“I think you’re still in the collecting-stories stage of your life. And eventually, when the time is right, you’ll sneeze them out as poems. What’s that Bellini quote?Only do something if it claws at you…”
“And forces its way out in spite of oh so much,”Rae finished. She’d been so surprised by everything tonight that Dustin quoting one ofher favorite indie writers back to her seemed perfectly natural. Not normal, but natural. There was an important difference.
“You write?” she asked.
“No, I don’t have that gene. But I read anything I can get my hands on. Business stuff, sure, but mostly novels. Poetry, too, sometimes—free verse, not the stuff that rhymes for the sake of rhyming. No offense if you like rhymes,” he added quickly.
“I don’t.” She found rhyme schemes offensively trite. “You know,” she said, smile flickering with the flames. “I pegged you as a boring finance bro.”
“Is that right?” Dustin seemed amused. “Well, since we’re being honest, I nearly didn’t even ask you out in the first place. I try not to spend my free time with other Wall Streeters. It’s not that I hate my job—I actually find stock markets fascinating, how human emotions like fear and insecurity drive all these wildly irrational moves in prices, often at odds with the story of the underlying fundamentals. It’s just that finance is only a tiny sliver of the world, and it’s so easy to get isolated within it.”
Rae had never thought about financial markets like that: a collection of emotions and narratives. It made her like her job a little bit more. “So what made you give my dating-app profile a second look? Was it the irresistible filter of my photos?” she deadpanned.
Dustin’s teeth poked through his smile. “Not quite. There was something about the depth of your expressions—3-D even in 2-D.” His even tone kept it from sounding sappy, not that Rae would have minded if it had. “I could tell you dreamed about more than money.”
Rae let go of his hand just long enough to reach into her coat pocket and pull out the Santa hat, understanding now what Ellen had meant by “just in case.”Just in case you feel free to let him really see you.
“You’ve had that the whole time?” Dustin asked as she put it on. “Why didn’t you wear it earlier?”
“I don’t know,” she said, tugging the hat down to her eyebrows. Nobody else was dressed up.”
“Rae,” Dustin said. They were so close now that Dustin’s eyes should have been blurred but weren’t. She’d thought his eyes were green but saw now they were hazel, flecked with complexity. “You’re too much of a somebody to follow the nobodies.”
He wasn’t the one who kissed her first, and she wasn’t the one who kissed him first, but they met at a halfway point that wasn’t the average.
Rae pulled away, aware of how many people could see them—the couple across the patio, the guests inside the apartment, the silhouette in the window.
“Something wrong?” Dustin asked.
Rae didn’t want to be the midtwenties girl piling on the PDA at the late-twenties party. But more than that, she didn’t want to let other people write her own life.
“No,” she said. “Nothing’s wrong.”
Their lips found each other again as the playlist cut to a new carol and the bonfire crackled beside them, wrapping the memory in a ribbon of smoke.
CHAPTER NINE
LOVE MARKET UNCERTAINTY
“I told you dating apps worked,” Mina said the next night, after Rae finished recapping date two with Dustin.
The Scramblettes were on the penthouse floor, exchanging gifts for their annual Secret Santa. Rae had just opened a silk-ish pajama set from Ellen (“two steps up from the bathrobe!”), a GMAT study guide from Sarah (“in case you want to study with me!”) and a pink vibrator from Mina (“to help you through your dry spell!”). Rae had gifted them all farmhouse-chic dispensers of peppermint soap, inspired by yesterday’s bathroom furnishings. She’d ordered them from her bed this morning and had never been more grateful for same-day delivery.
After her dramatic birthday party, Rae had resolved to ban all future Sunday night celebrations, but this was the only time that had matched up for all four of them before they scattered across the country for the holidays. So here they were, bracing for work tomorrow as they shared a kale scramblette and bottle of red. Last night’s late-twenties decor was too fresh in Rae’s memory for her to be impressed by the girls’ amateur “green eggs and wine” Christmas theme, but she pretended to be.
“You just needed to kiss enough frogs before you found your prince,” Mina went on, dabbing peppermint soap on her neck like lotion.
“More like shake enough webbed hands,” Sarah teased.
“I really think it’s the magic of the detox,” Ellen said. “Something about the reverse psychology. How else do you explain that Rae and I both found our dream guys the week after we deleted our dating apps?”
“Is this the first time all four Scramblettes are dating someone at the same time?” Mina asked, reveling at the adult-ish-ness of it. Mina and her latest soul mate had just had the “exclusive” talk.
“Dustin and I aren’t dating,” Rae said. “I’ve only seen him twice.” She was already regretting oversharing but hadn’t been able to help herself from going into every detail of how he’d quoted poetry (“so intellectual!” the Scramblettes had cooed) and waved to the mystery woman in the window (“so kind!”) and kissed with exactly the right proportions of tenderness and tenacity (“the spark!”) and texted her at 10:34A.M.this morning saying he’d had a “wonderful time” (“such prompt follow-up!”).
Low expectations, high standards, Rae kept telling herself. It was one of the Scramblettes’ go-to mottos, but she was already conjuring up next Christmas with Dustin coming to Indiana with her to meet her mom and grandpa. Her mom would like him. She might think he was a little reserved at first, but once she got to know him …
Rae reached for her Santa hat, which she’d tossed on the floor when she’d gotten home last night. It still smelled like bonfire. Pulling it on so that it covered her eyes, she tried to relive the patio scene.
