Page 31

Emily Bond

Sort of Seeing Someone

Ollie’s vintage one-bedroom apartment feels comfortable.

It’s not at all what I pictured him living in, which was something spacious and sterile, like a lifestyle condo building with “good HVAC ” and lots of fancy amenities.

Alas, he looks right at home as he mans the oven in his outdated kitchen, kept warm by a beastly brown radiator gently oozing heat in front of a big bay window facing the roaring Blue Line.

Honey-colored wood floors are all throughout his apartment.

They creak when he walks from the fridge to the stove and back.

I find it charming. He must be annoyed by it.

As I sit back in the breakfast nook of the connected dining area and watch Ollie flip the pannkakor , it dawns on me that he is a triple threat: he can solve complex riddles, he can fix/build things, and he can, apparently, cook.

Just then, I receive an incoming call from Olivia, a reminder that my phone is not on silent.

“It’s my sister,” I announce, as if he would mind that I take it.

He gives me a wave, spatula in hand.

“Hello?” I say into the phone.

“ Moonie ,” Liv says back.

I wait for something to follow my name but hear nothing. I hold the phone in front of me to see if it disconnected. It didn’t.

“ Liv ? Hello? You there?”

“I’m clinically expecting.”

It takes me a moment to piece it together. I’ve never heard pregnancy described in that manner, but I’m not shocked about Liv’s word choices.

“Are you for real?”

“For real, for real,” Liv says. She goes on to talk a mile a minute.

“I had my blood draw this morning and they called me thirty minutes later. My HCG is well within the normal pregnant range. I go back in a few days to make sure it’s climbing like it’s supposed to, but hey, I’ll take it for what it is right now: a positive pregnancy test—my first one ever. ”

“Where are you now? Do you want me to meet up with you?”

In my peripheral, I notice Ollie pause a bit from whisking the pancake batter. I’m not really going to leave him in the middle of our breakfast date, but it is nice to know he had a reaction that indicated he’d be disappointed if I did.

“No thanks. I’m on my way to CVS. I’m getting a pregnancy test.”

“I thought it’s already confirmed?” I ask.

“Yes, but I want to pee on a stick and see that second pink line with my own eyes. I want to hold it in my hands. I want to shove it in Ted’s face the second he’s home from work.”

“I love that for you,” I encourage her. “Does Nora know?”

“Not yet. I’ll call her next. Alright, I’m parking now. I gotta go. I’ll keep you posted on all-things baby .”

I reiterate how happy I am for her and hang up.

Well how about that.

“What’s the good word?” Ollie asks.

“My sister is pregnant,” I say.

“That’s a very good word.”

“Very,” I reiterate.

He has no clue that more than joy for my sister, I’m overcome with an immense feeling of shock and satisfaction.

My mom’s fertility crystal ritual is apparently high-octane.

Nora and I are responsible for this. Or rather, I’m responsible for this.

Nora was just Brittany Mahomes jumping around in the skybox.

I’m the one who touched downLiv’s new reality: motherhood.

I manifested a baby.

“More coffee?” Ollie asks, snapping me out of my holy-shit moment.

“Please,” I say, wrapping my cold fingers around the warm ceramic coffee cup.

“This is called Church Basement Coffee, aka Swedish coffee, aka egg coffee.”

“ Egg coffee?”

“Swedes like to add a raw egg to their coffee grounds.”

“Dare I ask why?”

“In a nutshell, less bitterness, more caffeine. And if you’re die-hard like my dad, you throw in the shells, too. But don’t worry, I left them out this time. Don’t want to scare you away.”

And here I was thinking I was the only one who had to worry about scaring the other person away.

Even though I could have done without knowing a raw egg was part of the brewing process, I look down at my light-colored coffee and appreciate the fact that there’s absolutely no bitterness or acidity to it.

The velvety texture is easy to drink and I can feel a nice caffeine buzz starting to creep in.

I still miss my French press, but this beats a K-cup completely.

“Best of all? It pairs well with these.”

In front of me, Ollie sets a plate with three thin rolled up Swedish pancakes. They look more like crepes than the short stack you’d get at IHOP, but they’re steaming hot, smell like melted butter, and are coated with perfect golden-brown spots from the hot cast iron pan.

“These look amazing,” I say, grabbing hold of my fork and knife.

“Wait until you taste them. And you can’t forget the lingonberry jam.”

