Chapter Eighteen Evan
I ask her on a Thursday.
Not because Thursday is significant or because I planned it or because I had some strategy in mind.
I ask her on a Thursday because it’s my night off and the station is quiet and I come upstairs from the basement to find her in the kitchen making tea at nine o’clock at night with her hair in a knot on top of her head and her feet bare on the tile floor, and it occurs to me, standing in the doorway watching her wait for the kettle, that I have been finding reasons to be in whatever room she’s in for the better part of a week and that this probably means something.
“Come out with me,” I say.
She turns around. “What?”
“Tonight. Come out.”
She looks at me for a moment. “Where?”
“I don’t know yet,” I say. “Somewhere that isn’t here.”
She considers this with an expression that shows she’s weighing something that she already knows the answer to, but wants to think about anyway. Then she looks down at her feet. “Let me get my shoes.”
The bar idea dies before it starts because she mentions, while pulling on her jacket in the hallway, that she’s been off alcohol since the concussion and that wine still gives her a headache, and I say nothing about the fact that I’d already decided against the bar anyway because a crowded, loud room is not what I had in mind.
“Ice cream,” I say instead.
She stops with one arm in her jacket and looks at me. “It’s October.”
“Ice cream doesn’t have a season,” I say.
She looks at me for another second. Then she finishes putting on her jacket. “Okay,” she says. “Ice cream.”
The place I’m thinking of is four blocks from the station, a small shop that’s been there since before I started at this post, run by a man named Gerald who is seventy years old and completely indifferent to seasonal trends and who makes his own waffle cones from scratch every morning.
It’s not the kind of place that gets written up anywhere. It’s the kind of place that exists because a neighborhood needs it to exist, and everyone who lives nearby knows that.
Brielle walks beside me with her hands in her jacket pockets and looks at everything.
This is something I’ve noticed about her, the way she takes in a street, a block, a stretch of ordinary city, with the attention of someone for whom ordinary city is still relatively new.
She grew up here, technically, but the version of New York she grew up in was a different city wearing the same name, all townhouses and charity galas and cars that arrive when you call them.
This version, the one where you walk four blocks in October for ice cream because you feel like it, is something she’s still learning.
I find I like watching her learn it.
Gerald’s is lit up warm against the dark street, the hand-lettered sign in the window unchanged from the first time I walked past it six years ago.
Inside, there are four flavors on the board and no apologies for it, and Gerald himself is behind the counter looking at us the way he looks at everyone, which is with the serene indifference of a man who has seen it all and has ice cream to make.
Brielle studies the board like it’s a document requiring analysis.
“There are only four options,” I say.
“I know,” she says. “I’m deciding.”
“They’re all good.”
“That’s not helpful,” she says.
Gerald looks at me. I shrug.
She gets the salted caramel. I get the dark chocolate. Gerald hands them over without ceremony, and we go back out into the October night, and she takes the first bite on the sidewalk and closes her eyes for a second the way she does when something is better than she expected.
She opens her eyes and looks at the cone like it personally wronged her by being this good.
“Why is this better than anything I've eaten in a restaurant that costs four hundred dollars a plate,” she says.
“Gerald,” I say. “That's the whole answer.”
We walk.
The park is two blocks further, a small one, more of a wide pause in the city than a proper park, with benches and a few trees that have mostly given up their leaves, and a path that goes in a loop and comes back to where it started.
It’s quiet at this hour, a few people walking dogs, a couple on a bench near the entrance, the city doing its ambient thing at a slight remove.
We take the path without discussing it.
She asks me things while we walk. How long I’ve been in Brooklyn, whether I grew up here, and what made me want to be a firefighter.
I answer honestly, which is easier with her than it usually is, because she asks questions the way she listens, without an agenda, without waiting for her turn to talk, actually interested in what comes back.
I tell her about growing up in Queens, four brothers, the chaos of a household where the volume is always slightly too high.
She laughs at the right things and asks follow-up questions, and at some point, we’ve looped halfway around the park, and I’ve told her more about my family than I’ve told most people I’ve known considerably longer.
“Four brothers,” she says.
“Four,” I confirm.
“And you’re the youngest.”
“Youngest and, according to general family consensus, most likely to need supervision.”
“Do you?” she says. “Need supervision.”
I look at her sideways. “Depends on the situation.”
She makes a sound that is trying to be neutral, but isn’t quite.
We come around a bend in the path, and I see her at the same moment I see the bench.
Daniela.
She’s sitting with someone, a friend maybe, and she hasn’t seen me yet, but she will.
The path goes directly past the bench. There's no detour that doesn't mean leaving the park entirely.
The last time I spoke to Daniela I spent forty minutes on the phone trying to end something she refused to accept was ending. I have not picked up since. She is thirty feet away and has not looked up yet.
I have approximately three seconds before she looks up.
I do not think about what I do next. I simply do it.
I turn toward Brielle, put one hand on her jaw, and kiss her.
