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Sam hoped he had enough room in his pants for dinner. PJ had taken him to freshen up his wardrobe for his date and they had gone to a shop in Greek Village, near the university. The shop was inexplicably called TORSO and instead of the clothes being displayed on racks, they were hung in discreet closets lined in canvas, or hung from tree branches made from some kind of all-white ceramic. Sam had understood it not at all, while PJ went from nook to nook, somehow gathering clothes, and then shoved him into a dressing room that had, of all things, bookshelves lining the walls.

PJ had talked him into a pair of dark jeans much, much tighter than he usually wore and a short-sleeved button-down that Sam immediately thought was totally dorky, but PJ said was
swank.
The shirt was a rough gray linen, and Sam had spent what seemed like forever ironing it, horrified to discover that over the entire back yoke of the shirt was a large swirl of metallic printing with letters that looked like graffiti. It took him forever to make out that it spelled
DEEPER
.

Sweet Jesus.

Now he was standing in the lobby of Nina’s condo in his too-tight jeans, and his swank shirt that was already wrinkling across his belly and under his arms, and his feet were killing him, as PJ had insisted on new shoes and the ones he approved were black and pointed and had both a zipper and a buckle, though Sam thought they could probably hold on to his feet by pressure alone.

He just wanted to look nice.

Then he saw Nina.

And if stuffing his nut sack into these pants and killing his feet and looking like a dork were what it took to have her, he’d do it a hundred times over. She was wearing an orange dress that her insane body was practically bursting out of. Her hair was everywhere, down like it had been in the hospital, spilling over her shoulders and back. He wanted to sink his face into it and inhale.

She was walking kind of slow, and then his heart stopped when he saw her legs in heels.

“Fuck Nina, you look good.”

She gave him a half smile, and he realized she looked a little tired. “You always know just what to say, Sam.”

He wasn’t sure what she meant, then he wanted to smack himself in the head. Sam’d brought Mike to the Paz Farms cold storage center this morning to help him sort the Community Share boxes and Mike had used
the time while they filled them with cucumbers, tomatoes, and corn to coach him on how to handle himself with Nina.

“Thing is, Sammy, this Nina? She’s done all this herself, and it’s fuckin’ impressive. She’s like a goddamned baroness. Smart woman like that, you hafta let her make all the decisions, like I do with my DeeDee. You’ll just be happier.” He’d crisscrossed the flaps on another box then picked up an ear of corn, pointing it at Sam’s chest.

“Watch your mouth, and in your case try not to act anything like yourself. You have an impulse? Can it. For once. Bite your tongue, snap a rubber band on your wrist, whatever, your first guess is wrong. I love you, Sam, baby, but that’s ’cause I don’t remember otherwise. This Nina, you’re going to have to polish your chrome and hope she doesn’t look under the hood.”

“Fuck,” Sam’d said, but he didn’t have any reason to think Mike wasn’t right. And here, already, confronted with Nina looking beautiful in her dress and heels, he’d hit her with the F-bomb and leered at her like he’d never seen a beautiful woman before.

Actually though, until Nina, he never had.

He picked up her hand. “Sorry. It’s just that you do. Look good.”

She looked at him, tilted her head. When she did, her hair sort of slithered over one shoulder and Sam fisted his hands to keep them off her hair. She tilted her head the other way. “You look … nice?”

“Yeah?” He smoothed his hands over the front of the shirt, and was pissed to see that it was even more wrinkled than when he got out of his car. Also, wasn’t linen supposed to be cool, or something? The shirt was feeling damp under his arms, and like he’d get chafed. Maybe it was the tight jeans making him feel so warm.

“Very … hip?”

She had her lips pressed together and she wasn’t quite meeting him in his eyes, or not for long. He squinted at her face as a shaft of sunlight highbeamed through the lobby windows.

“You’ve been crying.” He stepped closer. Her eyelids were a little swollen and it made her crow’s feet spread into the skin under her eyes, which looked purplish. He reached out a finger and brushed underneath one eye.

She slapped his hand away.

“Who dressed you?”

