They passed the rest of the ride to his apartment in a silence broken only by the splash of tires through puddles and the slap-slap of the cab’s windshield wipers. Tim paid the driver, then followed Sarah into the pouring rain. Her hair, normally so wild, lay flat against her head and face. Without the distracting flyaway curls, her eyes were huge in her pale face. It was a vulnerability he’d never seen in her before, hidden as it was behind her zest for life, her delight in simply being alive.
“The city sucks in the rain.”
“It’s not so bad,” she said.
“Can you find the silver lining in any cloud?”
There was a long pause. “I guess I can. Ovarian cancer is one of the hardest cancers to diagnose. Aunt Joan was sick off and on for a couple of years before they caught it, but by then, it was really too late. We move so fast through our lives that it’s easy to think we’re in control, but it’s really an illusion. I try not to forget that now.”
Something snicked into place in his head as he unlocked the building door. They left trails of droplets as they climbed the stairs. Tim shucked his jacket on his way up. Sarah followed suit and left her denim jacket on the hallway floor outside his door, then stepped out of her clogs.
He paused and listened. No sound from upstairs or across the hall, so he unlocked the apartment door, then stripped his wet T-shirt over his head right in the hall. Sarah didn’t bat an eyelash, just pulled off her own T-shirt.
Tim froze. Her breasts, her lush, gorgeous, heavy breasts, spilled over the top of black lace cups as she twisted to find the button on the side of her skirt.
“What?” she asked as she unfastened the button.
“Uh,” he said stupidly, and nodded at her breasts.
“Oh, these?” She unzipped her skirt and let it fall. “I bought these for you.”
Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and all the saints in heaven. She was standing in his building’s hallway, dripping rainwater, skin glowing, wearing underwear straight out of his lingerie model dreams. Her adorable little belly pooched over the top of the panties just a little, and it was so Sarah, so perfectly, rightly Sarah, life just spilling out every goddamn direction, that he nearly went to his knees to worship her. In that moment he understood the male instinct to worship the rounded, ripe female body. It was life, alive, so fucking alive.
He went from half-hard to fully erect in a couple of racing heartbeats, like he was sixteen years old and invincible, not thirty-two, not tired and old and worn out from carrying a superhero’s armor.
“When?” he managed.
“Earlier today.” She gathered her hair and twisted it into a rope. Water coursed down her arms to stream from her elbows onto the floor.
“You had . . . You wore that . . .” He reached out and trailed his finger from the hollow in her throat to her navel. “While we were on the High Line?”
Goose bumps rippled up her arms, and she shivered as she nodded.
He’d almost missed it. He’d almost sent her home and missed the way her pale skin glowed against the black lace and nude fabric. He gathered up her clothes and his, shoved open the door, and tossed the whole soaked mass into the kitchen sink. “Inside.”
They left puddles on the way to the bathroom, where he turned on the shower. “Leave that on,” he said when she reached behind her to unfasten the bra.
She cocked an eyebrow at him.
“You can’t get any wetter,” he pointed out, testing the water temperature.
He shucked his own soaked boxers and kicked them into the corner, then pulled back the shower curtain. She stepped past him into the narrow, tiled rectangle.
“Oh,” she sighed. “That’s good. I didn’t realize how cold I was. That’s very, very good.”
He crowded into her, backing her under the spray, using the water and his own body heat to warm her. Quickly her skin went from pale to pink, probably from the warm water beating on it, but possibly from the pressure of his thumb against her nipple. The lace provided an interesting, irresistible contrast in texture.
Prior experience taught him the stall was too small to accommodate the length of his shins, so, turning his back to the wall, he went to his heels and widened his knees. “Come here,” he said.
She did. Head bent, she stood under the pounding water and let him worship her. He kissed her cheeks, her lips, her throat, then the soft skin lifted and offered by the bra. With his teeth he nipped at her nipples, then licked them, then scraped and soothed the firm, confined flesh of her breast. She was whimpering and writhing in his hold when he’d finished, one hand braced on the wall, the other wrapped around his neck.
He unhooked the bra and let it drop to the floor, then kissed his way down to the sexy panties. A millimeter at a time he tugged them off her hips, teasing her as thoroughly as she teased him, sliding his tongue between stretched elastic and her skin, then the soft swell of her mound. Even with the water pounding all around them he could taste the salt of her arousal. When he slipped the panties low enough to work his tongue between her outer folds and touch her clit, she shuddered and cried out. The sensitive flesh was swollen and hot, and she trembled with each pass of his tongue.
