.
Her eyebrows perked up. "And what's that?"
"I want to take people's gaming instinct and turn it into social good," he said. "You remember that old online game where every time you played, a grain of rice was donated to a food supply charity?"
She shook her head. "Nope. But my gaming knowledge usually doesn't go past what's currently on my phone."
He felt his voice starting speed up, which always happened when he was given license to expound on his favorite topics. "When I think about the future of games, that’s what I think of. But it should go further than just getting people to trade gameplay for charity donations. I'd like to determine how online gaming can help people make moral decisions, like whether they're going to help others, even if they don't know and will never meet those people. That's what interaction is going to be like, more and more, in the future. Or maybe I can make games for kids that kind of train them to think more altruistically toward others. I keep thinking, what if you could train kids to empathize at the same time as they're learning to read or do math?"
Kelly seemed impressed. "Or jump off cliffs on hang-gliders. That's lofty, Manoj. Very lofty. I like it."
Drinks had followed the evening after their bull session, and they ended up talking about the game at hand more then they had in their actual meeting. They debated the best way to display how the human body reacted to swinging in a harness while being buffeted by thermals (increasingly more innuendo passing between them the more they drank), and they had been dating ever since. When she had asked him to come with her for a weekend to Deertail Lodge in the mountains, he had of course agreed, admittedly thinking more about the idea of what stripping her out of multiple layers of fleecy clothing would be like than hurtling through the snow with wooden sticks strapped to his feet.
---
But here they were, and he had started feeling inadequate ever since their rental car had pulled up to the front of the lodge. It wasn't until then that he started to realize how completely out of his element he was. His grandparents had all grown up in New Delhi, which was the precisely opposite climate from where he was now. This weather was oppressive in a completely different way, and one that his very genetic makeup rebelled against. It had set him on edge, and that was probably why he had taken such offense to the way Kelly had been listening to the grizzled ski pro holding court in front of the fireplace, impressing all the noobs with his daring war stories.
As always, he stopped thinking about these things once they got back up to their room. In bed with her was the only time when he didn't feel like he was competing, or that his athletic failings meant anything. Like the sheets they fell onto, the playfield was perfectly level. His precision and attention to details met with her pure awareness of physical space, and their talents complemented each other perfectly.
She snuggled up to him afterward, and just as he was about to drift off to sleep, she said, “You know what would make this moment even more perfect?”
He muttered some sort of noncommittal negative response, already sliding toward slumber.
She sat up suddenly. “Hot fudge sundaes! Are you in?”
The incongruity of it all woke him enough to ask, “What do you mean? Room service?”
“Yeah!” she said, as if he had just made her great idea even better. She immediately leaned over to the nightstand and started rummaging around in the drawer. “Where’s that menu? I think I threw it in here, just to remove the temptation because everything’s so flipping expensive – oh, hi Gideon – but... desperate times, you know?”
Manoj sat up slowly, noticing how amazing her bare back looked in the moonlight as she hunched to hold the menu in the patch of moonlight. There were times -- and it was usually at moments like this, when his mind was blessedly clear of other, distracting things -- that he became entirely unaware of how precipitous his place in her heart must be. This lack of worry never lasted too long, though. All too soon he was thinking that all it would take would be her meeting a man taller, more muscular than him, one who could confidently join her in her snowboarding, rock climbing, and the dozen other outdoor activities she was into, and her nerdy programmer would be shown the door.
True, he had just now made her come so hard that dessert had become necessary, but wasn’t that really the only physical activity he could join her in with any degree of competency? He could conjure up an algorithm to visually replicate the mountain they were on from scratch in less than an hour, but was she ever going to convince him to actually get out there, climb to the top and go barreling down it? He still hadn’t given her a solid affirmation that he would. In the morning, she was going to expect him to get on a pair of skis and actually attempt to perform a few of the athletics that he typically spent his days replicating at his desk.
