We love you!!
Rae felt a smile poke through. She wondered if guys cheered each other on before dates too.
“Rae?”
She looked up, and there he was. Tim. Dressed in a crisp white-collared shirt with meticulously parted blond hair. Her first reaction was that he looked nearly like his profile pictures.
She smiled and automatically stuck out her hand. He shook it.
A handshake?Rae chastised herself as they let go.This isn’t a business meeting!
She wanted to run to the bathroom to text the Scramblettes about her screw-up, but she heard them in her head.
You can recover from that!
Not nearly as bad as the time I head-butted my date when I went in for the hug … almost gave him a concussion!
Just order a couple shots, and you’ll loosen up!
Tim held the first door but forgot to do so for the second door, which led into the speakeasy, so Rae followed him inside. The bar was dimly lit, long and narrow with swanky leather booths, striped armchairs, and a real copper bathtub that seemed to have been put there with the hope of a naked flapper lying in it, smoking a sultry cigarette while men looked on with self-righteous lust.
The space was crowded with tweed sport coats and black cocktail dresses. Rae was so accustomed to her work-late-go-home-sleep-and-repeat routine that it always came as a surprise to recall that there was an alternative version of New York City where socializing wasn’t confined to the weekend.
A waiter seated them at a table in the back, wedged between the overly ornate wallpaper and another date-night couple. Tim sat across from her, and there was nowhere to look except at each other or down at the candle in the middle of the table. Rae chose the candle.
“Two gin and tonics to start,” Tim said to the waiter. Rae didn’t even mind that he didn’t ask her before ordering. She just wanted a glass to hold so she had something to do with her hands, which were twisting in her lap.
“So, Rae,” Tim said, giving her an easy smile. “Tell me about yourself.” He seemed to have the small-talk routine down, and Rae wondered which number first date she was for him. She felt like she was on an interview, back in the 1920s when a woman never would’ve gotten a job on Wall Street.
He folded his hands on the white tablecloth and waited for her to answer.
Forty-six minutes later, Rae was returning alone to the Perry Street Penthouse. She walked down the Highline, an old train track converted into a pedestrian walking path that was lined with exotic-looking trees and shrubs. Perched twenty feet above the street, it provided some respite from the concrete chaos below.
Impossibly posh apartments rimmed the Highline, and most of them had their curtains thrown open, as if inviting people to stare in and drool over the glamorous lives of their occupants. It had the opposite effect on Rae, the grandeur feeling cold and sterile. Looking into the windows of one of the apartments, she saw a man and woman watching the same TV show in separate rooms and drew up a sad little story that they were a married couple who’d grown apart as they’d grown rich.
Depressed by the emptiness of it all, Rae descended back to street level on West Fourteenth and hurried on toward the quieter section of the West Village, where the familiar streets swaddled her close with their cobblestone love and ivy-wall peace. On an overbuilt island where everyone was always in a rush, this was the closest place that felt like home. It was still quite loud and crowded on an absolute basis, but it was relatively calm and quiet, especially in the less desirable, more affordable part where she and Ellen lived—a fifteen-minute walk from the subway but close to the Hudson River and its slow-burning sunsets.
Rae called Ellen on the phone and willed her to pick up with their BFF telepathy.
“What’s wrong?” Ellen answered on the second ring. “Did that asshole stand you up?”
“No,” Rae said, body and breath slowly unclenching. “We had our date.”
“It’s already done?”
“It was forty-six minutes,” Rae defended. “Rounds up to an hour.”
“Well, how was it?”
“It was … I survived.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Dogs, mostly, and places we wanted to travel. A little about our families. I mostly steered the conversation away from work.” It hadn’t been easy, as he’d kept probing with questions likeDo you see yourself on Wall Street long-term?
“Good job,” Ellen said. “Was he threshold-level attractive?”
Threshold-level attractive, or TLA, as Rae thought of it, was one of Ellen’s dating terms—it meant a guy just had to be a certain level of good-looking, and from there his personality carried the chemistry.