He cupped her bottom with both hands, let his head drop back against the wall, and pulled her forward. His erection jutted into the air, tortured by the absence of touch other than water coursing down it, but he shoved that aside and focused on her. Her hand fisted in his hair, holding him even when he had no intention of going anywhere at all, not until she was spent and shuddering in his arms. He slid his hands up over her hips to cup her breasts, pinching her nipples in time to her rhythmic hip movements.
Her knees buckled when she came, so he tightened his grip at her ribs and held her up. Fighting back the urge to back her into the opposite wall and fuck her until he came, he turned off the water and snagged a towel from the shelf over the toilet, then dried her face. She squeezed most of the water out of her hair, then began to quickly dry off.
“I’m as wrinkled as a prune,” she commented.
The bathroom barely held him, let alone two people’s elbows and knees as they dried off, so he stepped past her and dried off in the living room. He released the Murphy bed, then pulled her into a deep kiss. “Want you,” he growled.
“Yes,” she whispered.
The light had an odd, flat quality to it, dampened by the rain and dulled to gray. It washed Sarah’s skin to pale cream, softened by prolonged exposure to water, heated from within by several hours of foreplay. She sprawled on the bed and spread her legs, her fingers trailing over her belly and thigh as she watched him put on a condom. Something in her gaze niggled at the back of his brain, but he pushed it aside to settle between her legs and push inside her.
She was slick and hot and tight, coiling around him with the first stroke, breath hitching to a higher register. He gripped the back of her thigh while she braced her arm on the wall behind her head, as if she wanted more, deeper, more. As if she wanted a connection, to make this a shared experience, not a challenge.
“Tim.”
He kissed her, partly to stop her from saying whatever she was going to say, partly because the flush on her cheeks and collarbone matched the hue of her lips and he wanted to feel that heat against his own mouth. Maybe she had breath in her she would share with him. That tight feeling in his chest was back, constricting everything, making his heart race. He’d almost missed this, getting a hand job on the High Line, trying to move at the speed of light so nothing could touch him. Speed thrilled, and speed killed.
He couldn’t breathe. She was wound tight under him, heels digging into his ass, thighs trembling, one hand gripping his nape while the other flattened at the base of his spine. With a low cry she threw back her head and came apart under him. He tumbled over the edge after her. All he could think was while he’d won the occasional battle in their running challenge, the war had been hers to lose from the moment he saw her. She’d won. Skirmish, challenge, battle, war—it was all hers. He was hers, except the thought terrified him because that kind of victory meant a future together, and he had no idea what he was going to do about it.
He shifted off her and dealt with the condom, then found dry clothes on the shelves in the Murphy bed’s frame and pulled on a pair of basketball shorts. Sarah lay sprawled on her stomach, watching him with sleepy, satisfied eyes that sharpened when her phone buzzed. “I can’t reach that,” she said, lazily amused, extending her arm in the direction of the kitchen.
Tim found her phone in the pocket of her denim jacket, lying in the pile in the sink, and brought it over. She pushed her hair out of her face, dried the screen on the sheet, and pushed the home button. He watched her tap and scroll, then her face went blank.
“What’s up?”
“Captain Jones asked me out for dinner next Saturday night. A little café on the Upper West Side a friend of his opened a few weeks ago. He thinks I might like meeting his friend, and says the chef is really interesting, too. Studied in Spain.”
His brain kept right on cruising along at a hundred miles an hour even as his gut dropped six inches. Very classy: a dinner date plus an introduction to like-minded people, a connection that might be helpful to her business. Thoughtful. Jonesy didn’t waste time on stupid shit like challenges. No, he saved fooling around for AnonEMT and went for the kill when the stakes were high. Sarah Naylor was high stakes indeed.
Sarah looked up at him. “Did you know he was going to ask me out?”
Tim’s heart started to do things that, professionally, he found frightening. A weird stutter-step punctuated by a hard thunk against his breastbone. He ignored his body, because it was telling him a truth he didn’t want to know. Her question was an awkward one even if he hadn’t been inside her five minutes earlier. The text, and Sarah’s question, made the future that much more immediate, more real. “Yes.”
