"SO WHAT ALL places have you been to?" I asked, watching him turn over burgers and hot dogs over the grill.
Royce was—surprisingly—very easy to talk to. He was polite, affable, every word in the dictionary to describe the perfect gentleman. I had some thought in my mind, wondering why Juliet wasn't openly dating Royce instead of Mason. Mason was fine, sure, but his charm mainly lay in how tactile and brash he was, laughing and half-punching and snorting and cracking jokes every other second. A loud all-American charm that seemed a direct contrast to Juliet's slightly foreign way of carrying herself. Like she was always in half-dream, just on the verge of delicate.
Royce seemed a better fit for her. He had a very easy way about him, graceful, almost. Every movement and gesture careful and deliberate. And even when he was fidgeting, rolling his weight back and forth on his heels, it didn't detract from the fact that looked like if a tornado came about all you'd have to do was hold onto him and you'd be fine. Rock solid to Juliet's liquid grace.
"Let's see," he said, frowning at the grill. "Rome, Hong Kong, Barcelona, Uruguay, Karachi, Goa, St. Petersburg—"
"Holy hell."
"—Algiers, Paris that one time I had to see family, and of course," he said, offering me a smoking piece of a burger, "Makkah."
I liked the way he said the word. Most people—Ayah and Hyun excluded—said it like Mecca, may-keh. He said it right.
"You really are Muslim."
"No, I'm Zoroastrian. Of course I'm Muslim," he said. He smiled, and I saw that he had a dimple on his right cheek. He picked up a near-charred burger and put it onto a paper plate. "Do you want this?"
"I'm fasting."
"What a coincidence," he said. He leaned towards me, angling his head so that he was eye-level with me. And in a whisper, he said, "I am too."
The sun was slowly, slowly starting to sink into the horizon. We were nearly done grilling everything, and near the end, a bunch of guys came by to help—and I resented them a little for it. Where were they, before nearly all the work was done? Now they were swooping in to take the credit for our hard work. There was a metaphor here, but I was beginning to feel a little woozy and nauseated and cranky, and my throat was dry, and every part of my body was beginning to shake, but I smiled and grinned through it all. Royce was muttering to me about how if this were a real barbeque, we'd be eating real food—kababs, shish tawook, stuff like that—but here we were, trying to make do with veggie burgers and sausages and beef patties.
I let him talk. A pleasant background noise to my nausea. A very, very, very irrational part of me wanted to lie down on the glass and fall asleep to the sound of Royce's voice.
Someone cracked open a cooler. Beer cans and soft drinks inside, a treasure chest with tin and aluminum jewels. I was handing out paper plates and plastic cutlery and Juliet told me that I would have made an excellent maid and I was feeling irritated enough that I flipped her off.
Her face, lovely even though I felt like I was barely hanging onto consciousness, twisted into an expression of such hurt that I felt every shred of anger I had melt away. Did she know, what she'd done to me? How she'd nearly ruined me? I don't know how she couldn't know—I felt like everything was written on my face, laid bare for her to see. If she didn't, she was more of an airhead than I thought she was. If she did, she was being unnecessarily cruel. I don't know which one I would have preferred.
