“Well, maybe once things settle down for us, we could think about choosing a place.” Deliberate pause. “Together.” More deliberate pause. “Outside of the city.”
I withdrew my hand, placed it on my lap. I’d felt my mood tunneling at the wordtogether—the second time he’d mentioned this after shading toward it at my failed dinner party idea at my apartment a few weeks ago. But leave here? “I love it here,” I said slowly. “I always imagined living in the city. And now I am.”
Wells’s smile was boyish. In it, I could see what he looked like when we met, the way the right side edged up one fraction higher than the left. “No, I know. Me, too. I started seeing a therapist—”
“On your own?” I raised a brow.
His nod was earnest. “I’m really trying here. I just had the thought—what if we tried somewhere new, together? If we don’t run from what we’ve gone through, then that could be a real fresh start.”
The tablecloth wasn’t fabric; it was a thick white paper. After we left today, the waitstaff would yank it to reveal a fresh sheet below. Now I traced the curve of my water glass, which had dampened the paper.Meniscus. I tore my glance away from a thing that rang of lilac walls and pastrami sandwiches. “So you want to move to, what? Long Island? Jersey?”
He shakes his head. “Further.”
“Connecticut?”I stirred red pepper flakes into the table hummus.
“Brace yourself.” Wells leaned forward. “What if we moved to California? Not right now, but eventually. A couple years. My college roommate’s in finance out there, and he’s always talked about me joining him.”
Something purred low, deep, heavy in my gut, then took off: an adrenaline buzz. California.California?Shock gave way to something else, my leg pumping up and down, shaking the paper tablecloth as a younger woman approached our table.
“Excuse me?” I turned to the interruption like it was water and I was thirsty. My savior wore daisy earrings. “You’re an icon. Do you mind if we take a picture?” she asked.
Even though I’d made a new rule about protecting my time—one I’d obviously never had to make in the before days—I obliged to buy a stretch for my response.
While I smiled, checking the phone to make sure my eyes were open and my teeth were free of things like poppy seeds, I forced myself to sharpen my hearing, to intently listen to everything Wells said next. My muscles knotted, which sent a warning signal from my knee. I weighed how to react.
On the East Coast,Californiawas always the answer to the question “What’s better than this?” And then ultimately, East Coast diehards volleyed excuses and developed rationales why California was not better. (Earthquakes. Lifestyle creep.) When I was a kid, I’d heard that California would fall into the oceansomeday, as if someone could take a giant pair of scissors and snip along its dotted state line, then cast the puzzle piece into the Pacific.
Daisy-earrings girl thanked me and left. I sipped my water, trying to consider the pros of the idea: A six-hour flight and a four or five-hour drive were basically the same thing when it came to seeing my parents. I didn’t like winter weather. My skin craved UV light, and not for a tan: It cracked, broke, went red and dry in the crevices of my joints.
There was something promised about that place, something I’d never really considered for myself. And now that I was older, and I saw my friends less and less, wouldn’t it kind of make sense to have our day-to-day be full of farmers markets? We were already in New York City, where the cost of living was astronomical. California wouldn’t be much different.
“Always? Why haven’t you ever told me this?” is what I settled on.
“?’Cause we never had a reason to consider it.” Wells topped off both glasses with a giant bottle of still water. (No gas. I’d loved being in Paris with Natalie, once, answering thegas or no gasquestion.) “Your career is just taking off, and once you log in the experience, then I think you could do anything you want. You could keep telling stories out there. Any kind of stories. I know that’s what you want most.”
“Sort of,” I said.
He did a double take. “Sort of?”
“Yeah. I want to move into something else eventually.” Salary aside, that was, I reminded myself. “I told you about the documentary opportunity.”
He shrugged. “Yeah. Exactly. The EP credit for our wedding.”
“For theepisoderelated to our wedding. But that’s not even what I’m talking about. It’s that now I have support for myowndoc, promised to me in my offer meeting. Besides, my job might not be what I went for, but it’s still big.”
“Of course it is,” he agreed, but the way he said it made me wonder if he actually agreed. “It’s huge. But you’re a smart woman. You know Per Diem isn’tTodayorGMA. All this buzz is about you, and your presence as a person on the internet, plus the leg up on the network.”
I straightened my spine, imagining my vertebrae piling one on top of the other then pulling up, the way my childhood ballet teacher instructed. “I wasn’t going forTodayorGMA.” I jabbed a knife into a pat of olive-oil-drizzled butter to spread on a piece of lavash. Then I plunked the bread on my plate without taking a bite. “I wasn’t going foranything. My ‘presence on the internet’ was me eating food and posting movie recommendations and small bits of our life together, so the people I went to college with could see I’m still a human being.”
“You’re Olivia Jane Adler. People watch for you. That’s called authenticity.”
“Fine. Uncalculated authenticity. I didn’t ask for any of this.”
“You’re right.” His nose twitched. “It’s silly. Never mind. We’ll do New York.”
I frowned. “Is this something real? You really want to move out west?”
He shrugged. “I’m just trying to do right by us,” he said.