“I would like to have two hot fudge sundaes sent up, please,” Kelly was saying into the phone. Manoj noticed how she used the same tone with the anonymous person on the other end of the line as when she was speaking to him. Another crack appeared in the wall that held back his suspicions about how he was about to lose her. He should be thinking of something he could do to impress her, convince her that he was worth staying with, at least for a little while longer, but nothing came. Nothing but the idea that he had to get out on the slopes with her the next day and at least make an effort to live in the outside world she was a full resident of. Maybe when he did, he would gain some sort of insight that no one back in the office had. It might reveal to him that one extra piece of mechanics that would turn his game into a true sport simulator.
Kelly had finalized the order, hung up, turned around, and started talking to him before he realized what was happening. “Now for phase two of my plan,” she said, “phase one being dragging you up to the room and getting you to make me crave sugar. I’m going to throw on one of those fluffy bathrobes and lounge in it so the room service guy doesn’t catch me in my starkers. You want one too, or are you just that much less modest than me?”
Manoj mustered a smile, hoped the room service guy, when he arrived, would be more of an out-of-shape slob than he. “Sure, count me in,” he said. “For anything.”
Fifteen minutes later they were carefully finishing their sundaes in bed, covered in terrycloth and only halfway caring if any got on the covers. Kelly had dialed in ESPN on the TV mounted up in the corner of the room, and was watching cricket highlights from halfway around the world.
“Every time I see this,” he said absently, “it makes me wonder what my life would be like if my grandparents hadn’t left.”
“What do you think you’d be doing?” Kelly asked, leaning back and resting her spoon elbow on his ribs. She continued to shovel ice cream into her mouth.
“Quite possibly the same thing I am now,” Manoj said. He meant professionally, but as soon as it was out of his mouth he guessed she meant personally. He gave himself a tiny mental kick.
“Is there lots of skiing in India?” she asked.
Manoj smiled. “Not so near the equator, not really. Some in the northern mountains. But I meant programming. There’s probably even more job opportunities there, in fact. Nothing I’d want to do though, I bet.” Certainly not better than eating ice cream in the middle of the night with someone like you, he thought but didn’t say.
Kelly tipped her dish to scoop up the last of the melted sundae from the bottom – not that they’d given their desserts much time to produce any – and spooned it into her mouth. Manoj was looking at a smudge of chocolate just beyond the corner of her mouth.
“You’ve got a little –“ he said, motioning toward the corner of his own mouth.
She mimicked his movements. He had meant to indicate the corner of his mouth that was pointing the same way as hers, as if he were her mirror, but she reached up and dabbed at the opposite side, touching the right side of her mouth just as he was touching his right side. It wasn’t the first time this mental schism had happened. She claimed it was because she thought from others’ points of view before her own (classic extrovert, he thought). Instead of switching tactics and tapping the other corner of his mouth, he instead leaned forward and kissed the spot, removing the chocolate with a kiss and a tiny swipe of the tip of his tongue. Kelly watched him the whole way, her eyes crossing comically in surprise.
“Well now,” she said, as he sat back. She didn’t resist, either, when he reached down and began unfastening the loose knot that held her white bathrobe together. “I’m telling ya, it’s the mountain air,” she said as he parted the fabric and slid his hands into the warm envelope of air she had created between it and her skin. “It gets the blood pumping, definitely… and speaking of which…” She had by this time opened his bathrobe as well.
They kept their robes on this time, wrapping themselves up in a double-cocoon of softness that only accented the solidity of their bodies as they moved together. Being the second time, Manoj felt more in control, his body’s natural resistance to stimulation married with Kelly’s relaxed muscles. He gloried in the feeling of her, and his own prowess, feeling like he could go on forever. When the bedframe began to rattle against the wall, he assumed that it was his doing.
Kelly’s fingernails dug into his shoulders. He wasn’t stopping for anything, not now. He was master of the world, so concentrated on pleasing her, and thereby pleasing himself, that he didn’t even notice when the room when went suddenly, ultimately dark.
Their bathrobes managed to keep the worst of the flying glass shards away from their skin when the patio doors blew in.
No comments:
Post a Comment