He has slept there, twice now, the first time another Friday night, just after starting his new gig, and his cool shoulder in her back that Saturday morning wasn’t as strange as she thought it would be. They’d dressed that morning and gone to the indoor flea market, where they ate fresh doughnuts and looked at people buying garbage. They’d walked around in the unseasonably mild chill, had lunch at a terrible Frenchy place on Atlantic Avenue, and ended up back at her place, Rob still in the clothes he’d worn to the office the day before. He mentioned this, then stripped out of his clothes and fucked her on the floor of the living room. They showered together, she cooked a frozen pizza, and they sat in their underwear and ate it, then he left the next morning, kissing at the front door. Now, seeing Rob waiting, hands in his pockets, in the front of the restaurant, which is dark, and very warm, feels familiar. A scene she’s lived before, the scene of meeting him in a place they’ve never been together before, but recognizing him, the slope of his shoulders, the long arms, the beginnings of a bald spot, the easy grin. Rob always looks satisfied.
“How was work?” Rob had joked to the hostess—Give us the best seat in the house—and it had worked. A back booth, out of the way, giving them a command over the whole room, candlelit, hushed despite the crowd, some trick of the acoustics.
“Gluten free,” Lauren says. The waitress brings them cocktails, and they knock their glasses together before they take a first sip, and Lauren can’t tell if the gesture is ironic or not. “You?”
His face brightens even further. He loves his job. “Great. We got the green light on that profile. So that’s exciting. And spring training starts soon. I think that’ll be good.”
“Awesome,” she says, and that, too, sits awkwardly, somewhere between irony and sincerity. She is excited for him; his excitement is infectious. She wants good things for him, and that seems surprising. It must mean she likes him more than she was aware of liking him, to this point. She is not one of those women who frets about what it all means, who is always checking the present against some grand game plan. She thinks of poor Meredith, her ravenous desire to use those nouns: boyfriend, fiancé, husband. Meredith would love Rob, who is handsome, but accessibly so: not beautiful. Beautiful men are horrible. Much better, a man who looks like a man, a man who is generically handsome, well proportioned, unfeminine, a man with faults, though it’s early enough that Lauren’s not privy to Rob’s faults, not yet. She’s never heard him burp.
“It is, right? What are you going to order?”
They have settled into a pattern of consulting each other before ordering in restaurants, exercising the right to reach across the table to the other’s plate. She opts for fish; he asks for lamb, even though they both agree it sounds cruel, and that there ought to be some euphemism for lamb, something nonpartisan, like veal, or something misleading, like sweetbreads.
They order a warm dessert—apples and caramel in a salty pastry, topped with saltier ice cream, this vogue for salty desserts is a winning one—and she pays the bill. This is something they’re still feeling through, this question of paying, but it’s idiotic to expect him to pay simply because he has a penis. She has the better job, after all. She puts down her corporate card—she’s allowed, it’s research, they’re scoping out the hotshot Korean chef who runs this place—and he says nothing, then thanks her when she’s signed the bill. It all feels like something they’ve done a million times before, but in the best possible way.
They walk to the subway, not holding hands but not far apart on the sidewalk, their shoulders brushing occasionally, and when they stop at the corner newsstand so he can buy a copy of a literary journal he likes, he asks if there’s anything she wants, and he buys her a copy of Elle and carries them both like a high school sweetheart in the 1950s, clutched to his chest. As they walk down the steps into the station, he offers her his hand—there’s ice, hidden beneath the puddles. She takes it. They push through the turnstiles and sit on the bench, knees pushed together, despite the intercession of the little wooden partition meant to offer commuters a modicum of personal space. The train arrives, and she finds a seat and he stands above her, both hands on the overhead bar. She holds the magazines on her lap, looks up at him. His face looks different from below. She likes this view of him, from below, his body near enough that she can pick up his scent—deodorant, faded by the day, chewing gum, something vaguely like pine, which might be his shampoo. There, on the bench, his dick so near her face, his dick that feels like it’s hers now, her special province, her territory. Tonight, she will sit like this, below him, and kiss his balls, and breathe in his smell deeply, and tomorrow morning they will kiss good-bye at the door and she’ll do the laundry and go grocery shopping. She’s out of yogurt, she noticed that morning.