“You knew,” she repeated, but it wasn’t a question this time. It was disbelief.
“I knew.”
“You knew that another man was going to ask me out. You probably told him that was okay,” she said, connecting the dots, “and had sex with me anyway.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a statement of fact, and her matter-of-fact tone and phrasing hurt worse than anger or indignation.
She pushed back onto her heels and looked at him. “All right, then.” She got off the bed and stepped into her underwear, discarded on the floor.
“Your clothes are soaking wet,” he pointed out. He should have thought about that before keeping her outside in a pounding rainstorm, but even the length of time it took to dry clothes was too much of a commitment to the future.
That’s what he’d become?
“It’s fine,” she said, and wriggled damp satin and lace up her hips. “I’ll take the train home.”
He watched in silence as she finished dressing. Finally, she lifted the strap of her messenger bag over her head and looked at him. Say something. Start with I’m sorry.
The thing is . . . futures can be exciting, or terrifying.
Tim looked down at his hands. “Are you going to go out with him?”
“Do you have an opinion about that?”
He could stop this with a single word. Yes. Yes, I have a problem with that.
No. No futures. Just the here and now. No fear, no anticipation, no regrets.
“Before Aunt Joan got sick, I would have dated both of you at once,” she said into the heavy silence. “That’s who I was then. Aunt Joan wanted me to go back to being the woman I was before she got sick. But I’m different now. The thing is . . .”
His head jerked up when he heard the litany of the last few weeks come out of her mouth.
“The thing is . . . I’m not that woman anymore. I can’t pretend that what happened to me, what is happening to me, doesn’t affect or change me. I can’t keep doing this, Tim. I’m sorry. I know I’m changing the rules mid-game, but this is what’s best for me.”
“Sure,” he said, far more casually than he felt. He didn’t know what else to say. He felt like a cartoon character the second after impact with a brick wall, birds tweeting over his head, body numbed by contact with an immovable object. Except the immovable object was a foodie chef who liked life spicy and wasn’t settling for anything less than . . . anything. She wasn’t settling, period.
She rummaged through her messenger bag until she came up with her MetroCard. “Hey,” she said. “Still friends, right?”
“Right,” he said. “Still friends.”
“Then I’ll see you around.” The door closed gently behind her. He heard her scuff into her clogs, clatter down the stairs, and out of his life.
***
Tim wiped sweat from his temple with his jersey as he dribbled the ball down the playground court. Kids from the neighborhood stood on the sidelines, waiting for the court, calling a mixture of good-natured encouragement and trash talk at the players. They were down four, with a couple of minutes left, based on the informal rules governing the playground. Normally he’d be focused on what his team needed to do to win, but right now his heart wasn’t in the game.
He’d gotten exactly what he wanted. He got a spring fling with a sweet, sexy woman who was as inventive and in-your-face challenging as he was. He got the best sex of his life. He found a new place for lunch. Best of all, they’d made a clean, uncomplicated, no-harm-no-foul break a couple of weeks earlier.
He should feel great. Fantastic. On top of the world. Living life balls to the wall. Instead he felt like he was circling a race track at top speed, running hard and going nowhere.
He felt like shit. Because he’d had sex with a woman he really, really liked, who made his days brighter and a little easier, knowing he’d told another man it was okay to ask her out. When it wasn’t. It wasn’t okay. It wasn’t even on the same continent as okay. And he was a grade A asshole. It ended like it always ended, very grown-up and mature, very cosmopolitan. Very New York. Sophisticated. Sarah wouldn’t throw a fit, or one of her deadly clogs. Still friends. So the kiss on the cheek and a thanks-for-the-memories wasn’t the problem.
“Doing okay, LT?” Casey called from the other side of the free throw line. “Your head bothering you?”
“My head’s fine, Casey,” he muttered. His heart, not so much. This was speed and indifference led him to, feeling sick at heart from what he’d done. He started driving toward the hoop. Jonesy held his ground. He was six inches shorter than Tim, but a bulldog when it came to defending his territory, and Tim ran the risk of fouling him.
Jonesy would take her seriously. He was quiet, committed, hardworking, perfect for a woman who’d walked through hell and come out the other side. He’d appreciate Sarah for who she was, know exactly what he had, cherish it.
Tim bumped Jonesy’s chest with his shoulder, nudging, nudging, dribbling while he forced Jonesy to concede territory. In his peripheral vision, Casey and Gutierrez jockeyed for position under the basket.
