Carly grinned and rolled her eyes. As if Heather hadn’t planned her pregnancy as carefully as she planned everything else in her life. That baby was coming out of the womb with a spreadsheet in her hand. Still, Carly thought, she should figure out her birth control situation, and soon.
As the bus trundled across town, she pulled up her calendar and looked at the day ahead. She and Catherine had a meeting with the director and deputy director of the NYB school, then lunch with a potential donor, and then Catherine wanted to stop by a rehearsal to observe a choreographer who was making her first ever work on the company.
Carly was fully adjusted to office life now, and for the last nine months, she’d been acting as Catherine’s assistant and right-hand woman, watching how Catherine made decisions about promotions and casting, about which choreographers to hire and which donors to cultivate. The learning curve had been steep, but once a month Catherine sat down with her and answered her questions and explained anything Carly felt she hadn’t understood in the moment. Carly doubted she’d ever be put in charge of NYB, but she was developing the skills and knowledge to runsomething, and she liked how competent she felt, even when she came home from work exhausted by all the information swirling around her brain. It was a different kind of exhaustion than the kind she’d felt at the end of a day of rehearsing or a night of performing, but she was getting accustomed to it. Tonight, though, she’d try not to come home exhausted, because Nick had planned a belated celebration dinner, since he’d been on a weeklong shoot in the Caribbean on the one-year anniversary of them getting together for real.
The bus pulled up beside Lincoln Center, and Carly hopped off, waving at a few of her former colleagues as they headed to the theater for company class. There were days when she missed dancing, she conceded as she walked toward the administrative building on the other side of the plaza, but most days she only felt gratitude. For her new life, for her new future. And for the fact that she was choosing them for herself.
The workday passed at its usual breakneck pace, and at 5:15, Catherine popped her head into Carly’s cubicle and told her to go home.
“You’re sure?” Carly asked, even though she was itching to throw her bag over her shoulder and race to the subway.
“Mmhmm, I’ve got a few more hours of work, but nothing you need to worry about. Plus I know you’ve got a special occasion to get to,” Catherine said with a smile, which widened as Carly leapt to her feet.
“Okay, thanks, see you tomorrow, bye!” she said quickly, grabbing her bag and nearly knocking a pile of binders off her desk as she rushed to the elevator. She might be an office worker now, but she was still occasionally, as Nick had once lovingly described her, a human hurricane.
Nick checked his reflection in the mirror for what must have been the forty-seventh time that evening and straightened his collar yet again. Everything was in place. The chicken was in the oven. The candles were lit, a bottle of champagne, the same exorbitant French brand they’d drunk the night of Carly’s retirement, was chilling in the fridge, and his anniversary present was wrapped and waiting on the coffee table. It had taken longer than expected for it to arrive from Australia, and Nick was secretly grateful that they’d had to delay their anniversary celebration. He hoped she liked the gift, even though it was goofy. If she didn’t like it, he reminded himself, she’d certainly like the other present he had for her.
He checked the mirror one last time, then resumed pacing. After a few laps of the living room, his phone buzzed.
Carly, 6:17PM: Almost home, 1 train was delayed again
Nick let out a shaky breath and kept pacing. He didn’t know why he was nervous. After all, he knew what her answer would be. He’d sent some potential ring designs to Heather, who had encouraged him to “add more sparkle,” and he knew their friendship well enough to suspect that this piece of feedback was not, in fact, from Heather. Still. He’d never proposed to anyone before, and the gravity of what he was about to do made him feel like his lungs were too big for his body and his skin too tight.
The past year had made a lot of things clear to Nick. The first was that he could make a home anywhere, if he wanted to. Living in New York had been utterly draining at first; the city had everything you could possibly want or need, but in exchange it took all your energy. Getting to know Carly’s hometown made him understand Carly better, in that respect. That first summer, as she’d been settling in to her new job, Nick had spent the weeks he wasn’t on location walking around the city trying to get his bearings, trying to learn the subway system, trying to adjust to the pace of New York, which was faster and more demanding than either Paris or Munich. But after a few months, he’d started to feel at home. Now, every time he returned from a shoot, he felt a sense of calm settle over him when he sank into the back seat of an airport cab and gave the driver the address of Carly’s apartment.
