“You okay?” he asked, as the boat rocked them gently from side to side.
She nodded immediately, her voice still MIA.
“Good.” He smiled a little, almost expectantly, as a lake breeze blew around them, raising goose bumps on her skin.
What was the expectation about? Did he want to kiss her? Did she want him to want to kiss her? Did he want her to want him to want—
“Pinky. You’re, ah… you’re still… you’ve got your arms around me.”
“No I don’t,” she said immediately, still gazing up at him. But then she realized in the next mortifying moment that she totally did. Her arms were still tight around his waist. She was virtually hugging him. She let her arms drop like they were heavy boulders and stepped aside, tucking a hair behind her ear. “Oh, right. I, um, just needed to make sure I was steady on my feet. That’s all.”
Samir’s lips twitched, like he saw right through her. “Sure,” he said easily, and now released from her grasp, turned to survey what had caused the boat to stop. “Oh, hell.” They’d hit the bank of the lake, hard. “Great, not only are we lost, but we’ve wrecked the boat, too.” Samir, red in the face, took his seat again and backpedaled to turn them around.
Pinky slid back into her seat quickly, like she was trying to fool them both that she’d never been close to him at all. “Right, yeah,” she heard herself saying in this defensive tone of voice, her cheeks hot. “I know I got us lost, but do you have to keep harping on it?”
“What?” Samir asked, looking at her, somewhere between confused and irate. “What are you talking about? I was just saying—”
“Yeah, I heard what you were saying.” Pinky wasn’t sure why she was trying to pick a fight exactly. Only that she felt off-kilter from rubbing that lotion into his shoulders and needed to put some emotional distance between them. Samir was here to be her fake boyfriend. He was a control freak, rigid, unimaginative, and boring. He was not at all the type of person she dated. She was trying to prove something to her parents, and she didn’t need any complications. “Just paddle the boat.”
Samir stared at her. “You’re unbelievable, you know that?”
Pinky trailed her hand in the cool water and tossed him a sarcastic smile. “Thank you.”
“Doesn’t swinging on your pendulum ever exhaust you?” Samir asked, his hand gripping the side of the boat. “Seriously.”
Pinky glared at him, saying nothing. He opened his mouth, then closed it again, sighed, and shook his head.
They paddled in relative silence for the next few minutes. Pinky’s brain swirled with tumultuous thoughts. Samir was handsome in a classic way, sure. And he seemed nice enough on the surface. But she was Pinky Kumar. She dated boys who had juvie records and unhealthy obsessions with eyeball tattooing. She was the hookup queen, the cautionary tale parents told their teenagers about. She was not someone who dated a guy who knew he wanted to become a Harvard-educated corporate lawyer. She may as well marry her own dad. Ew.
Besides all that, the last thing Pinky needed was another person in her life against whom her mom could compare her unfavorably. A summer transaction was one thing, but she could just imagine the train wreck her life would become if she and Samir extended this beyond the summer. All of his many accomplishments would supply her mom with an endless round of ammunition against her. No, thank you. Whatever that frisson of… whatever… was between them, she would kill it with fire.
Samir turned to her. “We’re here.”
Pinky followed his gaze to see her parents and Dolly’s family waving at them enthusiastically from the pier where they’d all congregated, waiting for Pinky and Samir. “Oh, right.” She stood and smirked at him, her hands on her hips. “So I guess I didn’t get us totally lost, huh?”
Samir studied her steadily, his brown eyes shimmering in the sun. Pinky’s heart thudded. “No, you didn’t,” he said finally, calmly, not rising to the bait. Something in his expression told her he knew exactly what she was trying to do—pick a fight so she didn’t have to focus on what the actual issue was, a.k.a. that weird little thing between them.
Feeling slightly off-balance, Pinky hopped off the boat and sauntered to her family, feeling his lingering gaze on her skin.
Samir
Pinky’s and Dolly’s parents had laid out a picnic on the grassy bank of the lake. The food was delicious too, chicken and masala potatoes and chickpea salad. Too bad it all tasted like cardboard to Samir.
He couldn’t stop sneaking glances at Pinky. What exactly had just happened between them? Thirty minutes ago, there’d been some definite vibeage going on. And then she began arguing with him for no apparent reason. He glanced at her again. She had her shirt back on, a strappy-back tank top of some kind, and was spearing each chickpea very studiously with her fork, refusing to even look his way. Normally he’d admire such precision, but the ferocity with which she was stabbing those poor beans freaked him out a tad.
Samir shook his head and went back to his lunch. What had he been thinking anyway? Pinky had the right idea—pretend the strange tension between them had never happened and move on. He was here on a business trip of sorts. He couldn’t even imagine what it’d be like to be in his first relationship (there was that kiss with the nineteen-year-old tennis instructor at the country club last year, but that was nowhere close to a relationship) with someone like Pinky. Actually, he could. It would be disastrous. A colossal mistake. They could barely complete a conversation without arguing, for flip’s sake, and there was a reason for that: She was a hotheaded, unpredictable, irresponsible mess. Samir was always on a mission to organize and simplify and streamline his life—not toss it into complete chaos.
“So, Samir!” Mr. Yeung said, looking pleased. There was a bit of mayonnaise at the corner of his mouth that he didn’t seem to know was there. Samir fought against every impulse that told him to pass Mr. Yeung a napkin. “Are you ready to admit defeat?”
Pinky tossed Samir a brief look at that, a kind of See? I told you. Then, apparently remembering she was ignoring him, she went back to her meal.
“Defeat?” Samir said, turning back to Mr. Yeung. He focused his gaze on Mr. Yeung’s forehead, though the mayo taunted him in his peripheral vision.
“We beat you by at least ten minutes!” he said, gesturing to the paddleboats at the pier behind them, gently rocking on the water. He rubbed his hands together, a mad glint in his eye. “Or do you want to see how you do heading back? Aim for a tie, maybe?”
Pinky’s mom reached over and dabbed the corner of his mouth with a napkin, and Samir sagged with relief. “Howard, please. Try not to scare the boy.”
Dolly laughed. “I doubt Samir scares easily. He’s dating Pinky, after all.”
Pinky threw a grape at her. “Samir’s not the competitive type,” Pinky said at the exact same moment Samir said, “I love a little healthy competition.”
They stared at each other, frozen, for a moment.
Mr. Montclair, Dolly’s dad, laughed. “I sense a little incongruence! Which is it?”
“As the psychologists Luft and Ingham would say, perhaps Samir’s blind spot is warring with his arena.” Mrs. Montclair chuckled.