He spun on one foot, shifted his weight to the other, and went for the easy jump shot, but his timing was off and Jonesy knew his moves. He went up at the same time Tim did and smacked the ball backward, out of bounds. Hoots and whistles arose from the observers as a neighborhood kid waiting for the court gathered the ball in one hand and spun it up on a finger.
Jonesy beckoned for the ball. “You’re off your game today,” he said, breathing hard.
That’s what futures did to you in the moment. They threw you off your game. He was thinking about the future, what could be, if he could figure out how to make it happen, what he’d lose if he didn’t. He could wait for a moment like hers, a searing grief, to change his outlook, or he could learn from his own mistakes and her losses and admit he was wrong. Totally dead wrong. Speed didn’t stop the pain. It just numbed it. In the aftermath of the let’s-be-friends speech, he understood one thing: A future where he was friends with Sarah Naylor was a future he didn’t want.
“Earth to Cannon.” Jonesy snapped his fingers in front of Tim’s face. “Sir? Do you know your name?”
He finally realized . . . the game had changed.
***
Tim pulled on a sweatshirt against the cooling May evening air, then fell into step next to Jonesy. He knew he hadn’t taken Sarah out yet, because no one gossiped like first responders. If the captain had a date, the whole station would know. “Have you gone out with Sarah yet?”
“We had a date last weekend, but she had to cancel. She had a long day at work and she didn’t feel up to it. We’re rescheduled for this weekend,” Jonesy said noncommittally.
Thank you, Jesus. Tim’s heart expanded in his chest. Maybe she’d put off Jonesy because she needed time, or maybe she really was too tired. Either way, he had a second chance at the first really good grovel of his life. “Remember when I said I didn’t care if you asked Sarah out?”
“Yeah,” Jonesy said, eyebrows halfway up his forehead.
“I changed my mind.”
Jonesy’s brows lowered into a pissed-off frown. “You said—”
Tim cut him off. “I know. I do care.”
“So you are dating her?”
“It’s complicated,” Tim said.
“Meaning you fucked it up,” Jonesy said, exasperated, because he knew Tim all too well. They stopped for the light, Jonesy scanning for a break in traffic to jaywalk. “Give me one good reason why I should do the right thing and clear out of your way.”
“Because you always do the right thing,” Tim said. He waited until Jonesy looked at him. “Because I like her. I really like her.”
“Shit.” The word dripped disgust.
“Yeah.” The more steps he took in the future, the firmer the ground felt under his feet. It was still scary, but right. Really right. Okay. He could do this. Slower. Careful. Care-full. Sure, high velocity was appropriate in emergency situations, but the rest of the time? Care-full. He’d make it his new motto.
“It’s gonna cost you.”
No problem. “I’ll clean out the back of your bus for a month.”
“That’s a start,” Jonesy said grumpily.
“Thanks,” Tim said. “I mean it. Thanks.”
“Asshole.”
“I know,” Tim said, taking it in stride. If Jonesy were really mad at him, or really set on dating Sarah, he wouldn’t have given up so easily.
The next question was, where did he go from here?
***
Not quite sure where to start, he went home, showered, changed into jeans and a T-shirt, then went for a walk. He had a place in mind: a rent-controlled apartment in a six-floor walkup housing a couple married for over fifty years. He stopped and bought flowers, then rang the bell.
“Yes?”
“Mrs. Cohen, it’s Tim Cannon. Can I come up?”
She buzzed him in and had the door open when he got to the top of the stairs. The climb went a little faster when he wasn’t carrying fifteen pounds of equipment and a stretcher. “Come in, come in,” she exclaimed. “Arthur, look who’s here to see us! I’m sorry, but it’s his dinnertime. I make meals according to his medications now,” she said, and sat back down at the table.
Mr. Cohen turned to look at Tim. He had a tea towel tied around his neck, but his eyes were calm and curious. On the table in front of him sat a bowl of soup. The stock pot simmered on the ancient gas stove.
“I’m sorry to interrupt your meal,” he said.
“Sit down,” she urged. “Have you eaten?”
“No, ma’am,” he said.
“Would you like to join us? I have plenty. I got in the habit of doubling the recipe when the boys were little and never got out of it. It freezes nicely, and sometimes I take some down to Mary in 4C.”
