“Must be awkward.” Probably not more awkward than this meeting, but still.
He shrugs, a slight lift of those broad shoulders, and it’s a sloppy-looking, uncharacteristic gesture on him. Unexpected. “It’s business.”
He must be speaking of the work he does, but somehow, it seems “It’s business” is also what he means by Avery, by their engagement. Their breakup, however amicable it was.
“I apologize for calling you a shopgirl,” he says, a change of subject abrupt enough that it takes me a second to realize what he’s said. “I obviously think you’re very talented.”
It’s so surprising that I make a quiet snort of disbelief. If nothing else has been confirmed by this extremely wrenching conversation, at least it’s fair to say that I’ve got a pretty good instinct when it comes to Reid Sutherland, and no part of our interactions today or a year ago have indicated that he thinks I have any talent at all.
“Obviously?”
“Yes,” he says. “Everything was . . . well, Avery was very pleased with all of it.”
“Butyouweren’t.” As soon as it’s out of my mouth, I regret it. What am I doing? Baiting a very messy hook, fishing for compliments from a guy I mostly need to forget me five minutes after he leaves here? I need him to never think about my talent again, given what he knows about how I’ve used it.
“I was . . .” He moves his cup again, another quarter-turn. “I was affected by it. I looked down at your letters and—they felt like numbers to me. Something I could read. They felt like a sign.”
I know how that feels. The first time I saw—well,reallysaw, really paid attention to—a hand-drawn letter, it was on an old sign in this city. And that’s how it’d felt to me—something I could read, sure. But also something that was full of possibility.Look at all the ways this lettersayssomething. It gives me a strange, secret pleasure to hear Reid say this about some of my own letters.
But I can’t and shouldn’t take what he’s said—that my work affected him—as a compliment. What I do—it’s petty, secretive, immature. I’m not meant to be writingsignsfor people. I’m meant to be writingplansfor them, plans they’ve already made for themselves.
I have to stop this. I have to find a way to break the habit for good. Get back on track, get unblocked. Make my deadline, the one that could take my still-in-startup-mode small business to the next level.
“I won’t do it again,” I say, more to myself than to him, but immediately I wish I’d made this declaration privately. Stand-in-front-of-the-mirror-in-my-bathroom privately. I sound as if I’m begging for his silence with this promise, and the way his mouth flattens even further tells me he doesn’t appreciate the shakedown.
“I assure you, I have no interest in talking to anyone about this ever again.”
That’s his promise back, I guess—his version ofI’ll never tell, and it should make me happy, or at least relieved. Instead I feel like I’ve done whatever theMasterpiece Theatreversion of a drug deal is. I guess it would still be a drug deal, but an old-timey one.
When Reid moves, as though to stand, I get a strange sense of panic at leaving it this way, with this clandestine promise between us, and so I speak—the first question I can think of.
“Why now?”
Left Quirk is the only response he gives me before straightening in his chair again. He turns the cup one-quarter and looks at me.
“I mean, why come to me now, if you saw this then? Before the . . . before the wedding, I mean.”
“It wasn’t the most urgent thing on my to-do list,” he says dryly, but somehow he has managed to telegraph directly into my brain every single way I probably screwed up his life—his relationship, surely his living situation, his job, possibly his friendships. “And I suppose I’m running out of time.”
“You’re running out oftime?” This last part is high-pitched enough to sound almost hysterical. Is there somethingwrongwith him? Am I on this man’s bucket list? My eyeballs feel like they’re in a 3D movie, jumping right across the table into his face.
Please, don’t let something be wrong with him, I think, with a startling amount of feeling.
“Ah, no,” he says quickly, obviously disconcerted by my 3D eyeballs. “I’m leaving New York. Probably by the end of the summer.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
I’m sorry?What do I have to be sorry for? This is good for me, that he’s leaving. This is the best possible outcome for this meeting, short of Reid developing spontaneous, highly specific amnesia about me and his wedding program.
The noise he makes—it is a scoff. Nothing so sloppy as a snort. “I’m not.”
“You don’t like New York?”
“I hate New York.”
It almost makes me recoil, the way he’s said this. Bold, sans serif. No caps, but italics for theIt’s not a harmless, pedestrian “I hate this song” or “I hate those chocolate balls rolled in shredded coconut.” It’s not one of those small, meaningless hatreds that shear the word of its meaning.
When Reid Sutherland says he hates New York, he really, really means it.