Sam sighed. “PJ.”

Nina grinned and it was contagious and perfect and familiar. “Can you breathe, baby?”

Sam tried to pretend his heart didn’t tenderize into a useless pulp when Nina called him
baby.
“No. Also, I can’t breathe because you take my breath away. Not just because my pants are too tight.”

Nina really laughed then, and took his hand. “Where are we going?”

“To this Ethiopian restaurant.”

“Have you been there before?”

“No, but CityPages says it’s really good and a good place for a date.”

“And it’s where you want to go?”

“Absolutely.”

Sam had thought about taking her to the dinner club in his neighborhood, but when he thought about the heavy leather booths and the cheesy pictures of Frank Sinatra all over the walls, he wasn’t sure. He had taken women there before and they seemed to wrinkle their noses at the old-fashioned surf-and-turf menu. His dad had taken his mother there, trading date nights with Betty and her late husband, Marvin, and later, Sam had taken his homecoming and prom dates there, feeling important that he had the cash to cover the tab.

Nina was different though. He wanted to show her he could match up to her. Like Mike said, she was smart and had built an entire business herself. She knew a lot about food, too. What if she didn’t want to eat anything at a throwback dinner club? At her café, there were things like sweet potato gnocchi and cornmeal mush with field greens and candied pork belly. None of those were things he’d ever eaten before, but when he did, he’d thought about what it would be like to eat things like that and listen to Nina boss around her employees forever, and ordered seconds.

He wanted her to be the one to try something new, with him.

“Let’s go, Opie.” She laced her fingers through his and he forgot about his sweaty, wrinkled shirt and how his shoes pinched.

Everything was just Nina.

“We have to walk, is that okay? It’s just six blocks from here, but I don’t think I can get parking in your neighborhood. I had to use a garage to get here.”

Nina winced, but nodded.

“You sure? I could get my car, and take a chance?”

“No, of course we’ll walk.”

Sam tried to dig around to find the confidence he had planning this, but in the end could only hold Nina’s hand and walk out the door.

He looked at her, her bright dress straining across everything that jiggled, the hard caps of her deltoids, her hair, which, when he leaned over her to push open the door, was just under his chin and smelled so good. He didn’t know what it smelled like, just good.

He would not fuck this up, not this thing. If everything else had to go to hell, that was just fine, all he needed was Nina not to realize she shouldn’t be holding his hand.

He could do this. If he just stayed ahead of his own impulses, like Mike said, thought first of Nina and
what she might like, and was careful, this could be it.

Right here.

A woman like this, with legs like that, and her brain, and how well she took care of everyone and everything—he could be by the side of that woman.

Maybe.

He laced his fingers through hers and felt tall. Felt like he could breathe. Felt like he wanted to take her someplace quiet and kiss her and get his hands all over and under that orange dress, but he could do better than he had in the front seat of her truck or against a chicken house or in a hospital office.

He could
be
better.

He wondered, though, if being better meant that he might not have the chance to get his hands under that dress.

She looked at him, and he felt his face go hot, like maybe she could read his mind.

“What are you thinking about?” She was leaning into him and walking slow, so maybe she liked this. It was hot out, though, and Sam tried not to think about whether she was leaning up against the damp underarm of his shirt.

“I’m thinking about your dress.” Which was true, and not necessarily a crass thing to say.

She laughed. “Oh yeah? What about it?”

“It’s a good color.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You match my hair.”

She laughed again, and stumbled a little, and that gave him the chance to haul her closer.

“What does your shirt say?”

Goddammit
,
PJ.
“I don’t think it says anything. I think it’s just a design.”

She stopped and walked behind him. “No, I think it says something, it’s just very stylized. See, here.” She traced over his shoulders and he closed his eyes. “Huh.”

“What?”

“It says
deeper.
Deeper than what? Does that mean you’re really deep? Or that you go—”

“I think it’s just the brand, or the company or whatever.”

“Huh. I hadn’t pegged you for a logo hound.”

“I’m not.”

“It’s really shiny, too. Sparkles in the sunlight. I like these small blue rhinestones on the swirls.”