“I’ll get it,” he said hastily.
In between spooning bites of soup into Mr. Cohen’s mouth she directed him to the bowls, the silverware, the juice glasses. Feeling a little out of place, he ladled out a bowlful of soup and took a slice of bread from the plate on the table. Mrs. Cohen surveyed his meal and nodded her approval.
After he blew on the soup to cool it, he sipped. “It’s good,” he said.
“It’s my grandmother’s recipe,” she confided, then dabbed at Mr. Cohen’s chin. “Beef and barley. When we were first married I made it nearly every week because it was cheap. Then we had the boys and I made it every week because we could stretch it with potatoes and vegetables. Now I make it because the smell reminds me of our life together, and it’s easy for Arthur to eat.”
She took a bite herself while her husband chewed and swallowed. In the spring sunshine her skin was paper-thin, dotted with age spots, creased and wrinkled around her mouth and eyes.
“Did you make the bread, too?” It was a dark brown bread, a dense, chewy compliment to the soup.
“Yes, dear.”
Tim looked at her hands, gently lifting a piece of buttered bread to her husband’s mouth, then lifting a piece to her own. He saw Sarah’s hands in fifty years, hands that made the things that made life worth living, good food, cleaned wounds. In that moment, he knew what he wanted to do.
***
“You really didn’t have to stay home,” Sarah said. Trish had canceled her weekend in the Hamptons. They’d spent Saturday scrubbing the food truck, then come home to scrub the apartment. Now they were stretched out in the squishy chairs, watching the sun set over Manhattan and drinking wine. “I know how much you like the Hamptons.”
“After your date canceled, I thought you might need a friend. Plus, we got all the cleaning done. Keeping busy helps.” She sipped her wine. “Tim hasn’t called? Texted?”
“Nope,” she said, trying for lighthearted. “It’s all right. I was already getting more emotionally involved than he was. The signs were all there, even before Captain Jones asked me out. I did the right thing. It’s just . . . not what I would have done in the past.”
“What would you have done in the past?”
“Honestly? Probably gone out with both of them at once. I mean, not at the same time, but dated both of them . . . gone out at different times . . . Oh, hell, just pour me some more wine.”
“It’s a sunk cost,” Trish said as she poured out the rest of the bottle into Sarah’s glass.
“It’s a what?”
“A sunk cost. You’ve already spent the time. You can’t get it back, but continuing to invest in it doesn’t make sense, either. You cut your losses and walk away.”
Sarah considered this as the setting sun drenched the Manhattan skyline in shades of orange and gold. She still wasn’t sure how she felt about the city. It was growing on her. Maybe. If she were being reasonable, she couldn’t hold the whole of New York City responsible for her dinged heart. “How do you know if a sunk cost is truly sunk or a project that just takes a little more time to develop?”
“In my old job the answer would be inside information masked as intuition,” Trish said, scrolling through Twitter on her phone. “Which is, under no circumstances, to be mistaken for wishful thinking.”
“I liked him,” Sarah said after a while, to no one in particular. “He loved New York. He loved this city. Worked hard to take care of it. I liked that about him.”
Trish tossed her phone on the coffee table and finished her wine. “I’m meeting some friends in Tribeca tonight. Want to come?”
“After all that cleaning? You’ve got more energy than I do. I’m going to stay home and nurse the sunk cost with wine and binging on The Tudors.”
One more night of regrets and nursing her wounded pride, and then she’d move on.
***
She got up the next morning to an incipient red wine headache that demanded water or coffee or both, stat. The shower was running, so she stumbled toward the scent of strong, fresh coffee. A guy wearing boxer shorts and a Ramones T-shirt sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and skimming something on his phone.
“Morning,” he said. “I made coffee.”
“Bless you,” she said. “Want me to find you the Economist?”
“Is that the preferred reading material for strange men you find at your kitchen table?”
He had kind eyes and a smile she liked. “Maybe,” she said. “The guy who was reading the Post didn’t get asked back.”
“Wall Street Journal?” he asked, waggling his phone. “I’m good, thanks.”
She poured the rest of the coffee into a cup and started a fresh batch.
“Are you Sarah?”
“I am.”
“I followed-slash-liked-slash-friended Symbowl’s social media after I met Trish last night. Quite a few people have signed on for the new sauce tasting event.”
