CHAPTER 17
“HEAR me out: kimchi latkes,” is the first thing Daniel says when Liyah opens the door. He sets a five-pound bag of russet potatoes and three liter-sized mason jars of bubbling fermented cabbage on Liyah’s counter.
“I told you it’s just Siobhan and Jordan, right?” Liyah smirks, tearing open the mesh sack and depositing the potatoes into a colander for washing.
Daniel laughs. “Well played. Are you going to hear me out?”
“You’re suggesting that we slice some kimchi, mix it with grated potatoes and flour and egg, and then fry it?”
Daniel hesitates. “Yes?”
Liyah lets him stew for a moment before relinquishing her urge to grin. “In what world would that not be delicious?”
He chuckles, shaking his head and relaxing his shoulders. “You had me worried for a minute there,” he says, and gets to work.
Liyah is more than happy to play sous-chef and be saved from dodging the splattering oil from the hot pan. If she’s being honest, it’s also a joy to watch Daniel cook. He’s so lost in the ritual of it that she doesn’t have to pretend she’s not staring. The sleeves of his menorah-printed button-down are rolled up (naturally), the rounded ends of jellyfish tentacles on his forearms on display. She only teases him for it once. He furrows his brow and sweeps his tongue over his bottom lip in concentration and a stray lock of hair keeps falling in front of his face.
“This is how my parents met,” Liyah says absently as she places another tray of latkes in the oven to keep warm.
“Your goyishe dad made your Jewish mom latkes?”
Liyah frowns. “First of all, if that is supposed to imply that you are making me latkes, as opposed to this being a team effort, you’re an ass.” Daniel laughs. Typical. “Second, no. I meant Chanukah in general. He saw her lighting the menorah in her dorm room window at U-dub and demanded to know who this white girl celebrating Kwanzaa alone was. So she told him the story of Chanukah. Not the miracle of the oil—she explained how that’s the sanitized version for children and that the original miracle was how three hundred Jews were able to fight off their occupiers, but celebrating war and death isn’t in line with Jewish values so we do the light thing instead. And, you know, every religion has a winter festival of lights so it’s just universal human spirituality. Safe to say, he was enamored.”
Daniel laughs. “Now that you’ve told me, I can’t really imagine the people who made you meeting any other way.”
“Good story, huh? He grew up in Clarke County, Alabama. Not a lot of Jews out there. Not that he grew up celebrating Kwanzaa, either, but he had heard of it.”
They fall into silence, and Liyah watches that bit of hair come loose once again. After the third failed attempt to shake it out of his eyes, Liyah takes pity and washes the eggy mess from her hands. “Come here,” she says, and Daniel does a half-squat to bring himself to her level. She brushes the offending strands up, her fingers ghosting against his forehead, and does her best to tuck them into place. She’s focusing solely on his hair, but she can feel his eyes on her, and her heart pumps harder in her chest.
“Thanks,” he says, barely audible over the sizzle of the pancakes, and she makes eye contact at last.
Here’s the thing: Daniel is beautiful. She remembers the first time she noticed it: the summer she turned eleven, during Sechiah. They, along with Gross and Michal, were competing to see who could hold their breath the longest. Liyah and Daniel were the last two underwater, but she surfaced seconds before he did. And when he popped up, hair slicked to his forehead, droplets dangling from his impossibly thick eyelashes, Liyah forgot how to tread for a moment and swallowed a bunch of water trying to come back up for air. She was so embarrassed, she wouldn’t talk to him for the rest of the day, and he assumed it was because she was a sore loser. Right now, his gaze flickering down to her lips, she’s taking in those eyelashes and the cut of his jaw and the softness in his eyes and the golden undertones of his skin all at once and it’s exactly how it was that first time. Too much.
And yet she can’t look away. If he were the sun, she’d readily burn her retinas.
“Liyah.” Daniel’s voice comes out strained, and she loses her breath.
There’s a knock at the door, and Liyah jumps back, scrambling to answer it.
“We come bearing drinks!” Siobhan and Jordan hold up their respective bottles of whiskey and gin.
“Perfect, come on in.”
Siobhan pulls Liyah aside as Jordan calls a “Hey man, want a gin and tonic?” and saunters over to the kitchen.
She presses the back of her hand to Liyah’s forehead. “You feeling okay, love? You’re a bit red in the cheeks.”
“I’ve been standing over a hot stove, it’s to be expected,” Liyah lies.
Daniel whips around, waving the spatula at Liyah. “I’ve been doing the frying, don’t try to take credit.”
“Well, I’ve been by the heat mixing the batter. By hand, might I add,” Liyah retorts.
“That’s nothing. I’m doing all the hard work, and I’ve got the oil burns to prove it.”
