Chapter 12 #2
“They tried,” he said, focusing on where his fingers were laced together in his lap.
He should have left it at that, let the silence return, but in the periphery, he could see her waiting for him to continue.
She used to do that, as if more information was guaranteed if she gave him time.
And after a moment, he found himself obliging.
“I used to stay with them when I was in town. In the beginning it was once a year, if they were lucky. I told myself it was for them to make up for the fact that I left. But it was for me, too. Then, when I was looking for a place, I was there almost every weekend and I just…”
“You just?” she asked.
He let out a frustrated sigh. Why was he telling her this?
They hadn’t had a conversation in years.
She probably didn’t even care. But it still felt like a heavy weight around his neck, this thing he just needed to offload.
“It felt like they were trying to freeze time. Yeah, I had been trying to freeze a bit of my life there, too, but it was like they almost resented who I am now and wanted me to fall back into that old version of myself from before I left. Like who I am now doesn’t matter as much as that twenty-year-old meddling with Dad’s toolbox in the basement. ”
Her gaze flitted down his suit, but her expression had lost a bit of the judgmental edge he had come to expect in recent weeks. In fact, she looked almost contrite.
“That doesn’t sound like such a bad problem to have,” she said.
He threw her a wry grin. “It is when you come in on the red-eye and the first thing your mom needs you to do is stir the Bolognese for three hours.”
She laughed again, but this time she turned to the window as if it could hide her smile.
Another memory hit him, the way she used to turn away from him to hide her smile.
How he had always used it as an opportunity to lean down and steal a kiss.
He hadn’t let himself recall that in years, and even though he tried not to linger on it now, the image still took up residency in his brain and refused to budge.
But it was still just a memory, he reminded himself.
“So,” he said, clearing his throat. “How’d you know how to handle all that back there? With the police.”
“Oh.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s a long story.”
He nodded to the traffic ahead. “It’s a long cab ride.”
“Well, I’ve been working at my dad’s TV production company for the past few years. He really only has one show, Divorce Divas, and one of the stars can be… confrontational.”
Freddie remembered her father’s company and the show, mostly because Anne had always talked about how ridiculous it was.
He wanted to ask what had changed, about the steps between business school and reality TV, but it felt too intimate, trespassing on territory that wasn’t his anymore. So instead, he asked, “How so?”
“She’s been arrested eleven times.”
He blinked. “Eleven?”
“Wait. Twelve,” she said, eyebrows stitched together. “I forgot about New Orleans during Mardi Gras.”
He cocked an eyebrow, waiting.
“Disturbing the peace,” she answered his unvoiced question.
“Isn’t that the point of Mardi Gras?”
“It was ten a.m. on Bourbon Street, and she flashed a cop car for some beads. When they told her they didn’t have any, she threw a beer bottle at their windshield.”
He let out a low whistle. “That’s amazing.”
Anne laughed softly. “And expensive when you have a production schedule and a very limited budget.”
“Right.” He smiled, averting his eyes down to where his hand played with the corners of his phone. “I was sure you were going to end up in finance or something.”
Her expression had dimmed a little. “I tried. After I graduated from Columbia, I got a job at a hedge fund. Then I quit five months later.”
“Why?”
She let out a dry laugh. “I may love numbers, but you and I both know I was never going to love finance.”
A sharp ache hit his chest, one he hadn’t felt in years. Maybe it was the familiarity—she had the courage to acknowledge their shared history, while he had been so eager to ignore it over the past few weeks.
The stillness was broken by a hard knock against the cab’s plexiglass partition.
“FDR okay?” the cabbie asked.
Freddie frowned. “Excuse me?”
“Cutting down FDR Drive. Second Avenue is backed up.”
Anne leaned forward. “That’s fine, thank you.”
The cabbie nodded and cut the steering wheel to the right.
Freddie turned, ready to continue with his line of questions, but Anne beat him to it.
“That’s great news about your company.”
