Come on Skinny Love, Angely Mercado [i love reading .TXT] 📗

clique moment of a guy presenting his girlfriend/lady friend or love interest with a homemade breakfast. But my fridge decided to kill that moment for me. Its lack of food jeered and reminded me that Ivelisse didn’t even count as a love interest. If she was, I wouldn’t have expected her to be gone by morning, meaning that I would have planned ahead by having groceries in the house.

            I walked back to my room and then ran back to the bathroom when the idea sprang into my head. I pounded the door.

            “Hey…Ive…want to go somewhere with me?”

            “No.”

            “Why not?” I pressed.

            No response. I knocked on the door again.

            “It’ll be fun, I promise. I just want to treat you to something.”

            She opened the door and raised her eyebrow at me.

            “Where are we going?” she asked.

            “Get dressed.”

            “I said, where are we going,” she demanded.

            I walked back to my bedroom to throw on some pants.

            “You’ll see,” I called out to her.

***

            I dragged Ivelisse off the N train and joined a large crowd that was of school groups, college students, high school kids, young children and their parents. We all proceeded to leave the station in a herd.

            “Where the hell are we?” she asked me, pulling back on the arm that I had grabbed.

            “You’ll see”.

            “Tell me”.

            I turned, smiled trying not to laugh at how bewildered she looked.

            “No”.

            Most of the crowd seemed excited. Their elation hit me, and I became brave enough to let my hand slip down Ivelisse’s wrist and intertwine with her hand. She let it stay. And so I strutted through the crowd clasping her hand with the bravado that most men must have when they’re still in the “honeymoon” aspect of their relationships. The emotional place where both couples still call each other every other night and give meaningful gifts in hopes of attaining that “ever after”. Ivelisse’s emotions didn’t seem to match.

            We made it up the myriad of stairs that it took to get out of the subway station. And that’s when she saw the sign, the big block letters that covered the side of the wall across the street from the iconic Nathan’s Hot Dogs.

            “Why the hell did you bring me to Coney Island?”

            “Oh come on, like you’ve never wanted to come down and just hang out here.”

            “No.”

            I turned myself towards the amusement park area of the boardwalk and prayed that Ivelisse wouldn’t disentangle her fingers from mine. She walked, more like huffed and plodded, but we made it to the swirly blue gates that read Luna Park. I purchased the passes and dragged Ivelisse to an array of rides. She didn’t even flinch on the airplanes that twisted and turned, seeming as if they were going to strike the ground at any second. But she cracked a smile on that weird pendulum ride and when the circle had turned so that it was our side of the ride’s turn to view the sky as we went up, I turned to her.

            I once had a grandfather who liked to tell me that life gave you very few true-love-slow-motion-passion-burning moments. It’s like when a parent holds a child for the first time, that first soft kiss between a new couple, the first caress that leads two people into making love, or just someone walking down the street and realizing that they had seen their soul mate. I only know that because of stories and movies, that and my grandfather was a romantic. So all I had was Ivelisse on a ride, her lips turned upwards as hair tumbled everywhere around her shoulders and neck. The sun silhouetted her cheekbones and caressed around her eyes, bringing out the crinkle of her smile. The rays turned the black of her irises into a coffee bean brown and I swore to God that I had never witnessed something so flawed, yet so beautiful.

            Ivelisse seemed to enjoy every other ride after that and allowed me to pick a few. We played games, won those crappy plastic prizes, ate taffy and over priced funnel cakes while leaning over the railing that separated the boardwalk from the sand.

            “Have you ever been here before?” I asked after several moments of silence.

            “No, always figured it was overrated, kind of like most amusement parks,” she told me.

            “But it’s just such an iconic part of Brooklyn. Tourists and native New Yorkers alike come here,” I tried to reason with her.

            “It looks like it’s been gentrified though,” she said glancing at a store that looked a bit trendier than some of the older one around it, “I hear tourism is getting bigger and bigger every year too.”

            “Is that bad?”

            “Ask any local, and they’ll tell you how annoyed they are. I know I’d be.”

            “You’re just a ray of sunshine, has anyone ever told you that?” I asked. I was hoping that my little “surprise” would woo her.

            “All the time,” she flashed a grin.

            Behind her stood the remaining tower of some ride that had killed a few people over 10 years ago, a few new roller coasters, and to the side was the Ferris wheel that everyone called The Wonder Wheel, or should I say Deno’s Wonder Wheel. I don’t remember how old it is. And I have no idea who Deno is. The last time I had been on a Ferris wheel, it was at some street festival somewhere in Queens. The good thing about ghetto carnivals is you get the thrill of surviving poorly maintained rides that have little to no safety belts or bars to keep you in your seat. You make it out alive, and you have enough street cred to last you a year. I survived the wheel with a friend who kept rocking it once we made it to the top. The only thing that stood between me and the concrete was a bar. A loose bar. A loose rusty bar. I had so much street cred, I got to eat everyone’s chicken nuggets at school the next day.

