We’ve moved back to the corner, where a crowd is waiting to cross Bowery. We could say our goodbyes here and I could turn, keep walking, see a few more signs on my own, walk through a neighborhood where the letters change, become characters for a language I don’t know. I could call for a Lyft when I get to the Manhattan Bridge. An indulgence, surge pricing for sure, but I feel I’ve earned it.
Except . . . I also want to stop for a few minutes. Take in the results of the game, look over the pictures and see what strikes me as interesting, as inspiration. There’s a coffee shop beside us—quite late for coffee—and I look toward it, see tables open. Even as I’m picturing it, as I’m thinking of me and my notebook and my Staedtler and these pictures, a familiar pressure builds. That twitching in my hands—what if I sit there, and it all comes to nothing? What if it’s another block, and I can’t—
“You should choose one of the letters,” Reid says, interrupting my thoughts. I blink away from the coffee shop and look up at him. “Choose one, and do one of our names, or—a month name, for your project. All from that one letter’s style. Another game.”
“Wow,” I say, chuckling at the way he seems to have read my mind. “Maybe youshouldbe a business consultant.”
“Maybe,” he says, with a small, self-deprecating smile.
I stare down at my phone again, my grid of pictures. The nice thing about the game was the way we created it together,playedit together, the way neither one of us was following or playing along. I wonder whether it feels as good to him as it does to me.
So before I can think about it too hard, I push my phone into his hands.
“Pick one,” I say. “Pick one, and follow me.”
Then I move past him into the coffee shop, not ready for the game to be over yet.
“You are not serious,” I say, looking down at Reid’s selection.
He shrugs, lifts his cup, and takes a sip of the herbal tea he ordered. Across the small, round table, his posture is nearly as impeccable as it had been the first time we sat together in a place like this.
But it’s not like that time. For one thing, I havealsoordered an herbal tea, and even though I think it tastes like licking the bottom of a flowerpot, at least I know I won’t wake up tomorrow with a caffeine hangover.
For another, Reid and I areplaying.
“This is extremely unexpected,” I say, tapping my pencil against my open notebook.
His mouth curves fleetingly as he sets down his cup. “If you’ll recall, unexpected was the point.”
The lowercaseathat’s pictured on my phone is strange, misshapen. It’s a double-storey, the kind ofawith a hook-and-eye look to it that’s common in roman fonts but uncommon in handwriting. But where most double-storeya’s have a circular counter, this one’s counter is triangular, made that way by the odd proportions elsewhere in the letter. Flat along the bottom, thick and blocky outlines, not at all consistent or familiar.
I’m surprised he picked it—orderly, well-shaped Reid—but I’m not displeased. In fact, as I still my pencil and flip it easily to rest in my usual drawing grip, a smile tugs at my mouth, because I already know what I’ll do with it. A month name, the first I’ve attempted outside of client jobs forweeks.
Within two minutes I’ve copied thea—I’m quicker, usually, but it takes me a couple of tries to get the proportions right, and by the time I’ve got a version I’m satisfied with, I’m working on the lower quarter of the page. I can feel Reid’s eyes on my hands, and while it sometimes makes me self-conscious to have people watch me work, I find I don’t mind. He’s so quiet that it’s not all that different from when I set my phone up on its tiny stand and take a video of myself sketching.
The hard part—the game, really—is not the copying, but the mimicking, the way I’m supposed to take this one letter and use it as inspiration for something new. That takes me longer—more experimentation, more mistakes as I struggle to get those over-broad shoulders on the top edges of the letters right, as I play with options to give them more dimension, more texture. I feel my mind going blank, my hand working more smoothly, confidently.
Ten minutes and two pages later, I’ve got a rough sketch of it. This isn’t where I’d stop—if I were home, if I had more time, if I had all my stuff with me. I’m already thinking of colors I’d use to fill it in, and of how those big shoulders could become tiny canvases all their own, the tiny, clever sketches I could put inside....
“March?” Reid says, reading what I’ve written. It’s the first time he’s spoken since I started sketching.
I blink up at him. He’s leaned forward, elbows resting on the table, his empty cup of tea in the space between. If this is how he sat while I worked, then I guess our heads were bent together, and it makes me feel strangely powerful, to know that my sketching was drawing him closer. Now that I’m finished, I’m free to notice things about close-up Reid: In the low light of this place, his eyes are darker blue. The lashes that frame them are long, but they aren’t showy about it—dark blond, lighter at the tips so that the true length of them is hidden from the casual observer. He has a single, small light brown freckle on his left cheekbone.
I realize, snapping myself out of it, that his lean-back method is very effective for stopping spontaneous face-pressing feelings—not that he has those to worry about.
“March,” I repeat. “Only sensible choice, for this kind of letter.”
His brow furrows, his mouth pulling to the side. “How do you figure?”
I shift in my seat, unsure about how to explain this part to someone else, how I try to read letters for more than the words they spell out.
“Did you notice the store this came from?”
He opens his mouth, then closes it again before making that furrow in his brow even deeper. Then he says, even more formally than usual, “I did not.”
I resist the urge to smile. “I mean, don’t worry about it. It’s not as if that was one of the rules.”
“Right.”