“Sorry?”
“At the bar,” she said. “You mentioned you sold your company last year. Congratulations.”
That’s right. He had said that. At the time, it felt good, a way of signaling that he had won, that he was doing better than anyone expected, but now it made him want to cringe. “Yeah. Thanks.”
“And you have a job interview tomorrow?”
“It’s just a meeting,” he said. “There’s this company looking to do something similar to what I did with Wentworth Hydroponics.
I promised a friend I would talk to their CEO.
You can’t tell my mom that, though. She assumes since I don’t have my company anymore, that I’m unemployed and one ConEd bill away from moving home to my childhood bedroom. ”
Anne smiled. “They must be really proud of you.”
“Yeah. I hope so.”
A long moment passed, then the cab came to a stop and there was another tap on the plexiglass. “Ninth Street at Avenue A.”
Anne reached into her bag as if she was going to try to pay, but Freddie shook his head. “I already told you, my treat.”
“But—”
“You took care of Cricket. Let me get the cab.”
She hesitated, then nodded and stepped out onto the sidewalk while he pulled out his wallet.
His pulse stuttered when he opened it. The flimsy paper corners of his first note to Anne were poking out from behind his credit cards.
He cleared his throat, working to ignore it as he removed his AmEx to tap on the nearby payment screen.
Tompkins Square Park was dark and loomed across the street as he exited the cab. The Uppercross was right there on the corner, but the rest of the city seemed far away, like the darkness had hidden them away in their own secret corner. A long moment passed, then he turned to her.
Anne was just a few feet away, head back and blond hair falling down the back of her peacoat as she stared up at the dark sky.
The glow from the streetlights was delicate on her skin, on where her eyebrows pinched together as she waited for him to continue.
Suddenly everything he had been battling with for the past forty blocks dissolved, and all he could do was stare at her.
At a face that, in this light, looked as if it hadn’t really changed in eight years. Like she had been frozen, too.
“No clouds,” she said, almost to herself.
“What?” he asked.
She tilted her head to look at him. “There’s no clouds tonight.”
He glanced up. He hadn’t even noticed.
“I bet you could see Saturn from the roof deck,” she said.
“I haven’t been up there yet.”
She turned to look at him. “Really?”
“Nope.” Another moment passed. Then he shot her a lopsided grin. “Want to show me?”
The lobby was empty as they walked to the elevator and Anne pressed the up button.
The doors opened almost instantly, and they both stepped inside.
He leaned back against the wall, trying to keep his posture casual, even as his pulse felt like it was kicking through his veins.
The space was too small; he couldn’t escape the sound of her short breaths, the smell of her perfume—vanilla and jasmine and peppermint.
It reminded him so much of the Anne he used to know, the one who would sneak out at night to meet him at the High Line in the West Village or a jazz bar in Midtown.
He couldn’t tell if it was the memory driving him crazy or the fact that it felt so far away, but before he could figure it out, the doors opened again on the eighth floor.
Anne hesitated for a moment, then stepped out. He half expected her to turn around, point to the stairs at the end of the short hall that led to the roof, and tell him to have a good night. Thankfully, she continued forward.
“I can’t believe you haven’t been out here yet,” she said, producing a key card from her purse and tapping it against the door lock.
“I’ve been busy,” he replied with a shrug.
“I thought you were unemployed?”
He smiled. “Just open the door.”
She smiled too, ducking her head as if she could hide it. The motion caused her hair to fall in front of her face, and he had the urge to tuck it behind her ear.
“Here we are,” she said, pushing the door open to walk outside into the cool night air.
He followed, and stepped out into a small oasis.
Bistro lights were strung overhead, casting a soft twinkle across the roof deck’s wooden floor.
There was a long table in the center and what looked like someone’s personal garden off to the side.
Large pots held a place for summer flowers and matching wood pergolas with shade canopies stretched over long couches and tables.
