“The shirt or the scent.”
“Both,” I admitted with a sheepish smile.
“They’re Issey Miyake.”
“I’m sorry. What?”
The man laughed, and I found myself loving the sound of it. “He’s a Japanese fashion designer. He did the shirt and the scent. I wear them together. Seems fitting.”
“Right. Of course.” The cologne wasn’t the highlight of the aroma. I got lost again in the man’s arresting eyes. He was younger than me but sure of himself in a way that seemed utterly authentic. My friends and I came from affluent families, still trying to prove we were worth the cost of our Ivy League educations—to our parents, our lovers, each other. The writers in my circle were by far the most insecure, riddled with anxiety and existential grief, our self-worth hinging on the number of zero’s in our book advances and whether theNew York Timesdeemed our work worthy of a review.
Pretty pathetic, all in all.
“Your nipples are hard,” I said stupidly and shook my head at my slip. “I mean, you’re cold. Here, take mine.” I unbuttoned my own shirt and handed it over, thankful that I’d been exercising regularly. We each buttoned up and smoothed our rumpled shirtfronts. I made a mental note to check my libido. Just because a man drags you into an empty stairwell and offers you his shirt doesnotmean he’s interested in going home with you later.
But it could happen.
“I’m Michael D'Agostino.” I held out my hand even though introductions seemed like a formality at this point.
“Yes, I know,” he said with another winning smile and shook my hand heartily. He had an enthusiasm about everything he did, a contagious energy like an unexpected burst of sunshine from between the clouds.
“God, I could really use a cigarette right now,” I admitted. The man’s eyebrows quirked, and he pulled a soft pack of Newports from his pocket with a single cigarette inside of it. Mmmm, menthol, my favorite.
“For emergencies only,” he said. “Mind if we share?”
“Of course not.”
The man flipped the cigarette into his mouth and lit it in the practiced way that only a habitual smoker could accomplish. Many of my friends had turned to vaping in recent years. I’d tried it myself, but it didn’t satisfy quite like a cigarette. Give me that carcinogenic, throat-raking smoke and the bitter aftertaste of tobacco over watermelon e-juice any day.
“I quit a few years back,” I said, my mouth watering for it.
“Same.” He tilted his head and inhaled, giving me an excellent view of his throat. The architecture of tendon and bone, fluted like a Grecian column and narrowing to the delicate hollow, made me think I’d never seen a man’s anatomy more artfully done. He blew smoke off to one side and offered the lit cigarette to me.
My drag was more furtive with the cigarette cupped behind one hand, because I was used to hiding this particular vice. It was a filthy habit and one that had always shamed me. It had been a long while since my last, and the jolt of nicotine hit me almost immediately. I imagined my sensory receptors bursting with dopamine like juice vesicles as my spirit settled into that familiar buzz.
“That’s good,” I said with a smoke-filled sigh of satisfaction.
“Too good,” the man said ruefully and shook his head.
We shared in the quiet intimacy of an illicit treasure passed back and forth. On any other occasion, this exchange might be the prelude to sex, but we were each content to simply share a smoke and wonder. Or in my case, admire. Overwhelmed by the closeness of our encounter and my impending reading, I didn’t think to ask his name or get his phone number. I simply settled into the verve coursing through my veins and my newfound invincibility, surely a side effect of this man’s attention.
After we’d burned the cigarette down to its filter, he crushed it on the pavement and cradled the butt in his hand. Then he was moving toward the door and urging me out of the stairwell.
“You’d better get out there and do your thing. Everyone’s waiting.”
My momentary calm was interrupted by the throngs of people waiting on me and the newfound worry that I probably reeked of smoke. We navigated our way back to the main reception where he deposited me near the podium, then melted back into the crowd.
Throughout my speech and subsequent reading, I searched for a glimpse of the beautiful man in a wine-stained shirt, but I couldn’t locate him anywhere.
Afterward, while I was sitting at a table signing books for readers and hoping to find him again, Bitzy caught up with me.
“You were simply fabulous, dahhhling,” she said in an exaggerated upper-crust accent. She sniffed my shirt and said, “Smoking again?”
“Just one, Mom,” I said with a pang of guilt. But not regret.
She did a doubletake. “Is that an Issey Miyake shirt?”
“You know his work?”