She shoved her hair out of her face, took the proffered phone, and scrolled through posts and tweets. “Huh,” she said. AnonEMT had tweeted Can’t wait to try something spicier than Infinite Heat. Tim swore he wasn’t behind the tweets, and she believed him. Still, the support was nice, and went a long way toward making her feel even more at home in the city.
“Trish said you’ve only been here a couple of months. Where are you from?”
“San Francisco,” she said, and sipped the coffee.
“Not bad,” he said, reclaiming his phone. “But there’s the earthquakes. Major fault zone. The eastern half of California is going to crash into the ocean in the next hundred years or so. New York is better.”
“For the hurricanes and the howling winter storms,” she agreed.
“Earthquakes come without warning,” he said. “You can plan for hurricanes and blizzards.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “What do you do?”
“Risk management for a commodities brokerage.”
Suddenly the focus on natural disasters made sense. “If this is what you’re like after coffee, I hate to see you before.”
“It’s all cowls and scythes and long bony fingers of death,” he agreed.
Trish padded in dressed in yoga pants, a camisole, and a big smile. She toweled her wet hair. “Sarah, this is Brandon. Brandon, Sarah.”
He had a name. A very good sign indeed. “If someone goes out for the ingredients for mimosas and French toast, I’ll make brunch,” Sarah said.
“Deal,” Brandon said, and tried to slide his phone into his pocket. It clattered to the floor.
“Pants,” Trish said. “You had pants last night, right?”
“Pretty sure,” Brandon said.
“Don’t forget powdered sugar,” Sarah said. A few minutes later the door closed behind them. She gave herself a few minutes to be grateful for friends, old and new, who would take care of her as she’d taken care of Aunt Joan, and to regret that keeping her promise to her aunt meant moving on from Tim. Then she got up to start scrambling eggs and heating the pan.
***
Sarah’s recipe for split pea soup on his phone’s screen, Tim stopped in the grocery store’s sliding doors, scanned the recipe again, then opted for a cart rather than his usual basket. The vegetables were easy enough to find, carrots, onions, celery all up front. When he asked for a ham bone, the guy in the meat department looked at him like he was crazy, but produced one. Split peas, where the hell were the split peas if they weren’t in the frozen section? A taciturn clerk informed him were in a bag in the dried section (who the fuck knew?). He found the garlic, bagged his own groceries to speed this along, and headed home to make something from scratch for the first time in . . . well, in forever. Back in his apartment everything went into the stock pot he had only because when he made pasta he made too much to fit into a regular pot. Then he let it simmer while he started on the brown bread.
What did Sarah like about this? He paid attention to learn. It was an investment in the present, and in the future, he decided as he measured flour and water. Cooking occupied the immediate moment: cutting vegetables, waiting for soup to simmer, adding spices at the right time to create a particular flavor. It rewarded patient attention with savory smells as carrots softened and the soup took on the sweetness of the onions. As the dough rose, his whole apartment smelled like yeast, a smell he hadn’t taken in since his grandmother died several years earlier. The sticky dough clung to his hands until he worked in enough dry flour to absorb the moisture, and he ended up with flour all over the floor, but the smell of rising bread more than made up for the mess. This time he was cleaning up the mess of life, not the mess of sickness or death.
But it wasn’t just about the present. Cooking was a bet on the future, on shared moments with family, friends, a lover. Sarah cooked to carve out time now, and in the future, to make sacred shared moments. It was different from bringing over takeout, too. Cooking meant you thought about the food and the person more than dialing a phone number and handing over a credit card. Takeout had its place, but cooking . . . cooking built a future, one meal at a time.
He could do that, use the present to build a future. He might be slow off the mark, but once he made up his mind, he could hold his own in the kitchen. It was surprisingly calming, slicing vegetables, adding spices, watching the slow boil. This might be exactly what he needed to ease the strain of the job.
He wasn’t asking for forever, although if he wanted forever with anyone, Sarah and her skirts and clogs and wild hair fit the bill pretty damned well. He wasn’t really asking for anything. He just wanted to show her he wasn’t a lost cause. Even superheroes had a right to hang up the cape every once in a while, to live in the moment, leave the city in capable hands.
Anyway, he was no superhero.
He took the stairs two at a time and borrowed a paper box from his upstairs writer neighbor. Back in his apartment, he lined the box with a towel to absorb spills and retain heat, then slid the fresh bread into paper towels and wedged it on one side of the stock pot. The salad ingredients went into the other side. He tucked the box against his hip and went downstairs to hail a cab.
