Our grocery order doesn’t arrive until tomorrow, so our options are pretty limited. There’s pasta and pesto, which is what we’ve had for dinner three nights in a row now, or we could have oven fries and veggie fingers, but I’m not sure we have enough of those for two, and Zach doesn’t even like veggie fingers.
This is what we get for not keeping the freezer stocked full to the brim, like my parents do.
“Why don’t we order pizza?” Zach suggests. “Save cooking.
Hopefully have some leftovers for tomorrow. I know you love cold pizza the next day.”
“I really do. Oh, go on. Why not?”
Once we moved in together, we created a pretty tight budget. It was Zach’s idea; I put the spreadsheet together for us in a shared Google document. We wanted to be able to save for a deposit on a bigger place, maybe even a proper house. (Although, God, do I wish we’d splurged on a new dining table right now.) One of the first things we decided to cut out was takeaways. We don’t often order in anymore, but when we do, it’s not usually pizza. Chinese, or Indian, for the most part. Thai’s our favorite, but Zach’s also partial to a burger on Uber Eats. But I really, really do love a pizza.
“Not like we’re going to use the socializing budget this week, right?” I joke.
“We’ll have happy hour here on Thursday,” he says, flashing a grin at me. “The house special: Quaran-tini. Shaken, not stirred.”
“Oh my God.”
“Served over ice . . . -olation.”
“Oh my God. ”
I stare at Zach, who is completely deadpan now, and we both crack up at the same time.
“You’re such a dork,” I tell him.
“Yeah, but you love me.”
I roll my eyes, bumping him with my hip as I stand back beside him. Zach’s been using my iPad for his banana bread recipe. He suggests we order it now, in advance. I agree, if only for an extra excuse to procrastinate getting back to work, and open a new tab to bring up the Dominos website, picking one of their deals, and scheduling the delivery for dinnertime. I add a vegetarian pizza for myself, and then turn to Zach, who’s carefully stirring the mixture.
“So pepperoni?” I ask. “Or the chicken one?”
“Nah, get me a Hawaiian, would you?”
I stare at him, sure I’ve misheard.
He’s oblivious to my slack-jawed expression, though.
“Get some extra dip,” is all he says.
I’m in such a state of shock I do as he says.
And all I can think is, He likes pineapple on pizza?
Since when has Zach ever liked pineapple on pizza?
*
I’m barely able to focus on work the rest of the day because I’m too preoccupied by this hideous and abrupt turn of events.
The moment has been replaying on loop in my head for the last few hours, and now I’m drinking a cup of tea on the sofa, eating a freshly baked slice of banana bread while Zach talks to his parents on FaceTime beside me. I’m still thinking about it when Zach goes down to collect the scheduled pizzas.
Because seriously?
I know pineapple on pizza is a pretty polarizing subject, and honestly, I don’t even care that much. So he likes a nice sweet fruit on his savory pizza. It’s weird, but hey, Zach’s a little weird. He’s a grown-ass man with Iron Man action figures, and his favorite feel-good movie is Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Liking pineapple on pizza is definitely not the weirdest thing about him.
But . . .
How can I not know this about him?
How have I been with this guy for four years, and I don’t know something as basic as where he stands on pineapple on pizza?
What next? He moonlights as a serial killer? He has a secret second life with a wife and kids? He—Oh my God.
Does he even want a wife and kids?
I mean, we never even really talked about getting married. Not properly. And I don’t even know if he actually wants kids; the closest we’ve come to discussing it is when someone we know has announced they’re expecting, and we’ve said, “Holy crap, I am not ready to raise a baby. Can you imagine?”
What else don’t I know about Zach?
He comes back to the apartment, but I don’t get to ask him about it, because I’m too confused by the fact he’s not holding any pizza boxes.
“Where’s the pizza?”
He pulls a face, exasperated. “Mr. Harris has a cleaning station set up. Sanitizing everything that comes into the place. He was going to disinfect the pizza boxes but that would just make them all soggy, I thought, so he said I could come get some plates to put the food on.”
“Right. I-I’ll come give you a hand.”
I collect a couple of plates from the kitchen, following Zach downstairs to pick up our food. Mr. Harris gives us some kind of lecture on not getting “unnecessary deliveries to the building,” but I barely hear it.
All I can do is stare at Zach like he’s a complete stranger, and wonder what the hell else lockdown is going to reveal about him.
apartment #15 – isla
Chapter Eleven
When I met Danny, it was instant sparks.
We met, of course, on Bumble. (Because, where else but dating apps do you find single guys now, without having to awkwardly tell a colleague that their best friend may be single, and may be a great person, but is that bowl cut some kind of ironic throw-back, or . . . ? And yes, maybe you said you were looking for someone athletic, but you didn’t mean a guy who basically lives in the gym and has biceps bigger than his head in every sense of the words and who pouts in all his photographs.)
Danny asked me on a date within an hour of us matching. Usually, I wouldn’t have met up with someone so quickly, but maybe that was why I’d agreed to it. All the other guys I’d met on dating apps had been after weeks of messaging, and had all fizzled out after a handful of dates. Maybe I’d just save myself a lot of time and effort, meeting Danny for dinner that same weekend.
I was a little turned off by the state of his house share, which, despite him and his housemates all being twenty-somethings, felt very much like a university student house—the line of empty beer bottles on a windowsill in the hallway, the mess of mop buckets and a Henry hoover and packets of toilet paper in the open space beneath the stairs, the cobweb in the corner by the doorway. But it all paled to insignificance in the glow of a perfect first date as he cooked me a three-course dinner entirely from scratch.
He even made soup from scratch. I’d sat on the kitchen counter sipping wine, the two of us chatting nonstop while he made spaghetti carbonara, with Danny as at ease in the kitchen as I was on a tennis court or a treadmill. I remember being so impressed, I forgot all about the state of the house share.
It was a perfect first date, and we just clicked.
Talking to some of my friends, we all waited with bated breath for things to go wrong. Such a perfect first date was so rare, something was bound to mess it all up.
Guys like that didn’t just exist. Dates like that didn’t just happen.
It’d all go south sooner or later; even my most optimistic friends said so.
But we went out for drinks and tapas. He talked in conversational Spanish to the waiter, who gave us a free jug of sangria because of it.