“We don’t know muchabouteach other,” Dustin said. “That doesn’t mean we don’t know each other.”
It became very clear, looking out at the man-made lights in the God-made night, that she knew Dustin, and he knew her. But she wanted him to knowabouther too.
“My parents are divorced,” she said. Then she rephrased it, resenting the passive voice, how it shielded from blame. “My dad left us.” The reveal happened so quickly it felt like a post-pizza burp.
“Do you want to tell me the story?” Dustin asked.
“Not tonight. But I will.”
He nodded. “You know how I said I hadn’t seen my friends in a while? I’ll tell you that story soon too.”
It didn’t matter that they didn’t yet know the details. They had shared that therewerestories and that they wanted to share them, and it felt more intimate than reciting facts and timelines about her dad’s affair and the cliché way it had shattered everything she’d thought she’d known.
They settled into one of their silences. The pronountheirmade Rae smile as it glided through her mind.
“When I first moved to the city,” she said, “I hated how the lights squeezed out the stars. But now, on good days, I kind of see the magic in it.”
“How so?”
“New York has so much brightness that it doesn’t need to rely on distant lights that take thousands of years to reach the earth. We can wish on skyscrapers and taxi headlights and neon dollar-pizza signs,and it’s all within our grasp.” She paused, then added as a hedge, “And now I realize how corny that sounds, so please disregard.”
“Disclaimers belong at the end of legal documents, not poetry.”
Rae was about to ask what he meant, then realized she already knew.
“You’re a Rae of light,” Dustin told her. “Glowing even brighter than a dollar-pizza sign, I’d say.”
In that moment, Rae let herself believe in every statistically doomed dream anyone in this city was chasing tonight.
She’d never thought of herself as one of those people who lit up a room. That was Ellen or her mom or the bubbly barista who swirled extra whipped cream on her cappuccinos.
But maybe light didn’t always have to be flashing or fluorescent or rely on catching people’s eyes. Maybe light could also be soft and shy and snuggle its way into souls through cracked back doors.
“Today was a good day,” Dustin said.
“Yes,” Rae said, turning into him so that her head rested against his chest, muffling the blaring of fire truck sirens from the street below. “A very good day.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BULLISH ON LOVE
“The only bad part was I got really sunburnt,” Ellen said, peely nosed in the Perry Street kitchenette on the night of New Year’s Day.
She and Rae were cooking a “New Year, New York, No Yolk” scramblette extravaganza with wasabi to cleanse the pallet of last year’s flavors, “big apples” that were on the dwarfish side, and egg whites to respect their joint resolution to be healthier.
Rae had picked up the overpriced ingredients on the way back from the airport that afternoon. In Indiana, all the stores had been closed for the holiday, but Manhattan establishments refused to forgo even a day of sales. She’d lugged the grocery bag up the stairs, wheezing after a week away from her concrete-jungle hiking regimen.
“Anyway,” Ellen said, giving the festive eggs a flip-stir. “Tell me more about your time back home.”
“Just the usual,” Rae said. “Wore my high school soccer sweats the whole week and played cards with my grandpa while my mom brought out endless trays of food and listed off all of her friends’ sons who are ‘dropping like flies’ getting married. She says I’d better snaga man soon or I’ll get ‘the leftovers.’ It’s like she thinks I don’t put enough pressure on myself or something.”
Rae often felt that that since her mom had wound up without a husband, she was dead set on making sure her daughter never reached the same sorry fate, so she overstepped her boundaries. Every time Rae came home for the holidays, her mom tried to set her up with a roster of fully vetted hometown bachelors, the kind of guys who’d expect her to make them sandwiches and be a stay-at-home mom.
“Sounds like a holly jolly Christmas,” Ellen said, cringing. “Did you tell her about Dustin? That should calm her down a bit. He’s practically out ring shopping already.”
“No he’s not,” Rae said, but she felt herself blushing on the outside and bubbling on the inside. “I didn’t tell my mom—I didn’t want to jinx it.” She liked the feeling of keeping their relationship private, safe from the harsh judgment of the world and the even harsher judgment of her mom.
“Smart move,” Ellen said. “Karma can be cruel like that, punishing people who start flaunting their happiness. I think I’m testing my luck. My whole family FaceTimed Aaron over Christmas.”
