I snickered.
“How could I forget, Arnie the Ankylosaurus,” I teased.
Ricky chuckled.
“Ha. Right.” Then he licked his lips, serious. “No, but I mean what you told me. About Abuela.”
“Yeah?” I asked encouragingly.
“Yeah,” Ricky continued. “Well, I followed your advice. My dad got admitted again. And I drove Abuela to the hospital. That was it. I didn’t even go up to the room with her.” He opened his eyes then, and they shone with the reflection of the lights. “She was so happy, Angie. Singing, the whole way there. All because I got my ass in the car and drove her to the hospital so that she could sit next to her son’s hospital bed. God, I felt like such a piece of shit.
“My family is small. So my grandparents have worked to expand it, you know. Abuela has her church friends and her Sunday school kids. Abuelo’s all but adopted some of the guys at his shop. I grew up with some of them, you know. Like this guy Juan . . . he’s been there like fifteen years and treats them like his parents. But still. I’m her blood.” Ricky swallowed. “She used to have to wait for Abuelo to close up shop, you know. Sometimes she’d convince one of the guys to drop her off. As if her perfectly capable grandson wasn’t just sitting on his hands a few miles away.”
“Ricky,” I said. The air was thick with his self-loathing. I felt a sudden, irresponsible urge to pull him close, but the six-inch-tall wooden barriers between our mats prevented that. “It’s more complicated than that. You’re allowed to have complex feelings about your dad.”
“But it isn’t about my dad,” Ricky interrupted. “It’s about Abuela. I never considered that perspective, before you. Which is nuts. It’s the only one that makes sense.” He turned to look at me then, his face open and unguarded. “That’s the thing about you, Angie. You just . . . get it. You care about people, even when they’re kind of shitty to you, but you aren’t a doormat. You don’t lose sight of who you are in the process. You make me actually stop and think about things, you know?” He looked at me unblinkingly, his expression almost grave. “That . . . I don’t think you realize how special that is.”
I’ve never met anyone like you, Ricky had said on the night that we decided to be friends. Frederick had once said something similar, but he hadn’t looked at me the way Ricky was looking at me now, with something akin to wonder. Instead, he’d grimaced, embarrassed. Angie, he’d said. Can you please just keep your thoughts to yourself for once?
“I’m glad I talked to you that day, in the garden. I know you feel some type of way about it, but we would’ve been strangers still, right? We wouldn’t be here right now. And that would’ve been a tragedy. Because this way . . . I get to know you. And I . . .” Ricky continued, “I consider that a privilege.”
I didn’t realize that I’d been holding my breath until I felt my lungs seize in my chest.
There were only a few times in my life that I’d been left at a loss for words, and this was one of them. I ducked away from Ricky’s probing stare, my pulse pounding audibly in my temples. This wasn’t fair. He couldn’t just open up to me and say all that and not expect me to fall for him. And I could feel myself falling, feel a pressure on my chest that was almost painful. Many men had called me beautiful; no one had yet to reach deeper and tell me what they liked about me beyond that. And here was Ricky, going into detail, identifying what I liked most about myself and telling me he liked it too.
“Thank you for saying that,” I managed finally. I reached out as far as I could above the partition, hooking his pinky into mine.
Ricky’s smile unfolded across his face slowly, first in the corners of his mouth, the lift of his cheeks, the squint and crease of his eyes. How many times had I looked at that face just to watch it light up like this? So many that it should have been embarrassing. But today, something was different; today, it felt like it was made for me, every part of it a match for mine, from the small Cupid’s bow in his top lip to the slightly jagged right canine that showed only when he laughed. I wanted to kiss him. I had never wanted to kiss anyone so badly. It was a physical want, like the feeling I got after one too many rum and Cokes, like the pulling I’d felt in my skin after our stint in the Ice Room. The impulse was so strong that I could think of nothing else, and so before I could convince myself otherwise, I closed the distance between us and pressed my lips against his.