A moment of thick silence passed between them. Olga stared at Matteo, her face blank. La Lupe was coming from the jukebox, and in the distance the sound of a motorcycle crew out for a summer night ride. Olga slapped the bar top and hopped off her barstool.
“You know what, fuck you.” Her hard-suppressed South Brooklyn accent jumped off her tongue as her chest and neck grew hot with anger. “Fuck. You. I really don’t know who the fuck you think you are, judging me, or what kind of fucking wack idea of a date you have in your head that you text a bitch nonstop for a week trying to get together, drag me out to bumblefuck Williamsburg just to take up my time by insulting me and how I make my fucking—”
Matteo grabbed her waist with one arm and, with his other hand, took hold of her hand, which seconds before had been shaking in his face, and kissed her. Intellectually, Olga knew that this was a cheap ploy to calm her righteous anger, but physically, she felt a surge that made the walls of her vagina contract, sending a charge up her spine, relaxing her shoulders, loosening her neck until her head dipped back in full surrender. Her intellectual resistance melting in recognition that this was why she had shown up to bumblefuck in the first place.
“Listen,” Matteo said, when they finally broke apart. He took hold of her hands in his and caressed them as he looked into her eyes. “I’m going to ask you to try and suspend disbelief for a moment and hear me out here: I’m not trying to diss you. I’m really not. My time at college was wasted. I did not learn the ways of the people of New England. I have no tact. I’m just genuinely curious about you. It’s not every day I get to meet a smart, sexy Brooklyn girl. That’s why I’ve been blowing up your phone and trying to drag you out to dive bars since we met. I just want to get to know you. I’m not good with small talk. I ask bad questions. I’m a bit of an asshole. And who the fuck would I ever be to judge you and the values of your profession? I’m a native Brooklynite earning my living as a fucking Realtor in gentrified Brooklyn. So, please, sit and let’s just get to know each other a little bit, okay?”
Olga looked at him and sat back down. She could hear kids outside squealing in play and wondered if it was possible that somewhere in the borough of Kings adults still opened fire hydrants for children to dance in on hot summer days.
“Let’s change the topic,” he said. “Why don’t you ask me a question? Anything you want to know.”
She looked around for a second and back at him, trying to glean something she couldn’t articulate. She felt a bit out of her element.
“Yeah,” she finally said. “You play dominos, you know the salsa classics, and you certainly seem to be a regular here. But, I don’t think you’re actually even Puerto Rican. Am I right?”
Matteo put his hands on his heart, his face grimaced.
“Ah! You’ve called me out! You really do know how to poke a man where it hurts. I didn’t pass the smell test. Damn. What gave me away?”
“Honestly? You know too much of our history. Dead giveaway. This begets another question, though. We’re a wonderful people and all, but why do you want to be one of us so bad in the first place?”
“That’s a longer answer that requires more rum and some better music, but let’s get ourselves sorted and then I’m more than happy to tell you.”
They spent the next forty-five minutes taking turns picking songs that the other simply “had to hear” and nursing another glass of rum, telling stories of Old Brooklyn, discovering common ground they had shared while never quite crossing paths: the Kids days of Washington Square Park, hanging out at Fat Beats, Sundays at the Tunnel. People that they inevitably knew in common.
Eventually, Matteo told her the story of his Jewish mother and Black father and their divorce, after which his father faded into his native Los Angeles, leaving his biracial son with his white mother in South Slope, Brooklyn. When he would play in the street with the other kids on the block, people always assumed that little Matteo, with his lightly freckled café-con-leche skin and tight head of curls, belonged to the Puerto Rican family who lived next door, and after a while, Matteo kind of felt the same way. He would be at all their family gatherings, sometimes dragging his mother, sometimes alone. He learned to dance, he learned to play dominos, he even learned how to cook.
After high school he got a partial scholarship to Bennington College, where he planned to study music composition, but soon discovered he would leave with more debt than he had talent. He switched his major to political economy, wrote a letter to one of the few other Bennington alumni interested in making money, and landed himself a job at an investment bank. The annual bonuses made it easy to forget he was the only Black guy he saw all day who didn’t work in the mail room. He bought a loft in SoHo, DJ’d parties downtown to keep life interesting, and did a ton of coke, so it all ran smoothly.