Liyah rolls her eyes. “You’re such a baby.” She makes her way over to her Bluetooth speaker and puts on her Chanukah party playlist, which consists of whatever alternative R&B she’s been listening to recently and the only three holiday-specific songs she knows.
And like that, the tension between them dissipates.
BY THE TIME the three candles in the chanukiah are nothing but colorful, waxy stubs, Siobhan is a few decibels louder than usual, having failed to curb her cocktail consumption after finding the kimchi latkes too spicy to eat. Daniel and Jordan had managed to hold in their white people jokes, but Liyah had not, and to her credit, Siobhan seemed genuinely amused.
The North Carolina–bred chivalry in Jordan has yet to be frozen out by the Chicago winters, and he calls an Uber as he helps Siobhan into her furry pink coat. “I’m sorry to leave you two to clean,” he says looking back to Siobhan, who is leaning against Liyah’s wall for support.
Daniel shakes his head, offering a “You’re good, man” as Liyah waves him off.
“I knew what I was getting into when I offered to host.” She hugs Jordan goodbye first, then Siobhan. “Text me the moment you’re home.”
“Well, I’m sure I’ll be scarlet about this tomorrow, but I had a wonderful night. Thanks for hosting, love.” She leans in and gives Liyah an audible kiss on the cheek.
“The moment you get home. I mean it.”
“Yes, sir!” Siobhan lazily salutes and waltzes out the door, Jordan trailing her and wearing a concerned frown.
Liyah slides the dead bolt into place with a satisfying click, and Daniel is alone with her once again. They silently go about clearing the table, eventually moving on to trade turns scrubbing and drying the pile of dishes in the sink.
This shouldn’t feel weird. They’ve been doing well—at least he thought—since his dad’s Yahrzeit. A bit of uncertainty that night on her rooftop, and again on Halloween, sure, but since then they’ve interacted with ease. Tonight, watching her joke and laugh and poorly sing along to Adam Sandler’s “The Chanukah Song” after that moment in the kitchen …
It’s broken him. It feels like every single hair on his body is standing up, his awareness of her heightened with her every move. She’s wearing this stupid baggy sweater with Let’s Get Lit! emblazoned across her chest above a cartoon menorah, and she’s quite possibly the sexiest woman he’s ever seen. With each accidental finger touch as a newly cleaned dish is exchanged, the air grows thicker.
Just before he suffocates, Liyah’s phone buzzes, slicing through the heady silence.
She abandons the pot and dishrag to check it. “Siobhan is home and has taken some Advil with a lot of water.”
“That’s good,” Daniel mumbles, his words coming out raspy—as if he hasn’t spoken in hours or days rather than mere minutes—and he turns to look at her.
Liyah’s eyes skate over his features, lingering at his lips, and he thinks—no, he knows—that she feels the denseness of the space between them. “Daniel,” she says in a voice he’s never heard before, and something knotted inside him comes undone.
“Liyah,” he starts, pausing to dry his hands on the dish towel and take a deep breath. He steps toward her, tentatively placing his hand at the small of her back. She blinks, inhaling sharply, but doesn’t move away from him. There’re a million reasons why he shouldn’t say what he’s about to say, not the least of them being how she reacted last time. After what feels like an eternity, the sheer desire thrumming through his body wins over. “Do you want me to kiss you?”
She exhales, still frozen in place. “We said we weren’t going to do this.”
Daniel swallows, nodding. “You’re right.”
“That wasn’t a no,” Liyah says.
A slow smile spreads across his face. “Alright, then, I’ll ask you again: do you want me to kiss you?”
Her lips part, her eyes widening in a way that almost looks pained. “Please,” she whimpers, and tilts her chin toward him.
Daniel closes the gap gently, softly pressing his lips to hers as his hand divulges the intensity of his want by roughly drawing her to him. Liyah presses right back, rising to her tiptoes to get better access, the movement causing her body to slide firmly against his. Her teeth graze his bottom lip, and he groans, kissing her back with full force, tongues tangling, hands finding bellies and hips and necks. Her fingernails skate down his spine and fuck he’s hard already and he can’t even be embarrassed because Liyah’s making these soft moans that get louder as his lips latch onto her neck, and when he leans back, her eyes are closed, her face relaxed in that familiar, blissfully lost look he loves so much. He lifts her onto the countertop, and she wraps her legs around him, bringing them closer together, heels digging into his hamstrings.
I’ve never been this turned on before, he thinks. But that can’t be true, can it? He’s slept with a fair number of women, and yet …
One of his greedy hands slides under Liyah’s sweater and crawls up her skin until it reaches the lace of her bra. The other hooks under her thigh, pulling her hips into him even though they’re already as close as they can possibly be. A hard nipple presses into his palm as he kneads, and Liyah digs her nails into his bicep. The back of his throat emits an unfamiliar sound, almost like a growl, and Liyah’s tongue plunges deeply into his mouth as if she’s trying to taste it.