***
Mimosas and brunch extended into the early afternoon. After cleaning up, Brandon and Trish decided to burn off the calories with a walk in Prospect Park, an early movie, then dinner, so Sarah wasn’t expecting the buzz on the intercom in the early evening.
“Did you forget your keys?” Sarah asked when she answered the intercom’s buzz.
“It’s Tim.”
She stared at the speaker as if she could see him through the vent. “Tim?”
“Tim Cannon,” he said uncertainly, as if there were any other Tim in her life. “Can I come up?”
She pressed the buzzer and opened the door to the landing. Tim came up the stairs carrying a box, but the smell preceded him. Fresh bread and . . . split pea soup?
“Hi,” Sarah said.
“Hi,” he said back.
“What’s all that?” she asked, because her nose must be misleading her.
“Homemade soup.”
“Homemade soup,” she repeated.
“Split pea soup, to be specific,” he said.
“It smells like my soup.”
“It is your soup. I got the recipe off your blog. Can I come in?”
She stepped back and let him into the apartment. He set the box on the counter and felt the towel, probably checking for spills, not quite meeting her eye.
“It’s not your bread, though,” he said. “I made Mrs. Cohen’s recipe. Brown bread. It’s pretty dense. I’m not sure if I did it right.”
“It smells fantastic,” she said, almost daring to hope. Almost. “Um . . . why are you here?”
He turned to face her, leaned against the counter, legs crossed at the ankle. “I’m sorry. I was a total jerk when I told Jonesy I didn’t care if he asked you out. Watching your face when you realized what I’d done . . . after what we’d just done . . .” He swallowed hard, his throat working, and looked away, then looked back at her. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, the words spoken with an intensity she’d never seen before. “I didn’t mean it. I care. I really, really care, and I really don’t want you to go out with him. Not that I have any right to tell you what to do, after what I did, but . . . don’t. Please don’t.”
“If you do care, why didn’t you say that?”
He took a deep breath. “Because you scare me.”
Her brows drew down. “I scare you.”
“I can’t point to one terrible thing that happened to make me start speeding through life. It just accumulated. The job. Taking care of my grandparents. Suddenly it was easier to get really fast, really good at my job, and ignore everything else, until you slowed me down. In a really good way,” he added hastily.
“Tim, I didn’t think you were lying when you said you had a difficult day at work. Your best day on the job is still someone’s worst day of their lives. Moving too fast to feel the pain is one way of coping with that kind of constant stress. It worked,” she said gently.
“But there’s a price to that kind of coping,” he said. “Relationships need time and attention. They need the opposite of speed. When I was with you, it didn’t feel so hard. I thought it was the challenges. The sex. It wasn’t. It was you. Us. When I’m with you, life doesn’t feel so heavy.” He blew out his breath and looked at her. “I need to find a new way of coping. I love my job. I don’t want to get callous about it. I really don’t want to lose you. I hope I can make your burdens a little lighter, too,” he said, as if he wasn’t sure the soup and bread made that clear.
She smiled at him. “You’re not going to lose me.” She stepped forward, put her hand on his hip, and tipped her face up to his. He bent his head and kissed her, slow and sweet, taking his time, letting it linger until the reality of the promise seeped through her veins, into her bones.
She lit the burner and lifted the pot from the box. “It smells really good,” she said.
“I hope it is.”
“Can we eat in the squashy chairs, like heathens? The sunset is really beautiful behind the Manhattan skyline.”
“Sure,” he said.
Sarah ladled out bowls of soup and put together an assortment of fresh fruit while Tim sliced and buttered the bread. They turned the chairs to face the big windows, pulled a table between them to hold the food and glasses of wine, then sat down to eat just as the sun was setting.
“It’s perfect,” she said after a couple of spoonfuls of soup.
“Not bad. Needs less salt. I’ll keep that in mind for next time.” He nodded at the skyline, burnished in shades of orange and sunset-red. “How do you feel about the city now?”
She smiled at the view, then at him. The setting sun gilded his beard to gold. The strands glinted as he smiled back at her, soft and easy, full of hope. Hope for a future together, in the city he loved. She set her soup on the table between them, then leaned across the chair’s arm and kissed him. “You know, I really think I’m going to like it here.”