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1029 Words
Three days. That's how long I'd been living in Mia's spare room, and in three days I had done nothing but lie on her pull-out couch in one of her old college t-shirts, scrolling through my phone, refreshing nothing, waiting for nothing.
Mia finally had enough on day three.
"Okay." She stood in the doorway with her arms crossed, looking at me like I was a problem she'd decided to solve by force. "Get up. Shower. We're going out."
"I don't want to go out."
"I didn't ask what you wanted." She threw a dress at me. It hit me in the face. "You've eaten cereal for every meal since Tuesday. You haven't opened your laptop once, and you love that stupid laptop more than most people. I'm not watching you turn into a ghost over a man who wasn't even worth the rent you two split."
She wasn't wrong. About any of it.
"One drink," I said.
"One drink. Sure." She was already pulling her own dress out of the closet, which told me exactly how much that promise was worth.
By ten o'clock we were at a rooftop bar downtown, the kind of place with a name I couldn't pronounce and a dress code I almost didn't meet. The city stretched out below us, all lights and noise, and I had a drink in my hand that I didn't remember ordering. Mia disappeared to talk to some guy from her office within twenty minutes, waving at me over her shoulder, mouthing I'll be right back in a way that meant I would not see her again for at least an hour.
So I drank.
Not because I wanted to feel better. Because for three days I had felt everything, all of it, at full volume, and I wanted five minutes of feeling nothing at all.
One drink turned into two. Two turned into a number I stopped counting. I was standing at the edge of the rooftop, looking down at the traffic, feeling the wind pull at my hair, when a voice next to me said, "You look like you're either about to cry or about to jump, and I'd like to talk you out of both."
I turned. And there he was.
Older than the guys usually circling this kind of bar. Maybe early forties, though he wore it well, the kind of well that made guessing his age feel rude. Gray starting at his temples. A dark button-down, sleeves rolled to the forearm, like he'd come from somewhere important and hadn't bothered changing. He had kind eyes. That was the first thing I noticed, before anything else. Kind, tired, steady eyes that looked at me like he actually saw something when he looked.
"I'm not going to jump," I said. "I'm just having a bad week."
"Bad week or bad life?"
"Ask me again in a year."
That got a laugh out of him, low and real, not the kind men usually gave me to be polite. "Fair enough." He held up his glass. "To bad weeks, then. May they end quickly."
I clinked my glass against his without really deciding to. That was the thing about him, I'd realize later. He made you do things without deciding to.
We talked for hours. I don't even know how it happened, because I'm not usually the type to spill my whole life to a stranger at a bar, but something about him made it easy. I told him about the wedding invitations Jason and I never sent because we kept pushing the date back. I told him about the necklace I still hadn't taken off, out of pure stubbornness, like keeping it on somehow proved I was fine. I didn't tell him Jason's name. I didn't tell him mine, not my last name anyway. He didn't ask.
He didn't talk about himself much, and I didn't push. I got pieces. He worked too much. He hadn't taken a real vacation in longer than he wanted to admit. He'd been divorced once, a long time ago, no hard feelings on either side, nothing worth dwelling on. He said it so easily I believed him.
What struck me most was that he never once looked at me with pity. Everyone had been looking at me with pity for three days, Mia included, even when she was trying not to. He just looked at me like I was a person having a hard week, not a woman who got left for someone else, not something broken that needed fixing. He asked what I did for work and actually listened to the answer. He asked what building in the city I'd design if nobody ever told me no, and I talked for twenty straight minutes about a children's wing I'd sketched in a notebook years ago and never shown anyone.
"You should build that," he said. "The world needs more people who still believe in things like that."
"You don't even know me."
"I know enough." He was looking at me in a way that made my stomach do something complicated. "I know you finished that drink three sips ago and you're still holding the glass like you need something to do with your hands. I know you've mentioned your ex twice and both times you laughed right after, like you're daring yourself to be fine about it. And I know you haven't asked me a single question about myself all night, which either means you're not interested, or you're the kind of person who forgets to take up space in your own life."
Nobody had ever said anything like that to me before. Nobody had ever looked that closely.
The city noise had gone soft and far away, like it belonged to some other night, some other people. It was just us at the railing, the wind, his voice low enough that I had to lean in to catch it, and for the first time in three days I wasn't thinking about Jason at all.
He set his glass down. Looked at me for a second longer than a stranger should.
"Would you like to get out of here?"
- Writer
