After what felt like an eternity, I finally turned the corner onto the wide cobblestones of Worth Street, counting down the building numbers until I reached 1843. I peered up at the residential loft building converted from an industrial warehouse. This was clearly not a cab company. Panic and arctic wind sliced through me, and my eyes darted around for some sort of an idea of what to do or a sign from the universe on some way to get me the hell home.
Suddenly, I noticed a perfectly timed Uber Eats deliveryman exiting the building, and I rushed up the short flight of steps to catch the handle just before the door snapped shut. I slithered past him and into a small but cozy lobby, hoping to thaw out while I gained my bearings. Maybe the cab company was on a side street? Or through the alleyway behind this building? Someone who lived here would certainly know.
I scanned the apartment doors on the first floor for a few minutes, hoping to see someone coming either in or out for their Christmas Day dinner, but shockingly, all things were quiet in the building. I’d have to knock on one of these doors, but honestly, if I saw me out in the hallway looking like the disheveled mess I was, I wouldn’t be much inclined to answer either. I untied the drawstring bowed underneath my chin and yanked the hood down from my head, hoping it would make me appear less suspicious, but aware that, without a brush, the scrunchie that had been barely making do before was certainly on its last leg now.
Huffing out a sigh of defeat, I started with the first apartment. I rapped three times on the solid metal door and was surprised when a leggy blonde in a stunning red dress greeted me. Her face could not disguise the look of pure horror at my appearance, but despite her obvious pity, she stepped forward anyway.
“Can I help you?” she asked, and a sympathetic look washed over her.
“Hi, I’m so sorry to bother you, especially on Christmas. You look beautiful, by the way. That’s a Valentino, isn’t it? Never mind. I’m looking for a cab company and this was the address I was given. Do you know of one nearby?” I gestured with the business card in my hand, the one the guard had given me, as some kind of proof of legitimacy, even though all that was written on it was the hand-scrawled phone number.
“Cab company? Here? I don’t think so, but hold on a sec.” She twisted her body away from me and called into the hallway. “Hey, G, you know of a cab company around here?” She turned back to face me with arms crossed over her chest. “Sorry, I don’t live in Tribeca.”
A beat later, a male voice called back, “What’s that?”
“There’s a woman at your front door in desperate need of . . . a cab?” Her voice went up on the word cab, but I’m sure she was thinking I was even more in need of a hair brush or a psych evaluation.
“How is it that at thirty-two years old and after all the events I’ve attended over the years, I still cannot tie a tie,” the man muttered, head down, as he approached the front doorway fumbling with the knot at the base of his neck. “There, I got it.” Just then, he lifted his head up to look at me standing in the doorway.
“Avery?” he said, wide-eyed and dumbstruck, unable to conceal his state of shock, “is that you?”
Suddenly it felt as if all the air in the hallway—and possibly all the air on Earth—had been sucked out of the atmosphere and released into oblivion, leaving me breathless and dizzy. “I—wha—Gabe? How?”
His boyish good looks hadn’t changed one bit since the last time I saw him, which happened to be our epic breakup almost seven years ago. Only now they were just more pronounced, mature, and sexy. His broad chest filled out his suit, and his arms were most impressive against the taut fabric that covered them. But more than anything, I couldn’t take my eyes off his, remembering that the last time I looked into them was the day he’d broken my heart and changed my life forever. My tongue suddenly felt too large for my mouth, and I struggled to swallow as I continued to blink at what I could only imagine was an exhaustion-induced mirage.
The blonde interjected, stirring me back to planet Earth. “Wait, you know each other?” she asked, wagging a finger between the two of us.
“We do. We did. In a past life,” I said in an almost whisper. “So sorry to have . . . I just . . . I’ll find a cab outside somehow. Merry Christmas,” I barked over my shoulder as I bolted from the building and out to the lamplit street.
I stumbled about in a haze of my own panic-retreat, my body temperature surged, and I no longer felt the bitter sting of the cold. Gabe? How?! I mean, what were the odds of finding myself on my ex-boyfriend’s doorstep? None of it made any sense.
Gabe was the very first person I met at college. Fresh off the train from Woodbury, Connecticut, I was greener than green. After saving every cent I made working at our local pizzeria to pay for voice lessons and acting classes, I managed to get accepted into NYU Tisch School of the Arts for musical theater, and it was a dream come true. But if New York City was the city that never slept, then Woodbury was the small town that liked a good catnap, and for the first few uncomfortable weeks blundering about like a fish out of water, I wasn’t sure I could successfully navigate a new life in the Big Apple—that is, until I met Gabe and his sister, Marisol, who quickly became my closest friend.
Raised by a single mother on the Lower East Side, Gabe was New York through and through—from his unwavering devotion to the Yankees to his uncanny ability to pick out the best food cart on any city block. Between meeting him and Marisol, it was like having my own personal Manhattan tour guides, only better. Gabe explained that the city was essentially one big grid, with the avenues running horizontally and the streets vertically, and educated me on which subway exits got you closest to class. Marisol was the one who let me in on the secret—that most of the plays I was assigned to read in History of Theater 101 could be bought at The Strand, a local indie bookstore, for a fraction of the cost they were sold for at the NYU one.
When I met Gabe, he was a junior and prelaw, with the singular goal of making a difference in the world, whatever it took. He could be intense and brooding, but he was also steadfast in his convictions, not to mention undeniably gorgeous. His drive to “do good” was infectious, and it wasn’t long before I joined the long line of freshman girls in love with him. We dated all through college, and I was positive I’d found “the one”—that is, until it all spectacularly fell apart. Almost a year later, I started dating Adam, cutting ties with Gabe and Marisol completely in order to dive headfirst into my new life.
In big moments over the past seven years, I couldn’t help but find myself reminiscing about Gabe and our relationship, and then about Marisol and what she’d think. It became the strange metric by which I evaluated all my choices. How would Gabe feel about this decision or that one? How would Marisol have done such and such? And every single time, I came to the same conclusion—Adam was my future, and Gabe and Marisol were my past.
Well, until tonight when I randomly showed up at his front door. But why?
No, I couldn’t worry about any of that now. It was still twenty-five degrees outside, and I was still only in a hoodie freezing my ass off. Now, I just needed to get home. I power-walked, more like power-stalked, back in the direction of the security guard’s booth, ready to give that lady a piece of my mind. What kind of sick game was she playing? I mean, who sends a defenseless woman who just stepped fresh out of jail, still in her pajamas, on a goose chase around town for shits and giggles?! A sadist, that’s who. A sadist who was going to have to schedule immediate surgery to remove my foot from her ass.