Gabe smiled, took another sip of his hot chocolate, and said, “It was amazing seeing you perform at Mimi’s. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a chance to check you out onstage, and it was like nothing changed, still as talented as I remember. So, have you been in anything I’d know? Working on anything new now?”
I shifted uncomfortably, suddenly unsure of how to answer the question. It was hard enough to consider the fact I’d ended things with Gabe because he didn’t support me enough in my career, only to have willingly sacrificed it once I got pulled into the impossible draw of Adam’s magnetic force. “After we broke up, I kept at it for a while, but I wasn’t booking any jobs. I started seeing Adam, and the opportunities became fewer and far between, and then one day, I just gave it up altogether and never looked back. Sometimes I look around Mimi’s and wonder what I’m even doing there, but this is all I know how to do.” I took a deep breath, unsure if the admission made me sad or proud. But either way, Gabe was still listening, attentively for that matter, finally interested in my career. Maybe things really had changed?
I continued, my mouth a bit dry, “I’ve even started auditioning again.”
“And?”
“And I still have some work to do on my belt and my confidence.”
“Not sure I can help much with the belt, but as for the confidence,” he said, pushing a hair out of my face and tucking it behind my ear, “I’ve never known a woman who has such a bright light within them. It could light up all of Manhattan if you’d just let it.”
A flush of warmth worked its way under my faux fur, competing with the orangey heat lamps above us. The rest of the rink faded away behind us, and we may as well have been on the moon.
The poet Robert Frost wrote about a man encountering two roads diverging in the woods. My watershed moment wasn’t so different, only it happened in the concrete jungle of New York City, between city blocks in a bustling metropolis. Happy as I thought I was with Adam, I never could shake the feeling there was a whole other life I could have been living. But now I had the chance that so few, if any, ever got—somehow finding myself back at the crossroads and able to explore the path of the choice I didn’t make.
Without another word, Gabe seized my waist, pulled me against him, and kissed me hard. My hands gripped the lapels of his white leisure suit like I would never let them go. I melted into his arms as fireworks erupted in my brain, and a disco ball of bright lights and colors flashed before me. I could hear the faint sound of “Upside Down” by Diana Ross echoing in the background, and I too felt like Gabe had spun my world off its axis with that one kiss.
Back in the arms of the man I once loved and once knew so well, it was almost like meeting him for the first time, but also not at all. Like when you meet a stranger you feel like you maybe knew in a past life. We had this whole rich and complicated history, which should’ve felt like an anchor weighing us both down, but it didn’t. Instead, that anchor was the thing rooting us in place, forcing us to re-examine one another using fresh eyes and gained perspectives. With the past crashing into the present, just like that, we had the chance to start again.
Chapter Nineteen
In spite of the fact that it was almost 1:00 a.m., I swung my front door open with the abandon of a silly schoolgirl with a wild crush who had just been on her very best date. Then, remembering I no longer lived alone on the Upper East Side, I quietly closed the door behind me, securing the dead bolt in place, and tiptoed in the direction of my bed, eager for my dreams to pick up where my date with Gabe ended. But laughter and commotion wafting down the corridor from the living room stopped me in my tracks. I followed the sound and was surprised to see all my roommates were not only still wide awake, but were elbow deep and eyeball high in containers of Chinese takeout.
Like a kid in trouble, Lyla cooed, “Ooooooh, Grandmaaaaa. Someone was out past her bedtime. We were getting ready to deploy Search and Rescue.”
“Yeah, you’re never out this late! Who’s the lucky guy? Or girl? No judgment!” Sevyn waggled her perfectly sculpted brows at me as I kicked off my shoes, smiling dreamily from ear to ear like a rom-com heroine, and flopped down next to Oak on the couch.
Without moving the rest of my body, I lifted my head and dodged her question by asking, “Were you guys waiting up for me, or do you normally order food at one in the morning?”
“Oh, this? Yeah, this is a pretty common occurrence, but you usually miss out since you’re tucked in by ten,” Oak teased.
Lyla gestured to the table full of egg rolls, dumplings, and three kinds of noodles. “Are you hungry? Want some dim sum? We got plenty. Ass was supposed to be home, but her work trip got extended,” she said, shaking a white paper container in my direction.
“Forget the dim sum! I wanna know, did you get some?”
“Sevyn!” Lyla cried, swatting in her direction.
Sevyn laughed. “What? With a grin like that on her face, I meeeeean . . .”
I felt my cheeks warm and waved my hands to pause their line of questioning. “No, no, nothing like that. I just . . . I had a really great date with um . . . a very old friend.”
A look of shock spread across Lyla’s face. “Oh my God, did you go out with Charlie?”
“Charlie?” I asked, momentarily forgetting that I even knew anyone named Charlie. “Oh no. Actually, it’s a bit of a crazy story.”
Sevyn lifted a wonton to her mouth with her chopsticks and took a bite. “Girl, I watch TikTok on the reg, and I have seeeeeen some thiiiiings.” Her eyes grew wide to emphasize her point, and then she relaxed and went back to chewing. “I don’t think anything can surprise me at this point.”
When I moved to Bushwick a little more than a month ago, I filled my roommates in on the whole Adam situation, explaining the reason why an almost thirty-year-old suddenly found herself in need of a flat with four roommates and was hustling in a job as a singing waitress. When I confessed how starting again seemed wholly impossible, the amount of support paired with their lack of judgment was an incredibly welcomed surprise.
Though they knew about Adam, I wasn’t sure how to explain the Gabe situation or what happened with the mystical phone booth. So as quickly and uncomplicatedly as I could, I detailed my strange encounter with Gabe on Christmas Day and everything that came after.
Finally, when I got to describing the date, I told them about Gabe’s surprise appearance at Mimi’s followed by our Funkytown Le Freak show, all of which ended in the most earth-shattering kiss I’d had in a long while. After all these years, after all this time, when our lips met, it felt like the stars aligned to create a portal, rocketing us back to before it all fell apart. The girls sat ramrod straight perched at the edge of their seats, lo mein noodles dangling from their lips and chopsticks, enraptured by the sheer absurdity and magic of my fairy tale.