You clear your throat and I stay quiet. You go on: “I like you. And I don’t want to have some soulless Torch hookup tonight.”
Okay. Wow. Not what I was expecting. Again, I opt for silence, my default setting.
“So, can I take you to dinner tomorrow?” You glance at your watch again. “Well, tonight I guess?”
Somewhere down the street there’s a swell of piano music coming from one of the other brownstones. I hear this often, and it never fails to give the night a magical quality. The air is cool, though tomorrow is supposed to be a scorcher. Global weirding, go figure.
Jax would tell me to say I had to check my schedule.
But Robin would tell me to be myself.
“I’d love to,” I say, not into games either. “Where and when?”
“I’ll pick you up here at seven?”
I nod. “Perfect.”
You start to back away, hands in pockets, and I can’t stop smiling.
“Good night, Wren Greenwood.”
“Good night, Adam Harper.”
Finally you turn and walk briskly away. Then, you’re gone around the corner.
Torch. It is shallow and soulless, a poor facsimile for human connection. But maybe there’s something to it after all.
I walk up the stone steps and let myself in with my electronic keypad, step into the silence of the home I have made, locking the door behind me. The air still smells of the soup I cooked earlier. It’s always a relief to return to the nest. For me, there’s a tension to all encounters, even the good ones.
The truth is that I haven’t really been with anyone seriously since college, and that was an embarrassingly long time ago. Let’s just say I have intimacy issues, trust issues.
Maybe I should have said what I was thinking: I like you, too, Adam.
On the other hand, we don’t know each other at all and maybe that’s how you end all your dates, easing the parting by scheduling the next encounter, one that will never happen.
Maybe, Adam, you won’t show up tomorrow and I’ll never see you again.
So it is with the modern dating ritual.
Could go either way.
two
“So…hot or not?”
When I come downstairs the next morning, Jax is already in my kitchen, making coffee. I didn’t sleep well, my slumber plagued as ever by vivid dreams, mostly bad. I’m not surprised to see her. She has the door code and I heard her come in.
From the look of her, inky curls wrangled into a tight plait, dark skin flushed, T-shirt damp, she ran from her place in Chelsea. She’s a super miler, runs like a fiend—inside on machines, or outside through the city, over bridges to outer boroughs. She runs like something’s chasing her, fast and powerful, never, and I mean never, tiring. On the rare occasion I join her, she leaves me gasping in her dust.
“Hot?” I venture, slipping onto a stool at the island.
The kitchen is a work in progress, original appliances on their last legs, walls unpainted, light bulbs hanging from the ceiling waiting for their fixtures, cabinets in the middle of being refaced—doors gone, stain stripped. The guy I had working on the cabinetry has mysteriously disappeared; it’s been two weeks.
Just a text: Hey, got called to another job. Be back to you soon.
Will he come back? There’s no way to know. It’s possible I’ve been ghosted by an extremely talented and bizarrely cheap but massively unreliable carpenter.
Amid the ruin, a brand-new gleaming espresso machine and milk frother hum and hiss. Let it not be said that I don’t have my priorities straight.
“An answer should not sound like a question,” says Jax, in response to my uncertain statement.
She sounds just like her mother, Miranda, who over the last eight years has become like my surrogate mother. But I know better than to say so. Jax pours almond milk in the frother and presses the button. The aroma of espresso, already in cups, wafts on the air.
“It’s a reductive question,” I say. “Hot or not? What are we—internet trolls?”
She pins me with her stunning green-hazel eyes. Jamaican mother, British father, Jax always says that she’s a true American girl. Her ancestors hail from all over the world, but she is Brooklyn born and raised. So, New Yorker first, everything else second.
“He’s not still here, is he?”
She looks past me, her gaze traveling down the hall toward the stairs.
I shake my head, gratefully take the cup of coffee she hands me over the quartz countertop that sits, not properly secured yet, atop the unfinished island. “I told you I wasn’t going to do that again. No more Torch hookups.”