The second thing that had become clear in the last year was that he really was a talented photographer. When hisVoguecontract had come up for renewal at the end of a year—after his photos had been featured in five issues, and once on the cover—he’d found himself more in demand than he’d ever imagined possible. He’d shot three luxury brand ad campaigns and had several more lined up. Carly’s parents had been impressed by those campaigns, but Carly herself had been more excited when he’d been approached by a nonprofit photography collective that was trying to diversify stock image footage of ballet dancers. His first shoot, with a group of Black, brown, fat, and disabled dancers, was scheduled for next week.
The final thing, and the only thing that truly mattered, and the reason he was pacing anxiously around the living room they now shared, was that he wanted to spend the rest of his life making Carly Montgomery happy. Furious, occasionally, if the last year was anything to go by, but happy. She was still a human hand grenade at times, but he knew now that when she exploded, it was usually because she was feeling insecure or misunderstood. It helped that she had switched from a free meditation app to actual therapy. Ballet companies still had hang-ups about dancers who needed mental health care, but no one thought twice about an office worker who needed a therapist. And now when she exploded, she didn’t storm out. She stayed, and they talked things out until they understood each other.
And the better he understood her, the more he loved her. He wanted years and years of her rolling her eyes at his bad puns and fierce, loving disagreement. Decades of waking up in the morning with her hair invading his pillow. He knew there had been years of his life, a whole career on a whole different continent, when he didn’t love Carly. Didn’t even know she existed. But it was hard to remember that time now. It was impossible to imagine his life, or his heart, without her, and he had no interest in trying.
He heard a key in the lock and froze, midstride, and turned towards the front door. A second later, the door swung open, and Carly appeared, her low ponytail draped over the shoulder of her sleek floral-print dress. Her cheeks were a little flushed, as though she’d rushed from the subway and all the way up the tight, dimly lit stairwell. The moment she entered the apartment and smiled at him, his nerves vanished. His lungs returned to their normal size, and his skin felt perfectly fine. He slipped his hand into his pocket and squeezed the small velvet box as she dropped her bag on the table in the entryway and walked towards him.
“Happy anniversary,” she said, rising up on her toes to kiss him. He wrapped his arms around her waist and held her close.
“Belated anniversary,” he said apologetically.
“Pedant,” she said, “and I don’t mind. Sounds like you had a great time over there. Next time take me with you.”
“Deal,” he agreed, and he kissed her back gently, mentally adding Anguilla to a list of potential honeymoon destinations.
“Mmm,” she murmured against his mouth, then pulled away and glanced towards the tiny kitchen. “Something smells good.”
“Roast chicken,” he said. “It needs another twenty minutes or so. And I’ve got a present for you in the meantime.”
She pulled back and frowned. “We said no presents! Remember, a nice meal, no gifts necessary?”
“I remember,” he said, “but then I thought of the perfect gift for you and I couldn’t resist.”
“Oh yeah?” she asked slyly. “Is it a sexy gift?”
“Absolutely not,” he said firmly, and her smile faltered a little. “In fact, I hope you don’t find it sexy.”
She raised her eyebrows, looking mystified, and watched him cross the room to the coffee table and return with the strangely shaped package. He handed it to her, and she weighed it in her hands curiously, then gave it a testing squeeze. Then she flipped it over and slipped her finger under the tape, and a second later the paper fell away to reveal—
“Oh my God,no!” she laughed. She threw her head back and cackled, hugging the horse-head pillow to her chest in delight. “How did you get this?”
“I emailed the B&B and asked them where they bought their hideous, cursed pillows, and they gave me the name of their deranged interior decorator. Don’t worry, I didn’t phrase it like that,” he added.
