His mouth penciled in its parenthesis smile. “Is that how you first knew you loved me? When your mind drifted to me instead of decimal points?”
“Might’ve been,” Rae said, relieved his sense of humor was out tonight, a sliver as thin as the new moon above them but even more beautiful. “Or maybe that time I screwed up a gross margin analysis replaying our first kiss.”
“Love in twenty-first-century corporate America,” Dustin said.
“Love,” Rae said, stripping out the qualifiers.
She tugged her hat over her ears. February wasn’t really that cold if you knew how to dress for it. “Another one,” Rae said, glad to see him eating.
“Read it for me?” Dustin asked, handing her the next Post-it note.
Rae had never read any of her poems aloud before. With only a fraction of the self-consciousness she’d expected, she began.
Spring into the air
and let love
give you life
and be your
remedy of
silver bullets.
She looked up at Dustin, who appeared to be letting the poem sink in, then sink again.
“It’s an alternate version of a Bellini poem,” Rae explained. “The one about—”
“I know the poem,” Dustin cut in, voice hardening out of the blue. “Stand against the wall and let love murder you with a round of careless bullets.”
“Yes,” Rae said. “Too dark for Valentine’s Day, so I put a new spin on it.”
Dustin stared at her with a stony expression, which he then turned onto the artificially bright skyline. “You can’t rewrite someone’s words just because you find them inconvenient.”
“I wasn’t rewriting,” Rae said. “I was reimagining.”
“Well, you can’t reimagine someone else’s thoughts either. That was how Bellini felt—that love should be lethal. And we can either accept that or deny it.”
Rae was feeling very cold now, and small, too, a leg-locked ant lost in a supersized, superspeed city. “I accept it,” she said, thin voice hitting a thick head wind.
They stood there at the railing for a few more icy gusts.
“I just wanted you to like our first Valentine’s Day together,” Rae said.
She’d liked the sound offirstin her thoughts, how it implied more to come. But aloud,firstfelt fragile, without a steady track record of historical data to prop it up.
“I did like it,” Dustin said. “Let’s go inside.”
Rae collected the sticky notes from the ledge but left the Bellini-inspired one behind, wishing on the dim rooftop lamppost that the wind would take this flimsy paper square somewhere else, somewhere its lightness might have a chance to dance in blue-sky breeze.
Then she and Dustin walked back inside, holding each other’s hurt but not each other’s hands.
“Is that a scramblette I smell?” Rae asked Ellen the next week, as she trudged into the penthouse after work and thudded her bag onto the floor.
Though they hadn’t cooked scramblettes in months now, the meal was exactly what Rae hadn’t known she’d been craving. Her nose correlated the burnt-yolk odor with raw camaraderie.
She and Ellen hadn’t overlapped much since Dustin had bailed on the engagement party and Ellen had staged the work intervention. Their interactions had been formulaically friendly.