Suddenly, she breaks the kiss, and Daniel’s entire body stills. Her eyelids squeeze shut, and she opens her mouth to speak, but says nothing.
Daniel searches her face. “Are you okay? Do you want me to stop?” She’s still quiet, breathing heavily. He drops his hands and pulls away, but she whines and uses her legs to bring him back against her, shaking her head.
She’s just as overwhelmed as I am, he realizes, and laughs softly, lifting his hands to trace gentle circles on her thighs. “Whenever you’re ready, let me know what you want from me. Unless you want me to forget we did this, because I don’t think there’s anything I could do to make that happen.”
HE’S LAUGHING. How is he laughing?
Liyah is unmoored from reality to the point of being unable to form a sentence, and here’s Daniel, sanguine, smiling, the only sign of disarray being the state of his hair. She’s not even sure why she’s like this; she’s not exactly a blushing virgin. It can’t just be that Daniel’s a good kisser (phenomenal, actually), because she’s enjoyed many good kissers before. And none of them have made her feel like she’s falling apart at the seams.
His fingers are still running over her thighs, and after a few seconds (or maybe minutes, she can’t be sure at the moment), Liyah bites out: “I didn’t forget the first time.”
Daniel laughs, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “Neither did I.”
“Oh.” Her heart flutters a bit. “You’re wearing too much clothing,” she says, and finally has a large enough shred of composure to laugh with him.
His calloused fingers find their way back to the bare skin of her stomach. She remembers noticing the roughness against her skin that first time he touched her at Kinley’s anniversary party. Now, she knows they’re from his evenings at Chicago Rocks. It’s the first time she’s ever articulated that thought in its entirety, but it makes her see the pads of his fingers differently. They’re an emblem of his friendship with Jordan, a sign of a major part of his life.
That’s what it is to let someone in, have someone go from a shadowy middle school memory to full-fledged Daniel. It’s being able to see a bigger picture from a singular puzzle piece. Funny how that goes.
“And what would you like me to do about that?” he asks, his lips stretching into that crooked smile. He reaches his free hand up to her face and brushes his thumb across her cheekbone, pressing gently on each of her moles.
“Think of it as an extension of rolling your cuffs. If you keep going, eventually you’ll get there.”
He releases her (this is not her intended result) to roll his right sleeve farther. It catches midway up his bicep, and he makes an exaggerated frown. “Looks like I’m stuck.”
“I have to do everything myself, don’t I?” she complains, and claws at the buttons until his shirt falls open, slipping it off his shoulders to reveal a delicious expanse of chest, a dark trail of hair on his abdomen. Without thinking, she presses a kiss to the body of the jellyfish, then a bite for good measure. She reaches out and traces the tentacles as they wrap around his arm, something she now realizes she has always wanted to do. “Why a jellyfish?”
“Got stung by one on a family vacation when I was little. I thought it was funny.”
“Your dad wasn’t mad?” The words fall from her lips before she thinks better of it. She’s never more desperately wished for a thicker filter between her brain and mouth. If it sways Daniel, though, he doesn’t show it.
“A little, at first. He was worried that I was rejecting Judaism. But when he saw I was still doing the major holidays, he got over it. I think it helped that he thought it was funny, too.”
She bites her lip, looking up at him, feeling warmth spread across her chest, down to her belly. “I’m glad.”
“Me too. Now,” Daniel says, his head dipping so that he can move his lips right against her earlobe. “Is it okay if we don’t talk about our parents?”
Liyah laughs and grabs his jaw, guiding his face toward hers until she can capture his lips in a kiss. “Fine by me,” she says against his mouth, pulling back only so that she can remove the ugly Chanukah sweater she found on a clearance rack.
“God, Liyah,” he says, voice gravelly, as he takes in the sight of her topless.
“There was once a time when you saw me in less every single day,” she challenges.
Daniel shakes his head, laughing. “One: I can’t believe you want to count seeing each other in swimsuits when we were preteens. I think you know this is different.” And she does. Even the picture Neen sent of Daniel shirtless at the pool party is nothing compared to seeing him now, when he’s in this partial state of undress just for her. She wants to argue, but her skin feels hot under his gaze, and she can’t bring herself to do it. “And two: even if I had seen you like this already, I’d still want to stop and look.”
Liyah’s lips part, releasing only her breath, because she can’t begin to formulate a response.
He waits for her to speak, leaning closer until their noses just barely touch.
