The Proposal(66)

“You . . . oh my god . . . the . . . your face!”

He was laughing so hard he bent over. She put her gloved hands on her hips while she waited for him to calm down from laughing at, not with, her. It wasn’t her fault that his fucking chilies set her face on fire.

“It’s just . . . you just . . .” He was laughing too hard to talk. Finally, he grabbed her by the hand and pulled her out of the kitchen and into the hallway that led to his bedroom.

“Where are you taking me? Are you trying to take me to bed?” She gestured to her face, which she knew from experience was set in a death glare. “Does this look like my ‘I want to have sex’ face?”

He stopped in the hallway and doubled over again, before he pulled himself together and dragged her into the bathroom.

“That! Look at that!” He pushed her in front of the mirror.

She’d been so distracted by gratitude for her face feeling better, that she’d sort of forgotten that she had smeared sour cream all over her face.

“Oh my God.”

Carlos was shaking with laughter behind her.

“I know!”

“I look . . . I look like a drunken clown.”

Carlos pointed at her. “You said it! I didn’t! I did not say that! Remember, I did not say that!”

“Oh my God.” She turned to Carlos, who started laughing again as soon as she turned around. She grinned, felt the drying sour cream crack as her face moved, and giggled at the ridiculous sensation. Soon, she was laughing so hard she could barely breathe.

She held up her gloved hands and laughed even harder.

“I’m sorry for laughing at you!” Carlos said, while still laughing at her. But she couldn’t really blame him. “Does it still hurt? Do you need more sour cream?”

She shook her head, unable to talk. Eventually, she took a deep breath to answer him.

“More sour cream for my face, you mean? What do you think I am, a baked potato? Are you going to give me some butter and salt next?”

That destroyed both of them. Soon, they were both sitting on his bathroom floor, shaking with laughter and holding each other upright. Tears were streaming down her face, driving paths through the tacky sour cream, and that made her laugh even harder.

Finally, her laughter subsided.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you for laughing at me. And, you know, just in general.”

He rested his arm around her shoulders.

“That’s okay. Your face was on fire. I feel like you’re allowed to yell when your face is on fire.”

She took a deep breath.

“Oh my God, I feel like I’ve been exercising; my abs hurt from laughing that much.”

He ran his hands through her hair.

“God, the last time I laughed that much was . . .” He paused for a while. “I can’t even remember the last time I laughed that much. That felt pretty good.”

She smiled up at him.

“Well, that makes it almost worth setting my face on fire, then.” He opened his mouth, and she lifted her index finger and shook it at him. “I said almost worth it. Don’t get any funny ideas.”

He laughed.

“Okay, I have a confession to make.”

Oh no. It was never good news when a man said that to you.

“What is it?”

He took a deep breath.

“I had no idea if the sour cream would work. When I said I was sure, what I meant was that I seriously couldn’t think of anything else.”

She punched him on the arm, and he fell back against the bathroom floor with a grin on his face.

“You asshole. I thought this was going to be a real confession. I’m very angry at you for making me smear sour cream on my face on a lark, but it worked so I can’t really be mad at you, which makes me even madder.”

He stood and offered her his hand to pull her up off of the floor.

“I know, it’s a real conundrum, isn’t it? Ready to attack these enchiladas again? This time with gloves on?”

She nodded.

“You know what they say. No glove, no love.”

He groaned and pushed her ahead of him back into the kitchen.



* * *



? ? ?

An hour later, Carlos looked around his kitchen, satisfied. Nik was covering the last of the six trays of enchiladas with aluminum foil; soon they’d all go in the oven. She’d offered to wash the dishes, but he’d thought it would be cruel to let her wash the pot that the enchilada sauce had cooked in—those were the chilies that had attacked her, after all. So instead he was standing at the stove, elbow deep in soap bubbles, as he scrubbed all of his pans clean.

“Don’t you have a dishwasher?” she asked him.

He nodded.

“Yeah, why?”

She looked at him like he’d lost his mind.

“Because you’re scouring your pots like that by hand—why don’t you just put them in the dishwasher?”

He rinsed the second to last pot and put it in his dish drainer.

“No child of Susana Ibarra would put pots in a dishwasher. Look, it took me until after med school to not completely wash my dishes before putting them in the dishwasher, okay? I have heard people say that they put pots in the dishwasher, in the same way I’ve heard people say they didn’t have student loans or they drove to the Westside without traffic or they got a dirt-cheap plane ticket to Europe. All of those things seem imaginary to me, just in the same way putting my pots in the dishwasher would be.”