Rae took a sip, smudging the rim with red lipstick.
The apartment was on the ground floor (garden level, New Yorkers called it), and Dustin led them out to the patio, a concrete courtyard encased by fifteen-story buildings. Low flames rose from a portable fire pit, clearing the city air with smoke.
Carols streamed through outdoor speakers. There was only one other couple outside, and Rae and Dustin stood off by themselves, setting their mugs on top of an out-of-season grill.
Rae could smell the fire but couldn’t feel it. The air was cold. She found herself liking how it sharpened her senses. “Your friends are great,” she said.
“They’re good people,” Dustin agreed. “Haven’t seen most of them in a while.”
On their first date, she’d dismissed his even-keeled tone as disinterested, but now she found it refreshingly unhurried. “It’s hard to keep up friendships in the real world,” she said, thinking about how she’d graduated from college with a smattering of “sisters for life” and yet Sarah and Mina were the only ones she still saw or even texted. She didn’t know where she’d be if Ellen hadn’t scooped her up.
Dustin didn’t answer, and Rae wondered if he had his own stories of shrunken circles. She surveyed the surrounding apartment buildings. A few floors up, a woman’s silhouette was standing ina window. Perhaps the woman was staring up at the sky, searching for the moon on a cloudy night, but Rae had the impression she was looking down at the courtyard, maybe angry about the volume of the music, or just lonely and wishing she’d been invited to the party.
“What are you looking at?” Dustin asked, following her gaze.
“That woman in the window.”
He evaluated the scene for a moment. “She looks lonely,” he said, and waved up at her.
Rae felt something in that wave, in her stomach or her chest, or some optimal ratio of the two, and she too gave a little wave up to the window.
The silhouette did not wave back.
“She probably just doesn’t see us,” Dustin said, slipping his rebuffed hand into Rae’s and giving it a squeeze.
Rae tried to squeeze back, but her fingers remained limp, comfortably stunned by the texture of new skin.
“It reminds me of a William Bellini poem,” Rae heard herself say. Her ex was the only guy she’d ever quoted poetry to, and he’d snuffed the habit with enough five-syllable yawns. “I like to be with people, just not up close.”
Dustin was quiet, and Rae regretted saying anything. Finally, in a curious voice, he said, “You think she wouldn’t like us if she were any closer?”
“No, I just mean—I think there’s something nice about watching things from afar like that. She can create whatever story about us she wants—she isn’t constrained by facts.”
“You don’t sound very much like an investment banker.”
“I want to be a poet one day.” The confession slipped out as easily as the Bellini verse. Perhaps the hot chocolate was stronger than she’d realized.
Dustin didn’t laugh or react like she’d just said something crazy. He just nodded, as if he’d expected as much.
“I don’t write much now,” she added, feeling a rush of embarrassment about the haiku from their date. She vowed to revise it right when she got home tonight. “My excuse is that I can’t find the time, but that’s a lie, of course.”
“Why is that a lie? You’re at the office around the clock.”
“Sure, but time is made, not found,” Rae said, aware of how her face, tilted up, was inches from his own, tilted down. The gap between them had all but disappeared as they’d stared up at the window. They were still holding hands.
Dustin smiled—two parentheses penciled into the edges of his mouth. “That sounds like a line of poetry right there,” he said, thumb drawing nameless shapes on her palm.
“Which do you think is worse,” Rae asked. She was so tired of going through the motions—playing the corporate character six days a week, and then the dating charade, and to hell with it if the realness backfired. “Deferring dreams or giving up on them?”
After one of his long silences, which Rae already felt herself getting used to, Dustin answered. “Deferring them. Because if you give up on a dream, you can redirect that energy toward a new pursuit. But if you defer it, that energy doesn’t go anywhere, except into ballooning the delusion.”
Ballooning the delusion.
“Exactly,” Rae said, feeling eerily understood. “That’s what I’m scared of. That I’ll keep deluding myself into thinking that I’ll write, until corporate America sucks the last of my soul.”
Dustin held her with his eyes, and she hoped he wouldn’t let go. “Want my opinion?”
“Yes, please.”
