Hopeless Romantic | ✔️

17| It All Starts With Lightsaber Chopsticks

It felt a little weird showing Tyler now, considering I was basically passing on exactly what Gracie had taught me. But if anything, it made me smile even more, knowing that the little things Gracie had taught me were things I could now take into this little relationship-thing I had going on with Tyler. And maybe, if I was lucky, this unsure thing between us would become more sure.

Maybe it all starts with lightsaber chopsticks.

"Your ex, right?" Tyler asked.

I nodded, not surprised that he knew. Cayden, as much as I trusted him, was also terrible at holding in too much information at once. He was good with secrets up until a point. There was some threshold-type-thing that when he reached it, things would just spill from his mouth.

"Do you still keep in touch with her?"

I shrugged. "Every so often I text her, or she texts me. I love her to death," I said, then caught myself. "I mean–not like that, obviously. I just–I pretty much love everyone ever, all the time. So–" I groaned and shook my head. "Okay, I didn't really mean that to come out that way, either, because I don't love you or anything, right, because that would be scary, and we just kind of re-met, and so obviously that's not the cast, but I–"

Tyler chuckled and touched my arm, which shut me up. "You're rambling, and you don't have to ramble. I know what you mean," he said, then poked my hand. "Chopsticks?"

I let go of a smile. "Chopsticks. So, uh, they're kind of like this." I took Tyler's right hand and placed one chopstick between the ring and middle finger, resting the base on his thumb, and the other in between the index and middle finger. "You hold this one like you would hold a pencil, and it's the only chopstick you actually move. So just think of it as writing, but with two pencils."

"Writing with... two pencils," he repeated, nodding slowly.

"Yeah, except you wouldn't really write with two pencils. So if someone put two pencils in your hand and said to write, but you had to keep the second pencil, you wouldn't use it. You would use this one," I touched the one in between his index finger, "while the other stays completely still."

"So, I move the pencil I would write with. How exactly?" Tyler asked.

"Have you seen Friends?"

"Well, I don't live under a rock."

"Okay, so you know the episode where Ross gets that huge sofa and him and Rachel carry it back to his apartment? And then they get Chandler involved and try to get the sofa upstairs, and the entire time, Ross is yelling–"

"–pivot," Tyler finished, smiling. "Yeah, I fucking love that episode."

"Me too!" I exclaimed. "So that's the movement of the pencil. It's just like a pivot. You pivot with this finger while the other stays stationary, and then bam! You can pick up a heap of noodles and eat like you've never eaten before!"

"I guess that kind of makes sense," Tyler said, then sighed.

He moved his hand, trying to use the pivot technique, but he couldn't quite get it. It took him a minute, but he finally picked up one singular noodle, then let it drop and looked up at me with a grin.

"I kind of did that!"

"You kind of did," I agreed.

"Except I totally didn't, also." Tyler set the chopsticks on his kitchen counter and stood up, brushing past me to grab a fork. "You're a good teacher. I'm just unequipped to use any utensil that doesn't involve scooping or stabbing."

"You could stab with the chopsticks. It would just be really weird," I said, and Tyler laughed.

He opened up his fridge and pulled out a Mike's, then offered me one. I took it even though I hardly drank; I was a sucker for fruity drinks, and Mike's grape-flavored was my all-time favorite.