Page 37 of The Expat Affair
I stare up at this man, taking in all that hair, all those beaded necklaces and chains. I should thank him for the offer and drag my ass home, but the truth is, I don’t want to. I don’t want to go back to my tiny bedroom with its sad, single bed. I want to be out. I want to forget. I want to flirt with a handsome man I have no plans of ever seeing again.
And this guy has one big plus in his corner: he is the exact opposite of the men I’ve chosen in the past. Barry with his blazersand chinos, Xander with his fancy watch and designer-decorated apartment. This man in his faded jeans and tangle of beads and chains, all that fabulous hair... he’s absolutely nothing like them.
I stick out a hand. “Rayna.”
“Nice to meet you, Rayna. I’m Lars.”
“Take me across the street, Lars, but don’t give me any more vodka. Vodka is the last thing I need.”
“Whatdoyou need?”
Suddenly, I’m thinking about the burger bar up the street, the french fry place around the corner that’s open until three.
“I need food,” I say. “The greasy, carby kind.”
He plucks the empty cup from my fingers, tosses it to the bar, and wraps his fingers around mine, tugging me toward the stairs. “I know just the place.”
“Just the place” is Sevil Ali Baba, a late-night Turkish grill room on the next block. A long, brightly lit space lined with booths on one side and a kitchen that runs the entire length of the other, a mix of griddles and deep fryers and giant spits stacked with slices of gleaming meat, chicken and lamb and pork. My mouth waters at the smell.
A man in an apron and an enormous knife looks up when we come inside, his face splitting into a wide grin. He says something to Lars in a language I don’t recognize, then points us to a booth at the back.
“Best shawarma in all of Amsterdam,” Lars says, sinking onto the bench across from me. “That guy up there is my cousin.”
“So you’re biased.” He frowns, and I clarify. “Inclined to believe your cousin when he says his shawarma is the best.”
“Oh, I believe him, because it’s not just him. It’s Yelp and Tripadvisor, too. Voted the best in the city, four years in a row.”He calls out something to his cousin—our order, I’m guessing, because two seconds later, he appears with two bottles of Coke. “This is Rayna,” Lars tells him in English. “She’s a shawarma virgin.”
The cousin’s eyes go wide, and he tells me that late-night shawarmas are an institution in Holland, a well-loved stop on the way home from the bars, much like Waffle House is back home. The Dutch version of a hangover helper, the holy, booze-sopping grail: meat and salt and carbs.
“Prepare to be amazed,” the cousin says, then heads back to the meat station.
“So you speak Dutch, English, and... Turkish?” I say, ticking the languages off on my fingers, feeling almost embarrassed that I know only one.
Lars nods. “My father lives in Bursa, a city on the Asian side.”
“And your mother?”
“Dutch, born and bred. They met when she was vacationing in Turkey. The love of her life, or so she says, even though their relationship crashed and burned pretty quickly. He couldn’t stand it here in Holland, apparently. Too cold. Too wet. I barely remember him.”
“That’s so sad. You don’t see your father at all?”
Lars shakes his head. “Not really. My mom used to send me there on holiday a couple times a year, but the older I got, the more I pushed back. My friends are all here, and the cultural divide is so big. My dad doesn’t understand my life here, and I can’t fathom his. We have very little in common.”
“And what about your mom? Did she ever consider moving to Turkey?”
He laughs, a warm, rich sound that makes me smile. “That would’ve been an even worse disaster. My mother is as Dutch as they come, which means she’s fiercely independent and sayswhatever is going through her head, which is alot, and it’s far too progressive to survive in a country like Turkey. Also, she’s like me. An artist, except she specializes in nudes. In Turkey, her work would get her arrested.”
There’s so much to absorb here. That Lars is the product of a relationship that was destined for doom. That the way he talks about his mother, with affection and obvious pride, makes me like him a little more. That he’s an artist, that he inherited his mother’s creativity.
Never, not in a million trillion years, would the old Rayna be sitting in a greasy diner in the middle of the night, sharing shawarmas with a random Dutch artist she met in a bar. She would have been concerned about the optics of being seen at this hour with a man who was not her husband, or what in the world the two of them would have to talk about, or the likelihood of getting mugged in a somewhat sketchy neighborhood at going on 2:00 a.m.
But Rayna 2.0 gives zero shits for optics, and she wants to stay. Mostly because Rayna 2.0 is ravenous.
The food arrives, two giant mounds of steaming sliced lamb wrapped in warm pita bread, a mountain of french fries, and little plastic bowls filled with what looks like mayonnaise and ketchup. Lars grabs a squirt bottle from the holder on the table and douses his meat, then does the same with mine.
“The moment of truth,” he says with a grin.
I pick up my sandwich and take a bite, grinning when it tastes as good as it smells. I don’t know if this is the best shawarma in Amsterdam, I just know that this one is damn good.
