The barista passed him the cordless. She seemed young enough to be in high school and had a nose ring and a messy topknot bun and was looking at him oddly, but then he did look like a figurative dumpster fire, like maybe he’d just emerged from a fistfight or possibly a run-in with a swarm of hornets. Ezra asked for a phone book and flipped the pages until he found the hotel, and Frankie overheard him requesting a connection for room number 303. Then his mangled face fell when, clearly, it rang and rang and rang.
“No answer,” he said, plopping back in the chair, then swiping the keys and tucking them back into his coat pocket.
“Try her cell?”
“She doesn’t answer unknown numbers. She gets personally involved with work sometimes—gives people her cell. It usually backfires, so she’s learned. Or she’s trying to learn, anyway.”
“Isn’t being personally involved at work a good thing?” Frankie was always personally involved; she didn’t know any other way with her artists.
Ezra shook his head. “No. Not with this. Have you heard of Datify?”
Frankie made a face.No.Also:What?
“Online dating,” Ezra said, then Frankie started laughing. “Stop! It’s a thing. Or it will be. Anyway, she also does off-line setups from her events. She gets paid when they match.” Ezra shrugged, and Frankie bit her lip. “Look,” he said, “she thinks it’s promising, and since I believe in her, I think it’s promising too.”
“Sure,” Frankie said and considered needling him, but honestly, the whole thing was so embarrassing it wasn’t even worth it. She suspected Ezra already agreed. “Okay then, maybe she’s out for a jog.”
They both turned toward the window where the snow had blanketed the street.
“Don’t be an asshole, Frankie,” Ezra said. “I mean, if you can help it.”
“I can’t.”
“That’s the problem.” He stood, as if to go. “Forget it. I thought we could make this work, and literally two minutes ago we agreed to a truce, but fine. I’ll do this on my own.”
“Godspeed,” Frankie offered.
Ezra steeled his jaw, brushed his hair off his forehead, which Frankie was disturbed to find as sexy as it had always been. “There are a lot of surprising things about this morning, but your... your...” Ezra continued, waving his hands around searching for the right word. “Your pain-in-the-assness is absolutely not one. God, can you just not be an asshole?”
“Oh shut up,” Frankie retorted. She didn’t really care if she offended him. Truthfully, she probably wanted to. But even she could see that he wasn’t wrong: in order to sort out their evening, they had to rely on each other. So she tried again. “Fine. It was a joke. I mean, obviously. No one is jogging in this weather.”
“Make your jokes funny then. Also, Mimi doesn’t run. She does the StairMaster—low impact. We go together five times a week.”
“You hate the gym,” Frankie said.
“You don’t know me anymore,” Ezra replied, though Frankie thought his voice was wavering, like she knew him better than he thought.
“Okay, fine, you love the gym now. Good for you, good for her. Yay, Mimi.” Frankie waited. He remained standing. “That wasn’t the problem back then, me being an asshole.” Still, Ezra scowled. Frankie sighed. “Sit down. Don’t be an idiot.”
Ezra pulled back a chair and sat, though he jutted his chin as if he weren’t relenting.
“Maybe we should start with the keys,” she said, ignoring his theatrics. “To the dorm? To an apartment? To a car?”
“The dorms use key cards now,” he said. “Everything’s gone tech.”
Frankie sighed. In college, she was constantly losing herkeys to the main gate of their building. She didn’t know why. Theoretically, she was disciplined and organized after years of childhood commitment to learning her craft. In practice, she was half falling apart. There was a pay phone on the corner just down the block from the upperclassman dorms, so not infrequently, she would call Ezra collect, then hang up once he intentionally refused the charges, and he would lumber down the steps from his third-floor room to the gate. He never seemed to mind and always greeted her with a raised eyebrow but a happy smile, like he was the only one who could grant her entry. And in a lot of ways, he was right.
Ezra was staring now, a leveled, steely glare. “Why did you come back, anyway?”
A simple question.
“Because April asked me to be a bridesmaid,” Frankie said.
“No.” Ezra shook his head. “That’s not a reason.”
Frankie opened her mouth as if to protest, then closed it. She didn’t want to tell Ezra that of course her instinct had been to say no. That when April reached her in Vancouver to tell her that Connor had proposed and to ask if she would be in the wedding, Frankie thought of all of the excuses she could offer. April was always so kind, and honestly, she wouldn’t have argued, wouldn’t have even doubted if Frankie were being truthful. But then Frankie remembered their freshman year together: even if they now lived such different lives that they often ran out of things to talk about whenever they did talk, April had that unique quality of making friendships easy, of being an ideally perfect freshman year roommate who wasn’t put off by Frankie’s moodiness, who made sure she always invited her to join her at the dining hall so Frankie had someoneto sit with, who showed Frankie—who’d had a housekeeper her whole life—how to do the laundry so her whites didn’t turn pink, so her sweaters didn’t get tossed in the dryer and emerge infant-sized.
There were people who saved you in big and small ways.