            The Ferris wheel at Coney Island was the one that gave you tourism cred. It’s like when you forget which train goes express into the Bronx and you go looking for a subway map, the fold up kind, and a friend laughs and calls you a tourist. Or a hipster.

            It was old, but that just made the wheel so much more appealing. Old as in vintage. Old as in unique. Old as in a countless number of lovers, friends, and family members had ridden the wheel, a countless number of people had gotten closer to heaven, closer to the sea, and to each other. I wonder if one of them was a lonely client dragging along a woman who was in it for the tips.

            “When can we leave?” Ivelisse asked, making me jump.

            “We still haven’t gone on all of the rides yet,” I insisted.

            “Do we really have to go to all the damned rides?” she shot back.

            “Honestly, this place is a lot of fun if you’d let it be fun. I mean, there had to be one time when you wanted to come here and just goof around on rides.”

            My patience isn’t infinite.

            “Fine, whatever, we’ll go on another freaking ride,” she rolled her eyes.

            And there we were, huffing and plodding all over again. And to think I had made so much progress. I purchased the ticket for the wheel and waited online in an awkward silence.

            The wheel had little carts instead of open air seats. They were painted carnival colors, the reds and blues and starch whites that stand out in a sepia photo. Ours was green. We sat opposite of each other in the cart. A middle aged man smiled and closed the door on us. Ivelisse and I probably looked like the start of a very bad blind date, or an adult film. The cheap kind.

            The cart shuddered and up we went into the stratosphere, where ever that is. I looked out and saw the ant people and noticed that Ivelisse was looking too.

            “You’re right,” she muttered.

            “What?”

            “You’re right, I’ve always wanted to come someplace like this, but no one ever offered to take me, and I would have felt pathetic coming by myself,” she sighed.

            She leaned out slightly away from me and looked out towards the beach. I went over and sat next to her.

            “You never told me you wanted to come here. You’re lucky I thought about this out of nowhere.”

            Ivelisse shrugged, I leaned on her shoulder and she didn’t shrug me off. The cart swung gently, suspended and I hoped the ride wouldn’t end so quickly. But it did, most rides do. Should be a crime, especially with how much they’re charging these days for anything interesting in Brooklyn.

            Other rides didn’t require begging and dragging. And down the iconic Cyclone, fingers intertwined with mine, hands were raised in the air during the initial drop, and that adrenaline rush was the sweetest.

            Afterward we sampled soft serve, oysters, corn on the cob, over priced chicken hot dogs and I had a lukewarm beer as Ivelisse stared and cringed.

            “Do you want one?”

            “No…beer looks like piss.”

            The sand finished the rest of the bottle for me.

            The sun softly lowered itself, deepening shadows around us. Sometimes wish it would stand still for just a little bit. But it doesn’t, and it won’t.

            We left the boardwalk behind and headed towards the subway station. Ivelisse commented on the sea animal signs and I told her it was the aquarium. I promised to take her.

            Shadows lengthened as we walked towards the station hand in hand. Someone had chalked a lopsided blue heart on the sidewalk. I prayed it was an omen.

           

           

           

           

           

           

            ***

            It was a strange week. The weather was warming up and so many women took it upon themselves to show leg. Well, that and everything else. The view was nice I guess, but it was a bitch to get Ivelisse to show anything. Despite her line of work, she was modest. I liked her modesty, but I like her legs a bit more. Maybe a lot more.

            I tried to get her to open up more, asking where she would like to eat, what her favorite color is. Her favorite childhood story. Her first kiss. Most of them were responded with shrugs and eye rolls. The answer to my first kiss question made me feel pathetic.

            “My first kiss was with Juanito. I was 13 years old I think, and he was 15 and kinda hot. Tall, dark, and handsome, and he was a great dancer.”

            “Should I learn how to dance?” I pressed on, trying to see how I could make myself a bit more likeable.

            “Na, you’re kinda pale and stringy. It’ll look wrong.”

            “Gee, thanks for the honesty.”

            “Any time,” she said, flashing a brilliantly crooked smile.

            I suppose her sarcasm was better than the initial can’t-we-just-get-this-over-with. Her straight forward approaches and reminders to be paid showed me that I was still a client.

            “Teach me how to dance bachata.”

            “No.”

            “Why not?” I was running out of patience with the idea.

            “You’d suck at it.”

            I threw a pillow from my couch across the room at her. She swatted it aside.

            “You don’t know if I’ll suck at it if you never see me dancing.”

            “Why are you so pissed off?”

            “Because you never even try to show me how to dance.” I was practically begging for a dance lesson.

            “Whatever.”

            She packed her bag and proceeded to leave. I held out a wad of bills. She reached out and wrapped her fingers around the money and tried to pull away. I pulled her in and kissed her hand. I was startled to feel the brush of her lips