I knew I’d be disappointing them, and I guess it made me a little stubborn. Defensive. But it’s the first time I’ve ever chosen things for myself, you know? When it came to school and clothes and even my first boyfriends—it was all to make them happy, to earn their approval, and it wasn’t until I was staring at the Spelman application my mom gave me that I realized how limited my choices had become. Mom went to Spelman, so I should go to Spelman. Dad studied abroad his sophomore year, so that’s when I was going to study abroad. I would have one year to pick pre-law or pre-med, and I would date a boy from Morehouse, and I would be Catholic but not too Catholic, and I would volunteer for one charity and one political campaign, but it had to be a national one—
Do you see? Can you feel it? It was like my entire life was decided for me before I’d even lived it, and I was suffocating under the weight of the future Zenny, the Zenobia Iverson everyone wanted me to be. But then I realized that there was one person who wanted differently for me, who would want me to find my own path and find something that made my soul sing with excitement.
I know you don’t believe, so I won’t say much about that moment except that it was maybe the moment I became truly aware of God. God wasn’t just a word anymore, a reason to get up every Sunday and sit in the first row. Not just a theory behind the all-girls Catholic high school I went to and the charity events my parents helped organize. He or She became real. I could feel Him or Her or Them—or whatever the best pronoun is—I could feel God’s presence like fingertips across my own fingertips. I could hear God like whispers from another room.
Except that changed somewhere, and I don’t know where, just that it did. I’m going through the pages of this journal and I’m seeing someone say: I’ll do anything for God…as long as it’s what I want too.
I’ve refused to be open to possibility. To God’s whispers.
Anyway, none of this substantially changes what we talked about this afternoon, but I wanted you to know and to hear why this is so important to me. I have to make sure that I’m listening for God everywhere and I want to make sure that I haven’t made an idol out of my own Future Zenny the same way my parents did.
I want to be my own Zenny. And I think this is how I do it.
Okay, this was long, way longer than I thought it would be. Um, I’m excited and hopeful about tomorrow and I hope you’re having a good night, and I’m just going to hang up now because I have no idea what to say next. Goodbye, Sean.
<end message>
Chapter 11
I’ve never been more nervous than I am right now.
Never.
Not before my basketball championship game senior year of high school, not before I got up to read the eulogy at Lizzy’s funeral, not before my interview with Valdman. Not even during that terrible doctor’s appointment after Mom’s first scan when they said here’s how bad it is, here are the few options we’ve got left.
Even though I usually keep my kitchen stocked with efficient and nutrition-dense options, I don’t want to serve Zenny grilled, skinless chicken breast and chard. I want to give her something stylish, something good, something that says you thought Sean Bell was awesome before, well, look at him smoldering at you over the fancy dinner he just made.
Yes, I said made. Because even though I don’t do relationships and never really have, I know enough from my mom and Tyler talking about Poppy to know that ladies like it when you cook for them.
Plus, given the topic of our discussion, I figure it’s best if we avoid a restaurant tonight. I want Zenny to be comfortable. I want to comfortable. And I could order something in, yes, but like I alluded to earlier, I want to impress her. All that trust and affection that she has for me that I don’t deserve? I want to start deserving it.
The only problem? I don’t really cook. Like ever.
But I’ve got two things going for me:
One—I know my way around a kitchen decently well after years of sous-chef-ing for Mom. So even though I may not have a cooking instinct, per se, I know how everything works.
Two—I watch a lot of GBBO (that’s The Great British Bake Off for you uninitiated) and by now I can recite the ingredients for most different kinds of pastry, bread, and biscuit by heart.
So to that end, I decide on a curried chicken pot pie topped with homemade puff pastry and some expensive cheese imported from somewhere. I’ll serve with a couple craft beers, since she’s probably sick of wine, and voila.
Cue impressed admiration.
Except when Zenny knocks on the door at seven o’clock, there’s nothing to be impressed about. I’m covered in flour, my vegetables refuse to brown up in the roasting tray like Alton Brown said they would, and I’ve forgotten how many times I’ve folded the puff pastry. I think it’s only two—Mary Berry says in her cookbook that I at least need three folds—but I drank a couple of the craft beers in nervous desperation before Zenny could get here, and now time and previous pastry-folding events are all fuzzy.
What the fuck is wrong with me? I’m worth twenty million dollars! I’ve snapped companies in half like kindling over my knee, and yet I can’t even be cool for one dinner? For long enough to make a fucking pot pie?
But when I open the door and Zenny catches sight of the flour dusting my Hugo Boss suit pants and the steaming wreckage that is my kitchen, she laughs so hard she has to slump against the doorframe, and that laugh makes it all worth it. Her laughter is light, happy, still the tiniest bit girlish, and her smile is like a shot of sunshine right to the heart.
I start laughing too.
“What happened?” she finally manages to ask, her eyes roving over me again. Except this time they linger not on the dusty smears of flour, but on the tapered lines of my waist. On the places where my sleeves are rolled into crisp, straight rolls, showing off the forearms I pay an ungodly trainer’s fee for.
Watching her drink in my body is headier than any eight-point-five percent beer, and I have to remind myself to focus.
Dinner. Pastry folds. Right.
“I’m cooking,” I say with dignity, closing the door behind her. “And it’s going very well.”
“I can see that,” she says, and when I turn, she lifts her eyes to my face very quickly as she blushes.
She was just checking out my ass.
The knowledge sends hot blood south, and my fingers are burning with the need to touch her, hold her, yank her into a kiss.
I walk toward the kitchen as quickly as I can…away from her and her sweetly roving eyes. “Would you like something to drink while I finish up?”
“A sparkling water would be nice.”
She comes to sit at the large island in the middle of my kitchen, pulling up a tall chair and sitting across the work surface from me as I hand her a LaCroix and go back to rolling out my piecrust. I’m giving myself a silent pep talk, trying to run through all the decisions and phrases that I’ve decided on in the last twenty-four hours, when she breaks the quiet with one of her determined yet vulnerable questions.
“So are you going to do it?” she asks.
I pause the motions of the rolling pin, looking up at her. She’s in jeans and a worn St. Teresa’s Academy T-shirt; no headband or scarf today, just curls everywhere. She looks like a college student. She looks young. And the expression on her face—hopeful and nervous and filled with shy attraction—it’s not doing anything to help either my conscience or my stiffening cock.