Rae played back the question twice before concluding he was inviting her to scooch closer. She did, and on the next slice scooched closer again. By the time they reached the last slice, her legs were draped over Dustin’s lap. His pizza-free hand brushed her black-tights-covered kneecaps.
Rae felt impostor syndrome, similar to what she felt at work when she wondered,Why did they hire me? I don’t know anything!Except now it was,Why does he like me? I’m so ordinary!
“Have the last piece,” Dustin said.
“No, you have it,” Rae said. It was an unsettling feeling, liking someone enough to genuinely want to give him the last pizza slice.
He cut it off-center and gave her the larger half, delivering it with a kiss. Rae was self-conscious about her breath smelling like pepperoni, but at least his did too.
Dustin stood up and walked into his bedroom. “Time for your Christmas present.”
Rae felt a rush of panic. The Scramblettes had assured her it was far too early for gifts. She’d spent several hours watching sewing 101 YouTube tutorials so she could stitch Dustin a monogrammed Santa hat and had put an autographed Bellini book in her online shopping cart, but the Scramblettes had vehemently vetoed both, warning against coming on too strong.
When Dustin rejoined her on the couch, he handed her a small parcel, wrapped in red tissue paper. Rae opened it to find a pocket-sized journal with a brown leather cover and parchment-like pages.
“So you can jot down little ideas during your bathroom breaks at work,” Dustin explained. “Mucus for the big poetic sneeze one day.”
“My very own Stall Street Journal,” Rae said, grinning like a kid.
Dustin laughed. He didn’t laugh often, so when he did, Rae knew he meant it. Most people had lost that correlation.
Rae cracked the journal open, gently so as not to hurt the spine.
On the first page, in scratchy red pen, Dustin had written a Bellini quote:
If the world feels cold to you,
then at least you know
you’re still warm inside.
“Thank you,” she whispered, curling against him, her emotional barriers to entry falling away.
“Want to check out the roof?” Dustin said, after more wordless gratitude had taken place.
“I’m fine right here, thanks.” Eyes shut in Dustin’s arms, she was halfway into a dreamy sleep.
“You’ve got to see the view,” he insisted, scooping her up and standing in one swift motion. “Or I’d be failing in my hosting responsibilities.” He carried her into the hall and set her down in the elevator. Rae wondered if she’d ever grow inured to elevator life. They held hands as they rose.
Breathtakingwas the word that popped into Rae’s head as they walked onto the rooftop, rectangular and empty. Breathgiving, she corrected, earmarking the word for some future use.
Rae stood at the railing, looking out. Dustin stood behind her, his chin resting on the top of her head so they shared the same view.
If they had been in the thick of Manhattan, they wouldn’t have been able to see much from only eight stories up, but here in Brooklyn they had an unobstructed view across the East River. Manhattan shone before them in all its electric glory—Midtown skyscrapers off to the right, with the peak of the Empire State Building plummeting into the lower neighborhoods of Gramercy and the East Village and then rising again, even taller, in the Financial District at the island’s southern tip.
The skyline looked like an illuminated line chart of the stock market, jagged ups and downs.
The lights of the Williamsburg Bridge reminded Rae of an elegant beaded necklace draping between the two boroughs. Near and far, the pointy silhouettes of old water towers dotted the city’s rooftops like hundreds of rocket ships ready for takeoff.
That old but always fresh feeling hit Rae, the one where she couldn’t believe she was really in New York, carving a life for herself. Just an hour ago she’d been trapped in a dark, smelly underground subway tunnel. And now, this …
She vowed to write a poem, or at least a poem-ish, about it later, pinpointing Manhattan’s magnetism by juxtaposing theI’m so done with yousubway lows with theSwear I’m never leaving yourooftop highs. “My Volatile Man(hattan),” she’d call it.
Dustin kissed her hair, and her impostor syndrome was escorted out by the rooftop wind.
She regretted rolling her eyes when Ellen told her it felt like she’d been dating Aaron for years already. Time wasn’t the right metric for measuring relationship depth.
“Isn’t it weird,” Rae heard herself say, “that we hardly even know each other?”
