“What’s wrong with this place?” I asked as I poked my head into the walk-in closet in the primary bedroom. If it was in our price range, there had to be a catch. Cockroaches? Professional tap dancers for upstairs neighbors? Ghosts?
It turned out I was right, I couldn’t afford this place, but we could. David had a huge grin on his face when he showed me the Excel formula he made to calculate how much rent we should each pay based on our relative salaries. My heart swelled seeing his nerdy excitement over a spreadsheet. “I really don’t mind,” he explained. “Please let me do this for us. I want us to be a team.” Instead of answering, I backed him against the closed door of our would-be bedroom and pressed a kiss to his lips.
“Is that a yes?” he asked when we came up for air.
“Definitely yes,” I confirmed.
I wasn’t used to having someone take care of me. Finn once called me violently self-sufficient when I failed to tell him about a two-day stomach flu until after I recovered. He meant it as an insult, but I took it as a compliment.
But here, David had a point: he shouldn’t be made to suffer through the real estate atrocities my salary could afford. It wasn’t his fault the radio industry paid peanuts, although technically I made the jump to podcasts two years ago. But my employer is still a chronically underfunded public radio station. I have a cabinet full of canvas pledge-drive totes to prove it.
This morning, I’m camped at the kitchen island getting a head start on my inbox when David emerges from our bedroom in blue-striped pajama pants and a white undershirt with a stretched-out collar. His light brown hair is mussed from sleep and he’s wearing an old pair of wire-rimmed glasses he only wears first thing in the morning or last thing at night.
Morning David is the version of David I like best. The private version, just for me, before he pomades his hair, puts in his contacts, and dons his suit for his job at the law firm. Although he doesn’t look bad in a suit either.
He wore the glasses on our first date, which I later learned was unusual and only because he ran out of contacts. “I have a really early morning,” he said after two glasses of wine at the Immigrant, the dimly lit wine bar in Alphabet City he’d suggested. I thought our date was going well, certainly the best I’d ever been on, but it seemed the feeling was not mutual.
I braced myself for a brush-off. After only a month on the dating apps, I’d learned to read the signs. I chastised myself for daring to get excited about him. But then he surprised me. “Would you mind if I just got a water?” he asked. “Because I’m really enjoying talking to you and I’m not ready for the night to end yet.” In that moment I fell a little bit in love with him, and the tally of tiny special moments added to his chart of accounts has only grown since.
“Morning,” he mumbles. “Why do you look like someone kicked your puppy? It’s barely seven thirty.” He shuffles over to me and plants a kiss in my hair. Butterflies flip in my stomach at the sweet, comforting gesture, and for a few seconds I forget about the email at the top of my inbox. I lean into him and can feel the heat of sleep radiating off him. “What’s wrong?” he asks.
“Mitch,” I groan.
“What did he do now?” David asks.
“He’s threatening to shut down the whole project if we don’t lock in talent for the pilot episode soon.” He marked the email letting me know with an urgent flag, the same way he does every single one of his other emails. Even the completely benign ones.
“How could he do that? I can’t believe he doesn’t see what a good idea this is.”
I’m working on a pitch for a music history podcast called Aural History, which I think is a pretty clever name. It would be my first solo project. Each episode would tell the story of a different song. Some chart toppers, other deep cuts with sentimental meaning to the artist, some one-hit wonders. We’d interview everyone involved, from the artist to the songwriters, producers, and session musicians about how the song came to be. I picture it as a hybrid of Pop-Up Video and Behind the Music, both staples of my teenage TV diet.
My original idea for the pilot was to tell the history of “Konstantine” by Something Corporate, a fan-favorite song that, for years, the band refused to play at concerts. It was the cornerstone of every playlist I made in high school.
“The song is nine minutes and thirty seconds long,” Mitch, my boss and the station’s newly hired head of podcast development, barely took his eyes off the CNN news ticker long enough to protest. He didn’t bother turning off the TV when I came into his glass-walled office, only muted it.
“So? That makes it more interesting. How did a nine-minute song that was only released in Japan become a fan favorite? This was 2003, the early days of the internet. I could make this fascinating.”
“To exactly four people, and you’re one of them. So your audience is three people. Bring me something with commercial appeal and I’ll think about it.”
My second pitch was to profile “Candy” by Mandy Moore. What’s more commercial than a bubblegum pop hit with a tie-in to the number-one show on television? What nineties kid doesn’t remember that lime-green VW Beetle?
“Yes!” Mitch boomed. “My wife loves This is Us. Now, how do we get the talent?”
“Leave it to me! I have plenty of music contacts from Z100,” I told him as I backed out of his office before he could change his mind.
With Mitch’s yellow light, I reached out to Mandy Moore’s manager. When I didn’t hear back, I tried her agent and her publicist, too. But after a month of silence, despite weekly follow ups, I have to admit they’re not going to return my inquiry. Turns out Z100 has plenty of music contacts, but I have none. Which leaves me back at square one.
“Would coffee help?” David asks.
It’s a rhetorical question. He’s already filling the carafe with water to pour into the coffee maker and pulling down my favorite BC mug from the cabinet. I could, of course, make my own coffee. But David’s a light sleeper and our beloved Capresso grind-and-brew sounds like a jet engine preparing for takeoff. So this has become our morning ritual. After five months here, I cherish the little routines we’ve built together. Falling asleep in the warm, protective circle of his arms every night and cooking dinner together while we talk about our days—fine, technically he cooks while assigning me the impossible to mess up tasks like chopping onions or peeling carrots, but I always do the dishes—far outweigh the occasional domestic spat. I’m starting to get used to, maybe even enjoy, someone taking care of me.
As the coffee brews, he leans against the counter. “I think I’ve figured out what I was doing wrong with the pizza crust,” David announces. He’s been trying to hack the at-home version of our favorite prosciutto and arugula pizza from a little pizzeria in the West Village for months. “How about I give it another whack tonight and we can start that Netflix series my brother was telling us about. Maybe it could be a light at the end of the tunnel after dealing with Mitch all day,” he suggests.
“That sounds amazing, but I can’t. I’m grabbing drinks with my friends tonight.”