Rae felt a pang, wishing she were back in Indiana to cook her mom dinner and have long, lazy talks on the back porch as the crickets gave them a private concert. She sometimes felt like a bad daughter for living so far away, especially now that her mom was getting a bit older and was taking care of Rae’s grandpa too, but she knew she’d feel stifled if she moved back to Indiana. Her New York chapter wasn’t over yet.
Refocusing, she analyzed an article about Dustin’s high school soccer team. Dustin had nerdy sports goggles and a bad bowl cut. Apparently he’d assisted the winning goal in the regional semifinals. She liked the trajectory of someone who hadn’t peaked in high school, and assisting rather than scoring symbolized a certain selflessness.
If he’d suggested they grab a drink, Rae likely would’ve ignored the text altogether and waited until January before she had to shout her life story once more in an overcrowded bar. But the well-written suggestion of tea intrigued her with its tranquility. That and the fact that she was home alone on a Saturday night with empty takeout boxes while her best friend was at one of New York’s most elegant restaurants with her apparent true love.
Meeting up with Dustin wouldn’t technically be breaking the dating detox, since he’d been in the pipeline since before the detox began. It was no more of a loophole than the one Ellen had found.
After spitting out the toothpaste, she texted back.Tea sounds nice.
She didn’t feel the need to add an artificial exclamation point.
CHAPTER SIX
ANOTHER FORMULAIC FIRST DATE
So sorry, stuck at work, don’t think I can make it tonight.
Rae drafted the text to Dustin as she left the office on Wednesday. It had been a particularly vapid day—she’d had to get in early to dial into a conference call where she wasn’t allowed to speak but was supposed to take detailed notes of what everyone else was saying. Then the bank’s holiday party had been canceled in a one-line email blaming “operational efficiency initiatives,” which Rae knew translated into “rich people’s stinginess.”
Though Rae’s hours were long, she usually didn’t have any real work to do for most of the day, which left her feeling equally useless and exhausted. Due to entrenched inefficiencies of the frat-house hierarchy, the higher-ups were too focused on wooing clients all day to brief the junior team members on their tasks. During these daylight hours, Rae and the other minions were expected to sit at their desks like well-trained dogs, ready to be staffed on a new deal at any time. When the higher-ups went home for the day—or more accurately, when they left to chug beers with more clients—they dumped work on the youngsters’ desks and expected them to stay up all nightand send through one-hundred-percent-mistake-free deliverables by sevenA.M.the next morning.
There was general acceptance on Wall Street that the system was broken but no appetite to fix it. The old white guys who ran the place had all endured brutal hours and sacrificed their happiness and health to get where they were, so damn it, everyone else should too.
Tonight’s “urgent” task was putting together a pitch book—a 120-slide presentation packed with fluffy graphs and charts—for a vice president on Rae’s team to take to a client meeting with a tech company executive, probably some guy he’d met on the golf course. Naturally, Rae wasn’t invited on the business trip, even though she was doing all the work to prepare for it.
The Wall Street life had chosen her far more than she had chosen it. A harmless ten-week internship had somehow become an entire life track.
The day’s highlight was her toilet nap and catching up on Scramblette group texts from the safety of the banker bunker, but this afternoon one of her “wannabe bosses”—her name for the dozens of men above her who weren’t her manager but ordered her around anyway—had informed her she’d been taking too many bathroom breaks. Rae had thought about telling this middle-aged man that she was having heavy menstrual discharge or perhaps filing a complaint to HR, but she’d just clenched her jaw and told him she would be more cognizant going forward. Bonuses were being decided around now. Once she pocketed the cash in January and paid down more of her loans, she’d strut out of this place with middle fingers raised high. She wasn’t in the position to be a full-time writer yet, but she could at least find a job that didn’t give her the feeling that her heart was physically hardening every time she walked into the marble lobby of the fifty-story skyscraper.
The only date she felt up to tonight was one she watched on Netflix from the couch. She walked out the revolving office doors, manned by security guards who all knew her name and often fed herinspirational quotes to keep her going through the grind. Tonight, Kenny, the man who worked night shifts, must have seen the exhaustion in her slumped posture. “Now remember, Rae,” he said in a paternal sort of way. “A job is just a job.”
Rae returned Kenny’s fist bump with as much of a smile as she could muster and stepped into the December night.
Cold air barreled through skyscraper wind tunnels, straight into her chest. The prospect of hot tea had new appeal. And Dustin had selected a spot in the West Village, just a few blocks from the penthouse. He was probably already on his way.
Rae shiver-walked toward the Wall Street subway station. The streets down here were narrow and winding, not following the logical grid pattern that governed most of Manhattan. The Financial District, or FiDi, as it was called, was rather ghostly after dark. Rae sometimes joked that it was haunted by all the spirits that had been sucked from Wall Street employees. Their robotic shells stayed hunched over their computers while their human souls drifted through the air, forming misty clouds with the other severed spirits, dampening the Victorian streetlights as if hoping that their earthly bodies might look out the window and wonder why it was so dark. But the bodies never did look. They kept their eyes glued to their computer monitors as if their lives depended on it, fully oblivious to the irony of it all.
FiDi was mostly made up of corporate offices rather than apartment buildings. The only people who actually lived here were young bankers who worked across the street and were trying to scrounge a few extra minutes of sleep by plopping right into bed when they were permitted to head home at threeA.M. This proximity made sense in theory, but Rae was glad that she lived in the West Village. It helped keep some semblance of separation between her work life and personal life, however small.
On the subway ride up to Christopher Street, the squeaky train violently lurched to a standstill several times, extending theten-minute journey into a twenty-minute one. The only explanation given was from the automated recording over the train’s loudspeaker, read in an infuriatingly calm voice: “We are being momentarily held by the train’s dispatcher.” It made Rae and everyone else on the train huff and fume at the incompetence of it all.
Walking fast, she still made it to Té Company on West Tenth, tucked just out of the way of the Seventh Avenue crowds, at nine o’clock on the dot. She felt a rush of gratitude to live in a place that kept its tea shops open so late.
Based on the precedent set by her ten other first dates, she assumed Dustin would be at least five minutes late. Figuring she’d have time to smooth her flyaway hairs and dab the sheen off her nose once she got inside, she didn’t look for anyone as she walked through the jingly door and exhaled a shuddery “Brrr.”
She’d never actually been in here before, though she’d walked by the tea shop many times. The first thing she noticed was its warmth, hugging her with the same texture as her bathrobe, or perhaps just heating her imagination enough so she could invent a world with cotton air. The second thing she noticed was the pleasing book/human ratio, with bookshelves lining the white brick wall and nearly no one in the matchbox-shaped seating area. The third thing was the sound of her name—a statement rather than a question.
“Rae.”
There he was—Dustin, standing up from a chair at a corner table near the lone window.
He was even better looking in person, at least six feet tall, curly black hair longer than in his corporate head shot, bangs grazing green eyes. His bone structure had thatYup, I could be a model if I wantedquality. Even if Rae hadn’t known he worked on Wall Street, she would’ve recognized him as a fellow sellout from his white collared shirt. Still, he wasn’t wearing a tie and his sleeves were rolled halfway up his forearms, perhaps implying some level of free spirit.
Rae plucked up a smile and sat down across from him. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” she told Dustin. “Got held up at the office.”
“You’re right on time.” He spoke slowly, without much change in inflection. His smile lacked charisma, not even showing teeth. “Can I get you some tea?”
He handed her a menu, which had pages of loose-leaf teas, all apparently sourced directly from Taiwan gardens.
