Then he leaned across the table — not far, because it was a small table, one of those bar tables designed to force intimacyon people who haven't consented to it — and kissed me. On purpose. Deliberately. A real one.
It lasted three seconds. Maybe four. Long enough for me to forget about the lipstick. Long enough for his hand to touch the side of my jaw — light, barely there — and then he was gone, and something in my chest pulled after him before I could tell it not to.
He pulled back, and there it was again — the eyes, the laugh lines, the exact problem I kept pretending I didn't have.
"À bientôt" (see you soon), he said. And left.
I sat there for eleven minutes after he'd gone, staring at my beer, running a full post-game analysis:Was the kiss too short? Did I respond correctly? Was my face doing the right thing? Did I seem surprised? Should I have seemed surprised? Was I supposed to text first or wait for him to —
Somewhere in minute eight, a small, tired voice in the back of my head said:You liked it. Can that be enough?
No, I told it.It cannot. Because liking something has never protected me from ruining it.
After four and a half dates— one coffee that was supposed to be a work meeting, one dinner walk, one pastry delivery, one accidental kiss at the movies, and one deliberate kiss interrupted by a station call-in — this is what we were:
Not together. Not not-together. Going on dates withoutdating.Existing in the grammatical space between "seeing each other" and "with each other," which in Montreal is wide enough to park a snowplow in and still leave room for ambiguity.
He texted every day. Not a lot — a photo of Poutine looking disgusted, a link to something he thought I'd find funny, abonne nuitthat landed in my phone around 11 PM like clockwork. Henever pushed. He never askedwhat are we.He never tried to close the distance I was so carefully maintaining.
And I — I kept the performance running. I showed up looking effortless. I laughed at the right moments. I was warm but not too warm, available but not too available, interested but not so interested that he could see the machinery behind it.
It was working. We were working. The system was holding.
And part of me — the part that stayed up after brushing my teeth and stared at herself in the bathroom mirror — knew that the system was the problem. That every layer of mascara was a layer of distance. That the girl he was textingbonne nuitto every night was a draft I kept revising, and sooner or later the gap between the draft and the real thing would become structurally significant.
But that was a future problem. A problem for when — if — things got real enough to require the truth.
And then Sophie's car slid down a slope, and time ran out at exactly the speed of gravity.
But that's not what keeps me up at night. What keeps me up is this: I had time. We had time. The ice would hold. And I was never going to use it.
3
THE SLOPE
The evening had been going well. This is important to note because of what happens next.
Sophie arrived at seven with a bottle of wine and a tote bag of "stuff I'm cleaning out" that included a candle, a face mask, and a cookbook calledPasta for People Who Cry,which she said reminded her of me. I chose not to unpack that.
The real reason Sophie came was Ethan. She'd been asking about him for three weeks —what does he look like, is he funny, does he have friends, is he tall, how tall, like TALL tall?— and tonight was the field test. He was coming over for dinner, and Sophie had engineered her visit to overlap by exactly forty-five minutes, which she denied.
"I just happened to be free," she said, pouring wine into a mug because I'd forgotten to wash the glasses.
"You moved a work meeting."
"I shifted a meeting. There's a difference."
He arrived at 7:55.Five minutes early, which meant he'd probably been pacing around the block for ten. He brought a bag of shelf brackets and the specific confidence of a man who hadpromised to fix a bookshelf this weekend and intended to follow through. I took the bag and set it on the counter near the door.
The three of us ate together — pasta, because what else do you make when your kitchen is the size of a generous closet? Sophie fired her questions. Ethan handled it the way Ethan handles everything — with patience, dry humor, and the occasional glance at me that saidis this normal?to which I returned a look that saidyes, and you're doing great.
Sophie liked him. I could tell because she stopped performing her questions and started actually listening to his answers.
Then her phone buzzed.
Her jaw tightened by a millimeter. She tapped the screen with a speed that meansI can't ignore this,then held up one finger —sorry, one sec— and stepped into the hallway. Ethan and I sat very still, the way you do when someone else's crisis is audible through a wall. Fifteen seconds. Sophie came back looking like a different person.
"I have to go." She was already standing. "My boss just called — massive client crisis in Calgary, I need to be on the first flight out tomorrow morning. I have to go pack and figure out the time difference and —merde— basically now."