“There’re
rhinestones
?”

“You’re a rhinestone cowboy, baby. Who goes deeper, or so your shirt claims.”

“It’s swank.”

“What is?”

“The shirt. That’s what PJ said, that it was
swank.
”

“What does that mean again?”

Sam closed his eyes and yanked Nina in close. “I have no fucking idea.”

They started to walk again. “I actually do like the rhinestones, but you know what I like more?”

“Normal shirts?”

“I like that you wanted to look swank for me and let PJ dress you.”

Sam grinned. He couldn’t help it. He’d done something right without even trying or understanding exactly what the right thing was. Who’da thought?

They walked, and Nina pulled back a little slower, and he kept pace.

If Nina wanted to stroll, they would stroll. He ignored how the zipper on one of his shoes was cutting into his ankle. The shoes were so tight that he wasn’t sure he was supposed to wear socks with them, so he hadn’t. If they walked this slow all night, though, he probably wouldn’t hobble and would be okay for what he’d planned after dinner.

“How’s Tay?” Sam had been upset to hear that Tay was staged at type IIA. She was going to have a rough road ahead and if he could have made that go completely away, he would. He hated everything about it.

“Holding.” Nina looked up at him. “She’s getting married.”

He squeezed her hand. She looked worried, but Sam had seen this before. A lot of people needed stakes just to live their lives. Maybe Tay or the person she was marrying, he guessed Adam, needed them.

That seemed okay to Sam. He kind of thought all of life itself was high stakes, but maybe that was keeping everything a little too ramped up.

“When?”

“After she’s recovered from surgery, before her treatments start.”

“That would be a good time to do it. It’s Adam?”

“Yeah. They’ve been together, or on their way to getting back together, since almost from the moment they met. I guess he’s probably freaked.”

“Yeah, maybe. But that’s okay.”

“You think a freak-out is a good way to start a marriage?”

“I don’t know. I think if you love somebody, and know you want to be with them forever, it doesn’t matter how it starts, just so long as it doesn’t end.”

“Sam.”

“It’s possible I’m a romantic, but you knew that.”

“I’m not going to regret this date, am I?”

Sam felt his heart stop. “Jesus, Nina, I fuckin’ hope not.”

Nina stopped walking. “I want to be here.”

“It’s just that now I’m worried that you don’t like Ethiopian food.”

“I love Ethiopian food, but even if I didn’t, the point is that I want to be here—with you. I promise everything else that happens, everything else but your presence, is just incidental.”

“I hope this restaurant is a little better than incidental.”

Nina closed her eyes and rested her forehead against Sam’s chest. That felt good. He put his arms around her. That felt even better. Her skin was warm and his hands slid over her hair and dress. He reached his hands under all of her hair, and it was surprisingly heavy. Her nape was sweaty, and he dug his fingertips into it, rubbing and tracing into the muscle.

She sighed, angled her hips over the outside of his thigh and pressed close.

“Don’t worry anymore, okay?”

He could feel her breath through the linen of his shirt.

“Okay, Nina.”

Her feet were killing her.

But Sam was killing her even more.

He was standing by the hostess, trying desperately not to yell at a manager while she desperately wished one of the chairs for patrons waiting for tables would open up before she passed out from heel blisters.

She wanted to go to Sam and take hold of his hand and tell him that it was okay that they had lost his reservation, or if he had never made one, or if he had meant to make one and just didn’t, that they could just go to her café and look for something in the walk-in to share with two forks, right over the dishwashing sink, with their shoes off and two cold beers.

It was hot in the restaurant, the air-conditioning just couldn’t keep up with the dense weekend crowd, and the huge trays on everyone’s tables were steaming with spicy
wat
and rounds of
teff.

The combination, all of it so intense, was making her a little dizzy and queasy.

Sam turned around, the shells of his ears entirely red, his funny shirt more wrinkle than shirt, and his flaming hair sticking up all over from his pulling at it with irritation.

“We’re good, fucking finally.” The manager standing behind him rolled her eyes.

“This way,” she said.