“Dee,” he said, “I love you.”
“I know,” she said, immediately.
And almost as immediately: “I think I love you, too.”
He nodded thoughtfully, picked at his larb with mass-produced chopsticks, knowing he could no longer eat any more of it, delicious as it was. Even though the tables were far apart, his senses were now heightened enough that he could hear every conversation around them （mostly they were about local real estate）， and his poor bladder was now consumed by that sweet, lovely panic that accompanies reciprocated love.
“Any more thoughts about what we just said to each other,” Dee ventured. “Or should we just talk politics?”
A towheaded and poorly masked five-year-old boy wearing an I AM A FEMINIST T-shirt had wandered very close to their table and was soon accompanied by his likewise-dressed twin. “Kent! Lorimer!” a freckled mama yelled from a nearby table. “Don’t come close!”
“That’s okay,” Dee shouted back, even as she put on her own surgical mask to protect herself from the invaders. The feminist children retreated, kicking up gravel behind them. Ed had spent so much of his capital on his declaration of love that he no longer knew which other words were still in his possession. He decided to gamble and say something stupid.
“You look beautiful in your mask.”
She laughed. “Are you saying my mouth and chin are ugly?”
“No, I just…The gauze matches the color of your eyes.”
“Oh, God. Make this year go away.”
There was so much brimming, and brewing, within Ed that he wondered how to keep it all within himself, how to stop it from coming out as a fountain of tears or a loud “Romanesco” belch or heavy black smoke steaming out of his ears. They were staring at each other again, hands mechanically reaching for the grapefruit mezcal, mouths anxiously swallowing. “Should I keep my mask on between sips?” she said. “Does that turn you on?”
“You know me better than that,” he said. “You know everything I’m thinking. Always.”
“I’m thinking right now you want to touch my knee with yours under the table.”
“See! That’s exactly right.”
“And now,” she said as he began to rub his knee against hers, “you’re kicking yourself for not wearing shorts so you can feel how smooth my skin is. Correction, you’re kicking yourself for not owning a pair of shorts. Which we will have to remedy right away.”
“You see right through me,” he said. “The writer’s mind gives you an advantage.”
“Fine, then what am I thinking?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“Oh, come on! Not fair!” Her voice was high and unusually girlish. She more than knew the rudiments of flirting, he thought.
“You’re thinking that you’ve never been kissed by an Asian man.”
She brought her hand up to her mouth in shock, mimicking, inadvertently, all of the young women on the reality show. “Oh my God,” she said. “You just racialized this.”
“Was I wrong?”
“Well.”
“Then you racialized it first.”
“Okay, fine. Where should this kiss take place? Right here in front of everyone?” Both of them now realized that after Dee’s recent public contretemps she might be recognized by some of the tent-restaurant’s patrons, all of whom were heavy social media users, even Kent and Lorimer, the five-year-old twins. Dee did not want to lose any more of her privacy, even though publicly kissing an Asian man, as he had correctly limned her thoughts, could only help her at this point. （A famous neo-Nazi television personality was now dating a Black man, not that Dee would compare herself to her.） “Let’s go somewhere else,” she said.
The propriety of Ed’s cotton shirt and the way he helped her up from her wooden bench meant they couldn’t just rush to her car and drive at double the speed limit to the Big Island or Writer’s Cottage. （Which would be better for a first tussle?） Instead, they had to do something date-like around town before giving in to their animal best. They walked over to the town’s main street, which sloped from a considerable height toward a promenade overlooking the river. Perhaps there they would find a suitable space for their first unhurried kiss.
The town was full of distressed art galleries and outrageously priced antiques shops. All the goods now had signs against racism next to their price tags. Toward the river, a housing project sheltered many of the town’s nonwhite citizens, and a small Bangladeshi community had set up residences and shops nearby. The easy pace reminded Ed of a recent visit to Trinidad, and indeed a storefront was cheerfully hawking island food to the locals. He made all of these observations to Dee at a rapid clip, and as she compared the Actor’s blathering with his, she found them similar in some ways, but Ed’s crooning was less intense, less self-conscious, the warble of an observer, not a participant. Again, she found it matched her own new outlook, a traveler just passing through a series of delightful hellscapes on the way to oblivion, and the way he sweated in his overdone formal shirt lent him all the personality she could handle in a man.