“Pets. I have two cats named Trixie and Lola. While I’m here, they’re with my neighbor.” He pays the cat tax and shows me a photo of a sleek brown tabby and round black cat sitting side by side like judgmental sphinxes.
“Home. I live in a condo near the water in Kitsilano. Hobbies.” Here he flounders. “I don’t think I have any. Most of my time is working. Relationships. None. My last girlfriend was two years ago, and we dated for three years.” He looks up. “Your turn.”
I stop myself from asking what broke them up, because I don’t like thinking of Rafe with another woman. “I make perfume under Ile de Grasse. Also, I know Grasse isn’t an island. Mom points it out all the time. The name is conceptual.”
“I had no doubt.” His grin makes me laugh.
“I move around a lot. I’ve lived in seven cities since I left and I don’t go home very often. I don’t have any pets. I…” I peter out. “No relationships.”
“That’s four,” he says.
“It’s five,” I argue. “Perfume, moving, seven cities, not going home, no pets, no significant other. Six, now that I count them out. I overdelivered.”
“I consider moving, the cities, and not going home all variations on a theme.” He crosses his arms. “Give me one more.”
“I–I don’t have…” I falter, trying to think of something, anything.
“Not a negative,” he says. “Not anything missing. Something you have.”
That shuts me up completely because I’ve defined the last decade more by what I lack. “I have a friend,” I say finally. “Ana. She owns the store. At least, I think we’re friends.”
We sit across the table, looking at each other. “If this were my eulogy, everyone in the funeral home would cry from pity,” Rafe says finally, frowning at his cup.
“At least you didn’t turn into a kayak guy,” I say to lighten the mood.
“I was one for a while.” Rafe goes red. “I sold it last year and got back into hiking. Hey, I guess I do have a hobby.”
“We used to hike all the time,” I say. “Remember when we climbed the Grouse Grind?”
“It was in October,” he says.
“You slipped.”
He snorts. “Because you missed a step and fell on me.”
“Then those Japanese tourists took photos of us because we were covered in mud.”
“Right before that eighty-year-old couple in the head-to-toe Patagonia beat us to the top.”
“They made fun of us for being slow.”
Rafe frowns. “Yeah, if we’d known it was a race, we could have totally beat them.”
“We probably should have known. Doesn’t it automatically become a race the second someone passes you on the trail?”
We laugh, and for that brief moment, it feels like no time at all has passed.
“We could go hiking again here,” he adds. “I found a nice trail out by the zoo I want to try.”
Another date, pulling us from the past into a shared future. I nod enthusiastically.
Rafe eats neatly, which is something I forgot. Missy Jin drilled manners into him, telling him a Realtor needed to exude a sense of class. The conversation is easier than I expected, and with the basics of our lives out of the way, I feel better about simply talking. We move from his trip to Ottawa to my time living there, and then to a jasmine-mint scent I’d been working on.
“I put it on before I left.” I hold out my wrist, where I’d sprayed it.
This is a mistake, because Rafe cradles my hand over the table. I keep my arm still but can feel the trembling start in my knees as hepushes my sleeve up to nose along my skin, his eyes closing to concentrate on the scent.
I do my best to cover my reaction to his touch. Having Rafe back in my life again leaves me feeling strangely untethered. It’s as if part of me never moved past the twenty-year-old who’d been stunted with hurt. That Lucy was stuck in time, but I have options I can take if I grow through the past like a sapling reaching for sun.
