“I want you to go if it’s right for you,” Lucas had said about New York.
Then, because they were apparently doing the difficult version of dating, he added, “I also had a bad thirty seconds when I read your message.”
Maya had sat on her bedroom floor, phone against her ear, and felt affection move through her so strongly it resembled relief.
“You can have thirty seconds,” she said. “Possibly forty-five.”
“Generous.”
“It’s twelve weeks, if I’m chosen. And I’m not deciding tonight.”
“Tell me the good parts.”
She did. The money, the time, the people she might work with. He listened until her excitement stopped sounding like a defense. By the end of the call, New York was a possibility between them, not a departure already happening.
Now, four days later, she was watching him encounter her friends across the last available table in a crowded neighborhood restaurant.
Date five had begun as dinner for two. Then Tessa’s work meeting ended nearby, and Renée texted about being in the same neighborhood, and Maya asked whether Lucas minded their joining for the first drink. He said he did not. The hostess rearranged two chairs with a look suggesting that human intimacy was fundamentally a seating problem.
“You’ve met Renée,” Maya said. “Tessa plans transit systems and judges everyone’s shoes.”
“Only when they’re impractical,” Tessa said, surveying Lucas’s boots. “You may remain.”
Lucas thanked her gravely.
The restaurant smelled of garlic, roasted peppers, and bread being carried through a crowded room. Music played at a level that required people to lean toward one another without shouting. Maya had chosen it because the food was good and the lighting forgave a long workweek.
Renée ordered olives for the table. Tessa asked Lucas how he and Maya had met, though both women knew every detail worth knowing.
“A storm drain brought us together,” he said.
“Finally,” Renée said. “Our city taxes at work.”
Maya closed her eyes. “I regret this gathering.”
“You organized it,” Tessa reminded her.
Lucas was good with her friends without trying to charm them into surrender. He asked about Renée’s library programs, listened while Tessa explained a bus corridor problem, and disagreed with Maya about the best late-night snack. He did not enlist her friends to tease her, a small thing she noticed because other men had found that an easy shortcut.
When she went to the restroom, Renée asked him one direct question.
“Are you comfortable with her wanting a large life?”
Lucas looked from her to Tessa. “I’m learning what hers looks like. I don’t want to be the person making it smaller.”
“Good,” Tessa said. “She does enough scheduling for all of us.”
“And you?” Renée asked. “What do you want?”
The question surprised him more than the first.
“A relationship where I don’t have to be indispensable to be wanted,” he said, before he could choose a more casual answer.
Renée’s expression gentled. “That sounds like something worth wanting.”
Maya returned before he had to elaborate. Her friends left after their drinks, exactly as promised, which she later intended to reward with an appropriately emotional group message and no actual admission of gratitude.
“Did they behave?” she asked Lucas.
“Terrifyingly well.”
“They like you.”
“I’m glad.”
“You don’t seem smug about it.”
“I can practice.”
They consulted the menu again, having forgotten what they intended to order. Lucas wanted the roasted peppers. Maya wanted the mushrooms. They agreed to share both, then became briefly distracted by a couple at the next table celebrating an anniversary with a dessert containing an alarming number of sparklers.
“How many years?” Maya whispered.
“Judging by the fire regulations, at least twenty.”
She laughed. When the sparklers went out, the couple leaned across the table and touched hands. Lucas watched for a moment, then looked back at Maya.
Their dinners arrived, and the conversation shifted toward the things that had shaped their ambitions. Maya told him about leaving a steady communications job at twenty-five to take an underpaid assistant position at Lakefront Audio. Her mother had supported her in every way except pretending not to be concerned.
“She mailed me grocery gift cards,” Maya said. “Inside birthday cards, even when it wasn’t my birthday.”
“That’s a good loophole.”
“It drove me crazy. I wanted to prove I could do it myself, so I let the first one sit in a drawer while I ate depressing soup.”
“Did you eventually use it?”
“Renée made me. She said independence wasn’t a competitive malnutrition event.”
Lucas laughed, then reached for his water. “I understand the impulse.”
“The gift cards or the soup?”
“Turning help into a verdict about your worth.”
She looked at him for a moment. “Yes.”
He told her about Jo returning to Chicago and finding that he had organized their father’s calendar so thoroughly there was almost no place for anyone else in it.
“She asked why the man who could manage a whole department shift couldn’t delegate buying lightbulbs.”
“Excellent question.”
“Unpleasant timing.”
“Did you answer?”
“Eventually. I thought if somebody else could do it, maybe I wasn’t giving up those things for a reason.”
Maya set down her fork. The noise around them continued, but she felt the table become still.
“You gave them up because things were difficult then,” she said. “They don’t have to stay difficult to make the choice count.”
Lucas looked at her with an expression she had not seen before, as if she had opened a window in a room he thought had no windows.
“I’ll need to sit with that,” he said.
She nodded and did not explain it again.
After dinner they walked beneath storefront awnings. He told her Jo wanted to meet her and that Frank had requested a musical hearing before making any judgment.
“On my taste?”
“On whether I deserve you. Apparently those are related.”
Maya smiled. “I’d like to meet them.”
Lucas stopped walking. “You don’t have to do it before the sixth date. There’s no deadline hidden in this.”
“I said I’d like to.”
“Okay.” His smile arrived slowly. “Sunday dinner?”
“Sunday dinner.”
At her car, she reached for his coat and pulled him gently closer.
“I liked tonight,” she said.
“Even the interrogation?”
“Especially the parts I was here for.”
He kissed her, one hand warm at the back of her coat. She felt the small smile that followed, then he kissed her once more as if no audience, schedule, or ending rule existed between them.
On the drive home, her phone rang through the car speakers. Evan.
She answered at a stoplight.
“The sponsor is Daymark,” he said. “Money-management app. They love the resilience angle.”
“What resilience angle?”
“Come in tomorrow. We’ll look at the promotional package.”
Maya watched the light turn green. A bus moved across the intersection, windows bright with people finishing one kind of day and beginning another.
“Evan,” she said, “there isn’t an approved promotional package.”
His pause lasted one beat too long.
“There’s a draft.”