Ollie ushers over a white ceramic ramekin with the purple-colored jelly in it. He uses a small gold-colored espresso spoon to scoop some of the jam and drape it across the rolled pancakes. He does the same for his plate before setting down the bowl and taking a seat himself.

“You don’t find stuff like this very often in the apartments of single guys,” I comment about the cute little serving pieces.

“Have you been in many single guys’ apartments lately?” he asks, I suppose both to give me a hard time and to subtly survey my dating life yet again.

“No, but if I was, I’d fully expect to see gaming consoles and empty pizza boxes, not ramekins and fancy little spoons.”

“Confession: I took them from The Brockmeier.”

“Figures. Am I good to dive in now?” I ask.

“Ja,” he says—Swedish for yes , he clarifies after.

Tender. Buttery. Snappy with a burst of tangy fruit preserve. Where has this Nordic delicacy been all my life? To be clear, just talking about the pancakes.

“Verdict?” he asks.

“Two thumbs up,” I say. “I just need a napkin.”

I hold up my hands to show him thelingonberry schmutz I got on my cuticles.

Ollie hops up from his seat and pulls open a drawer. He grabs two wads of linens and places them down on the table. Upon closer inspection, they are not wads at all.

“Are these…swans?”

“A little trick I learned from the catering department nearly twenty years ago.”

File “Napkin Artist” under things I would have never expected to show up on Ollie’s resume—and also under: Cutest. Thing. Ever.

“You’re full of surprises,” I can’t help but state. “Guess that’s par for the course when having breakfast with a stranger.”

“You don’t still consider us strangers , do you?” he asks.

The answer is no. But still, I shrug my shoulders in reply. I want a temperature check on what he thinks we are.

“We’ve now shared three meals together, navigated an infestation of possessed lab rats, and have officially eaten each other’s favorite foods—Cali burrito for you, pannkakor for me. That’s pretty damn intimate, wouldn’t you say?”

As he says that word, intimate , my mind jumps to the prior vision I had of him and I in this very apartment doing some version of the horizontal tango. Sultry vision aside, I’d have to agree. We’ve covered some good ground already.

“Sure,” I respond back. Before I can think any more about just how intimate things are, or are about to be, I change the subject. “So what else do you have planned for today?”

“Probably just fixing up this shit-hole apartment.”

“Or you could just…move?” I suggest.

“No, I searched high and low for this place. It’s exactly what I wanted.”

“I’m confused. Most people don’t want to live in a self-proclaimed shit-hole .”

“I wanted a dilapidated diamond in the rough with flexible lease terms. So I signed an agreement with the landlord under the pretense that I’d bring his property into the twenty-first century while living here, however long that will be.

I’ve been here six months already. Been working on the behind-the-walls type stuff.

And now I’m ready to flip the rest of the apartment so the landlord can rent it out for five times more than what he is currently makingonce I finish. ”

“What is there left to do?”

“Let’s see. I’ve already redone the plumbing and the electrical.

Next, I’ve got to rip out these radiators and put in forced heat and air.

Add a garbage disposal to the kitchen sink, make a little powder room where that wasted space in the corner is, and when I’m near-done, bring in all-new flooring.

I’m still on the fence about whether I want to do a laminate or not. It is a rental property after all.”

“You’re doing all that by yourself?” I ask, mentally noting the phrase he served me earlier about many hands making for lighter work.

“Well, I want it done right, so yes, I am.”

“How do you know how to do all this?”

“I know you said your memory isn’t as good as mine.

But surely you recall that I’m an engineer, right?

This is all I’ve ever known, Moonie . I’m self-taught.

It’s what I grew up doing. When things broke at The Grand Hotel, my dad’s first call was to me—not because he thought I already knew how to do it, but because he wanted me to learn.

We engineers, we’re problem solvers. We’ve got this innate desire to understand the mechanics of everything.

When we know how stuff works, we can figure out how to make it better.

That’s why you don’t see me living in some modern high-rise condo in River North.

Or working at some brand-new swank hotel built for the Instagram posts.

Places like that? That’s lipstick on a pig.

I’ll take the vintage relic with the questionably flushing toilets any day of the week.

Plus, my rent is offset by my handyman abilities which means I can grow a bit of nest egg while I stay here—dingy as it may be. ”

“What are you saving up for?”

“A place of my own to buy.”

“Why would you buy if you can live rent-free for the rest of your life fixing up shitty apartments?”