Texas Pages

“Hi,” he said.
He was cute. Shaggy hair that had probably been blond when he was a kid. Blue eyes with lashes that sisters always envy on brothers. Teeth that were just crooked enough for character. At that moment, he had a love-struck look to him that made me think, in that instant, against all my self-deprecating instincts, that he was appearing out of nowhere to ask me out. And right then, before we’d even spoken to each other, I felt like the answer to any question he could ever ask me would be yes. Yes, yes—hell, yes.
“What can I say,” he said then, leaning in, “to get your friend to fall in love with me?”
“Nadia?” I said.
“Oh, God, her name’s Nadia,” he said, collapsing backward against the chair like he’d been struck by an arrow. “That’s such a cool name.”
“Well,” I said, sitting a bit straighter and arranging my spoon on my napkin. “I’m not sure that you’re her type.”
Her type, in fact, was businessmen. Tall, BMW-driving, occasionally married businessmen.
“Just give me some tips.”
“Really, chief, my best tip is to find somebody else.”
“Give me her number.”
“I’m not going to do that.”
“Then do this. Give me your number, let me convince you I’m not a psycho, and then give me her number.”
“I don’t think you’re a psycho,” I said. “I just don’t think she’s going to go out with you.”
“Please,” he said.
He had a pen out already. He reached his hand across the table and waited, looking at me. I could have rooted in my purse for a scrap of paper, but, instead, I took his hand, turned it over, and wrote my number across the palm. Beneath the number, I wrote “Jenny.” Not a name to make anyone fall back in a chair. A name that seven girls in my graduating class had. As he pulled his hand back, I wished like anything that I had written something else—“Jasmine” or “Vivian” or “Delilah.”
He looked up. “Jenny,” he said, “I’m Dean.”
He called me the next morning and set about wooing me. Wooing me so that I would go to bat for him with Nadia. He opened the car door for me. He burned CDs for me. He gave me a potted orchid. He rubbed my neck in traffic. He took me to eat the best Vietnamese pho I had ever tasted. At a roadside carnival, he spent thirty dollars trying to win me a bear. And, all the while, he asked me question after question about myself, listening to the answers like I was the only person in the world who mattered.
And I was wooed. I was so wooed that I forgot why he was wooing me. After two weeks of what felt like the beginning of a relationship between the two of us, as we finished dinner at Indian restaurant, and just as I was starting to think I might get a goodnight kiss when we got to my house, he said, “So. Can I have it?”
“Have what?”
He looked at me like I was nuts. “Her number,” he said.
What choice did I have? I gave it to him.
Here was the problem: I liked him. By then, I already liked him. And even though it defied all logic, I knew that, whether he knew it or not, he liked me, too. I could just feel it. We had something.
What followed with Nadia was predictable. He called her, pursued her, was denied, pursued her harder, was denied and then mocked, and finally gave up. And I consoled him. And one night, after a six-pack of beer and our 100th conversation in the series on How Dean Had Blown It, he said, “You’re kind of pretty, too.” And then we slept together.