It’s that tiny bit of contact, so small that it’s almost nothing, that destroys what’s left of her self-control. “I want you,” she says before she can hold herself back. The words are throaty and desperate and nothing like her usual voice, and it’s not quite sexy, at least not in the way it should be. Because she doesn’t append the words inside me, nor does she say to touch me and it’s almost like that isn’t even what she means. She just says you, not as in his touch but as in him, as in Daniel as a whole, as in he found her loose thread and is going to tug until she completely unravels.
It must be the right thing to say, because his eyes darken and they’re back to kissing and unzipping and feeling until they’re out of breath and nearly naked in her kitchen, her bikini-cut underwear the only thing separating her from the countertop. He presses his lips in a trail down her stomach, peppers kisses on the underside of her thighs, moaning as he removes the last barrier between her and the cold quartz. His tongue and fingers move expertly against her until she cries out, wanting more. More touch, more closeness, more of him.
Daniel stands and pulls Liyah against him, lifting her up and stumbling over discarded clothes to her bedroom, where he lays her down and points at her bedside table, one eyebrow quirked. She nods, and he rummages through the drawer, extracting a foil square. He tucks it between his teeth as he pulls down his boxer briefs, doing an adorable little hop to spring free of them.
Liyah sharply exhales at the sight of him, standing naked before her, smiling and holding eye contact as he rolls the condom over himself. Daniel. He breaks almost every rule she’s ever made for herself. But there’s not a chance in hell that she’s not going to do it.
Her ambivalence (true meaning, not colloquial) must be apparent because he kneels on the bed beside her and takes her hand. “Are you okay?” he says for the second time tonight. “Do you still want to do this?”
Liyah nods fervently. “Yes, and very, very much.”
He lines himself up with her, presses a kiss to her forehead, and scoops her hips off the bed with his hand at the small of her back. “Good, because I want you so badly that it hurts.”
She doesn’t have the chance to return his words, to tell him just how much it hurts, because he presses into her, and her jaw falls open with a silent moan.
As he presses farther, Liyah squeezes her eyes so tightly shut that she sees stars. There’s a moment of stillness as Daniel waits for her to adjust. Or maybe for himself, too, judging by the hiss of breath she feels rush past her earlobe. His weight on her is all-consuming. So good. So, so good.
It’s not just his weight. It’s everything. Every sense, every thought is a hazy cloud of Daniel. Part of her, even now, even after months of wanting (and wanting not to want), can’t believe that it’s Daniel Rosenberg she’s doing this with. Who she is letting have so much of her, who is giving her so much of himself in return. Her skin is truly on fire now, made up not of cells but of tiny loci of heat. She might disintegrate.
“Daniel,” she whispers, voice strained.
“Liyah,” he says back. Like he’s in a cloud of her, too. She didn’t leave her own atmosphere behind to enter his. They switched.
Or maybe blended together, and now they’re both learning to breathe in this new composition of air.
He moves slowly, carefully, as though she’s made of glass at first, and she’s desperate for more, so she arches and grinds until he hears her plea and meets her where she wants him, quickening the pace, displaying the same urgency she feels.
That’s what it’s like the whole time, a call and response, a conversation between their bodies as they change positions and bury themselves within one another. This is how all language should be from now on, Liyah thinks. Touch. Waiting for equal and opposite reaction.
“Fuck, Liyah,” Daniel says through gritted teeth, his breath fanning over the back of her neck from where he spoons her, his fingers moving over her in perfect time with his hips. She reaches back and threads her fingers into his hair, pulling him in, feeling him kiss her neck as the conversation comes to a close, Daniel holding her tightly as their bodies tense and release around one another.
There’s a lot that Liyah could say after she goes slack but given that she recently predicted the obsolescence of verbal communication, the “That was … wow” she manages is rather impressive.
Daniel sighs into the crook of her neck. “Wow, indeed.” A kiss, pressed to her shoulder. “Thank you.”
“Some might say I should be thanking you as well.”
She can feel his lips stretch into a smile against her skin. “You’re welcome. But I more meant thank you for trusting me.”
At this, Liyah’s chest constricts painfully, trying to contain the thousand emotions threatening to pour out. If she holds still enough, maybe she won’t have to feel any of them. Maybe she’ll be frozen in this singular moment, and it will consume her until it is the only point in time she knows: past, present, future. Here, wrapped up in someone who holds her with kindness, will be the only way she has ever been touched, the only way she’ll ever be touched again. Infinite in either direction. And impossible as it may be, if she told Daniel that was what she wanted, she knows he would try to hold still as long as he could, just to give her that moment of peace. Because he’s right, she trusts him. She presses her fist to her sternum, as if that will hold her closed, and is silent for a minute.
Then, Daniel still inside her, Liyah begins to cry.