He peered out across the rooftops of the East Village and at the city skyline of lower Manhattan just beyond it.
The views were incredible out to the water—looking uptown he could see the Empire State building glowing with orange and red lights for the fall.
He turned around to find Anne standing a few feet away, the lights that lined the cables of the Williamsburg Bridge shining bright enough to make her silhouette glow.
“It’s beautiful,” he said softly.
“I know,” she said. Then she let out a deep sigh and looked up.
“When I was little, an astronomy professor from Hunter College lived on the third floor. He used to bring his telescope up here. He’d set it up right in the center and sit for hours.
On really clear nights he would let me look through it.
I saw Saturn and Jupiter. Even caught a couple of shooting stars once. ”
“What happened to him?”
“He moved to Midtown. Right near the building where you had that party in the empty loft space.”
He threw her a skeptical look. “I never threw a party in Midtown.”
“Yes you did. On Fifty-Third, remember? Halfway through the night, you went downstairs to get food and came back with the Russian guys you met on the street. And they ended up bringing a watermelon that was filled with vodka.”
The memory was buried so deep it took a moment for Freddie to find it, but when he did, he smiled. “Holy shit, that’s right. They made us go downstairs and buy more vodka for them. I think those guys still have my credit card.”
Anne laughed. The sound bubbled out of her, so light and effervescent that he couldn’t help but laugh, too.
“I can’t believe you remember that,” he said.
“Of course I do. You wrote me a note on the back of that vodka receipt. It was the first time…” Her voice suddenly faded along with her smile, while a deep blush rose in her cheeks.
It took him another minute to remember why, to recall what he had written to her that night so many years ago.
Annie— It’s Friday, April 15th. You’re upstairs on the roof, having an amazing time, and I’m downstairs buying three handles of vodka for five strangers who look like they could break me like a toothpick.
If they do, please know I probably had it coming.
Also: I am utterly and completely in love with you.
—Freddie
It was the first time he had said “I love you.” It felt so right at that moment, like the most natural thing in the world. Now the memory left a deep hole behind, a reminder that something substantial had been there once.
“It’s so odd,” she said, her voice so soft he almost missed it.
He turned to her. “What?”
She turned to meet his gaze. Her expression was almost apologetic.
“I don’t know how to be strangers with you,” she replied.
He stilled. It was so honest yet so unflinchingly brutal that he felt like the air had been knocked from his lungs.
He’d spent years carefully locking away all thoughts of her.
Forcing indifference into those places where love used to be.
He’d even convinced himself that he wasn’t angry about how things ended anymore.
But here on this roof, he could feel those walls beginning to crack.
Worse, he was reminded of how weak they had been in the first place.
Paper-thin and just waiting to be ripped.
What was he doing? He already knew what it would look like on the other side of that. He had let himself be vulnerable with her before; he didn’t know if he could survive it again.
“I should go,” he said, his voice clipped as he turned toward the steel door they had just come through.
“Right.” She nodded. “It’s late.”
They walked back to the door, then down the stairs in silence. Once they arrived down in the hallway, he turned toward the door to his apartment, and she pressed the button for the elevator.
“Thank you. For making me go up there,” he said, breaking the heavy silence.
“Anytime,” she replied.
A loud ding echoed around them as the elevator doors opened. She stepped inside.
“Anne,” he said before she could press the down button.
She looked up, meeting his gaze.
He wanted to say he was sorry for how he’d acted that first moment he saw her at Cricket’s apartment, for how he’d acted every moment since. But he didn’t know how to apologize without dredging up so much else, things he had worked to bury for so long that he was terrified of disturbing them.
Finally, he just offered a somber smile. “Have a good night.”
“You, too,” she replied.
Then the elevator doors closed.
His chest ached when he walked into his apartment. He didn’t go to the kitchen to get a drink, though. And he didn’t go to his bedroom and change, get out of his suit and go to bed. No, he went to the spare bedroom and stared out the window at her view of the stars.