My mouth is full of bagel and cream cheese as Noah explains the terms of his proposition. Rent, he says, will be taken out of my salary from now on, and this will also cover food and amenities for the apartment. He refers back to scribbled notes on a yellow pad between us, combinations of words and equations in a scrawl I can’t make out, and when he looks up, he tells me this should leave me with a hundred and fifty dollars per week, cash in hand.
‘You’ll be required to work four days, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. A combination of dog walking and dog-sitting, depending on who we get on the day. Each dog will come with its own care routine, and you’ll never have more than two, plus Franklin, to look after at any one time.’
He crosses something off in his notes and looks at me with his bright eyes, his hand extended. I see an image of black feathers, rustling.
‘Are you in?’
Alarmingly, I once again want to cry, but I nod silently instead, tongue pushing against the roof of my mouth, because I once read you can’t physically cry when you do this. Even so, my eyes pool with water as I shake Noah’s hand. I know there could not possibly be any combination of numbers in his scribbled equations that would cover rent and food and bills, and still leave me with money in my pocket. I know, too, that Noah doesn’t really need to be in the business of more dogs, that he works not for money, but for contact with his four-legged friends, and a chance to be out in the world from time to time. I’m not always able to read people’s motivations so well, but I know without doubt that this new home-care business has been formed around me. And I sense, grasping at a future truth, this might be Noah’s way of making sure I come back to him each day.
Thoughts swirling, I am overwhelmed at the door Noah has swung open. I do not know why he is helping me like this, why he shows me a kind of care he doesn’t seem to afford many, if any, other people. Later, when we have grown more accustomed to talking about real things, I will ask him why he placed that ad for a room in his apartment, what motivated this self-confessed introvert to open up a door in his life, too. For now, it’s enough to know that I am profoundly grateful for this place I have arrived at, and as we map out my first shifts at our new doggy daycare, I allow myself to believe I deserve what comes next. The beginning of a life where I take up space, where I belong.
In a world where some of that kindness of strangers I’ve so often heard about is finally directed at me.
Are you surprised at how little time it takes for my barriers to come down? I suppose, if things had turned out differently, you might think it a good thing. The way I readily embraced this fresh start, when girls like me so often fall back on their old ways. You might even admire my resilience, want to bump your fist against mine, congratulate me for all the positive changes I am making in my life.
How about we stay inside that fantasy a little while longer, hey.
It is as if Ruby has a fever. It has something to do with sex. Or a lot to do with it. Ever since Ash reached out via text, her body has insisted on responding to the slightest provocation. Cool sheets touching her bare legs. Hot shower water running down her back. Even the way she bites into an apple or slides food from fork to tongue somehow feels erotic. She dreams of sex, wakes up soaked in the sheets of it. Upon opening her eyes each morning, her collarbone aches, hot, as if this is where the electric cord of her desire is wired.
And that cord keeps leading her back to him.
Ruby is used to wanting Ash from afar, but this new fervour feels different. It isn’t, she soon realises, entirely about her lover, though the memory of his mouth, his hands, instantly and consistently makes her stomach flip. She remembers her grandmother gossiping about a cousin known for her scandalous love affairs—‘Oh, that woman was always on heat’—and this curled-lip, old-fashioned saying perhaps comes closest to describing the state Ruby has inexplicably found herself in, after a week of feeling nothing at all.
（She has forgotten the small explosion, and the woman on the dance floor at Sally’s wedding. It isn’t always the right moments we remember.）
Trying to distract herself, Ruby makes lists of places to see, in this second week that somehow feels like her first. Highlighting place names in her journal, she visits the Met, takes the Staten Island Ferry, catches a train to Brooklyn, and walks back over the bridge in the rain. This incessant spring rain is now as much a part of the city to her as the garbage and the scaffolds, as the chain stores on every corner, and the cardboard MetroCard she has in her purse. She is making acquaintance with New York, buoyed by a savings account that affords vodka martinis and French candles for her little studio, and the new Diane von Furstenberg dress she wore to a play at the Lincoln Center two nights ago. One of her favourite film actresses stood half-naked on the stage, so close Ruby could see the coffee stain of her nipples. New York!