He didn’t know anything about negotiation, which was a situation he probably needed to remedy. Caroline had already studiedGetting to Yes,Getting Past No, andGetting More, and probably a lot of other texts relevant to the kinds of negotiations they were likely to face unless his art career really exploded in the next few months.
He’d proposed that he cover the trip to New York if Caroline wanted to bring him with her to Europe after exams. She’d readily agreed, and he’d felt pretty good about that compromise until she turned around and accepted Tom’s offer to let them stay in his new apartment over the weekend. Adrian had assumed he would spend his first night with her at a two-star hotel somewhere in Midtown, not on an air mattress on the floor of Tom’s new bedroom in Hamilton Heights. It wasn’t even private, let alone romantic.
Tom was moving in with an actor he’d met during his first sojourn in New York. Other people Adrian and Tom had known during college soon appeared with bottles ofwine and six-packs of beer to welcome them back to the city, and it turned into a house party even before Adrian had finished carrying everything up from the rental truck and Caroline’s Tahoe.
It wasn’t how he’d expected to spend the evening. He’d planned to take Caroline to Rockefeller Center to see the lights and the tree, maybe eat dinner somewhere with a view of the city. Drinking cheap booze with the local bohemians was not what he’d promised Caroline, and he recalled that she was iffy on parties in general. But at one in the morning, he looked over at her and saw that she was happy. She sat cross-legged on a stack of broken-down cardboard boxes, one hand wrapped around her third watermelon White Claw of the evening and the other resting lightly on his knee where he sat next to her. Tom’s friends were mostly in theater or adjacent; they had correctly identified Caroline as an appreciative audience for exaggerated stories about embarrassing things Adrian and Tom had done in college or soon afterward. Her smile was hesitantly optimistic, even as she kept one nervous hand on him the entire time.
She’d wanted things like this too, he realized. Things he could give her regardless of whether he could ever pay half the bills. She’d hired him not because she wanted to go to the theater or learn about art but because she wanted a big, full life, with color and joy and new people in it, and she didn’t know how to do it alone. Giving that to her sounded like a thing he could do with the rest of his life, more important than any idea he’d ever tried to convey in paint.
So, the next morning, in a burst of inspiration, he snuck downstairs to call Tom’s ex-wife while Caroline was fighting with Tom’s aged Mr. Coffee and Tom was still sleeping off most of a bottle of Crema de Alba.
After Adrian was appropriately scolded for his delinquency with respect to months of missed texts and group emails, Rose was happy to meet him and Caroline for lunch all the way at the other end of the island of Manhattan.
It took some weaving and dodging to get Caroline dressed in business attire without letting Tom know where they were going, but it was worth it to see her face bloom as she realized they were headed into the thicket of skyscrapers in the Financial District. Adrian didn’t know what Rose did, exactly, or more likely he didn’t understand it, but years ago he’d pulled strings with Nora to get Rose her current job. Calling in that favor for Caroline felt like closing a loop. Rose was nothing if not responsible, and if he told Rose that Caroline needed someone to smuggle her into Spreadsheet City, she’d do it.
Rose was still as round, pretty, and polished as the day Adrian had held the rings and bouquet at her wedding, a vision of sleek professional confidence. While she gave Caroline the grand tour of the nonprofit art foundation where she worked, Adrian saw the wheels turn in Caroline’s head as she calculated how badly Tom had screwed up ten years ago.
At least they were back in the same borough, he thought as Rose delicately interviewed Caroline about her professional aspirations without being obvious about it. If Tom possessed even a single functioning brain cell, he’d track Rose down and apologize, if for no better reason than to save Adrian from a second decade of alternating custody.
I like her, Rose texted under the table while Caroline peered down at the street from the thirty-first floor.
Good, because I’m keeping her, Adrian wrote back.
Adrian and Caroline walked out into Battery Park afterlunch. Caroline had Rose’s business card and an invitation to apply for an internship. She squinted at the tops of the tall buildings like a tourist, but with an acquisitive gleam in her eye. She was already planning to come back; that was apparent. Adrian’s stomach did a complicated maneuver as he acknowledged that he’d just encouraged his girlfriend to move to a city he didn’t live in.
He hoped she’d take him with her then too.
Now they were nearly back to Tom’s Boston apartment—Adrian’s apartment, he supposed, because Tom was unlikely to be making any further payments on the lease—and Caroline seemed as unwilling to end the weekend as he was.
“Do you want to come up?” he asked when he parked her Tahoe at the curb. He got out and swung limbs that had gone stiff from the five-hour drive.
“Of course,” she said, grabbing a cardboard box full of random things Tom hadn’t found room for at his new apartment and carrying it up over Adrian’s objections.
Her face fell when he unlocked the front door, and he cursed himself for not remembering the state of the place before asking her up. It was dirty, like all apartments were after most of the furniture was removed. The living room was mostly unfurnished, except for the small breakfast table Tom’s new roommate hadn’t wanted. Tom’s bedroom was empty. The door was open to Adrian’s bedroom, where his scattered bits of mismatched furniture stood sadly alone. There were no towels hanging in the bathroom; those had been Tom’s.
Caroline didn’t say anything as she kicked dust bunnies aside and moved to the center of the room, but her face was eloquent. After a minute, she went and investigated the refrigerator, which had no non-condiment food.She shut the door to the refrigerator and spun to pin him with a glare, hands on her hips.
“It wouldn’t have made sense to buy groceriesbeforeleaving for three days,” Adrian began to argue with her.
“Then do you want me to take you to the store right now?” Caroline asked. “Or would you rather stay with me tonight?” Her tone presented it as a binary decision. The ultimatum made him stiffen his shoulders.
“I don’t mind staying with you tonight,” he said, pushing through. It would be nice to wake up next to Caroline without Tom five feet away and offering commentary on how he’d always assumed Adrian was the little spoon.
Caroline narrowed her eyes at his phrasing, which had been rather graceless.
“I would behonoredto stay with you,” he amended. It would bereallynice not to spend his first few moments of wakefulness lying facedown on a mostly deflated air mattress until the morning wood caused by spooning his girlfriend’s pert ass all night went away.
Caroline nodded, her small, tip-tilted nose stuck in the air as she marched back toward the front door. Then she stopped.
“What’s the plan?” she demanded.
“The plan?”
She waved at the nearly vacant apartment. The empty kitchen. “The plan for this.”
“I told you I sold a painting. I can pay the rent for a couple of months. I’m going to keep painting.” It sounded plainly insufficient as he described it. “I could get a roommate,” he added.
“Do you have a budget? A cash-flow forecast?”