It lasts maybe two seconds. Her lips are cold from the ice cream, and she goes very still, and I pull back immediately, already forming the apology.
“Oh, shit, I’m sorry,” I say, low. “There’s someone over there who I—it’s complicated, and I didn’t want—I’m sorry, that was—”
She looks at me.
Then she takes one step forward, and pulls me back down to her.
And that’s the end of the apology.
She kisses me like she means it, like she’s been deciding to do it for a while and has simply been waiting for a reason, and I stop thinking about Daniela or the bench or the fact that I used this woman as a cover for something and instead think about nothing at all because there is nothing else to think about, there is only this, her hands in my jacket and her mouth on mine and the cold air around us and the park going quietly about its business as if nothing significant is happening.
Which is incorrect.
Something significant is absolutely happening.
When she pulls back, I keep my eyes closed for a second longer than I mean to.
When I open them, she’s looking at me with an expression that is clear and direct and not the least bit apologetic, which is, I am finding, one of her better qualities.
“Who is she?” she says.
I glance toward the bench. Daniela is deep in conversation with her friend and hasn’t looked our way. “Someone I used to see,” I say. “She took the ending badly. I’ve been avoiding.”
Brielle nods. “Is it handled?”
“Getting there,” I say.
She looks at me for a minute longer, reading something in my face. Then she glances toward the bench, turns around, and starts walking back the way we came. I fall into step beside her without a word and we take the long way around the park.
It’s quiet for a while.
“Can I ask you something?” she says.
“Yes.”
She’s looking at the path ahead, her ice cream cone held loosely, the salted caramel mostly finished. “How many of those are there? Women you’ve been avoiding.”
It’s a fair question, and she’s asking it without cruelty, just wanting to know, and I find I don’t want to give her the easy version of the answer.
“A few,” I say. “Less than the reputation suggests. More than I’d like.”
She nods.
“It’s not—” I stop. Start again. “It was easier. Keeping things uncomplicated. Not letting things become more than what they were.” I pause. “I’m good at the beginning of things. The in-between is where I tend to make a mess.”
She’s quiet for a second. “Why?”
I look at the path. The question is simple and lands somewhere complicated, and I think about Erick’s voice on the phone, saying you know how it is, being the youngest, and about the way my family loves me, which is real and complete and somehow still manages to leave me feeling like I have to prove something every time I walk into a room.
“I’m better at making people like me,” I say finally, “than trusting that they will.”
She turns her head and looks at me.
I look back.
“Evan,” she says, and there’s something in the way she says my name, quiet and direct, that I don’t know what to do with. “For what it’s worth.” She pauses. “I like you. Not the performance. The actual you.”
I hold her gaze.
Then I look back at the path because I need to look at something that isn’t her face for a second.
“I have to tell you something,” she says.
“Okay.”
She’s quiet for a beat, working up to it. “You’re not the only one. That I’ve—that there’s something with.”
I wait.
“Max,” she says. “And Jase.” She says it plainly, without drama, the way she says most true things.
“I’m not—I wasn’t planning any of this. I’m not the kind of person who—” She stops.
“I don’t know what I am, actually. I’m figuring that out.
But I wanted you to know because it felt wrong not to tell you. ”
I walk for a minute without saying anything.
She’s watching me from the corner of her eye, I can feel it, waiting for the reaction, braced for something.
“Brielle,” I say.
“I know how it sounds,” she says quickly. “I know it’s—”
“It doesn’t sound like anything bad,” I say.
She stops walking.
I stop too and turn to face her.
“Max and Jase are two of the best people I know,” I say. “They’re not competition. They’re—” I look for the word. “They’re my people. And you ending up with my people doesn’t surprise me at all.” I pause. “You’re exactly who all three of us would find impossible to ignore. That’s not a criticism.”
She stares at me.
“It’s not?” she says.
“Why would it be?”
She opens her mouth. Closes it. Looks at me like I’ve said something she was prepared to argue against and has found herself without an argument.
“I don’t know,” she says finally. “I thought you might—”
“What?” I say. “Be threatened?”
She looks slightly embarrassed. “Maybe.”
I look at her for a long moment. There is a thing happening in my chest that I am not going to examine in detail right now, in a park in October, but which I am aware of in the way you’re aware of something that has shifted position and is not where it was before.
“I'm not threatened,” I say. “And I don't want you to choose.
That's not what I'm asking for.” I look at her properly.
“Max and Jase are my people. They're not someone I want to beat. If anything the three of us being in the same orbit as you makes more sense than any one of us alone.” I pause.
“I just want to be in it. Whatever it looks like.”
She stares at me.
“That's a very evolved position,” she says.
“I'm a very evolved person,” I say.
She looks at me for a long moment, and then something in her face loosens, the tension of waiting for a reaction she didn't get dissolving into something warmer.
“Okay,” she says quietly. “Good.”
She looks down at her ice cream cone, which has reached its final stages, and then back up at me, and the lamplight is doing something to her face that I am going to think about later.
“For what it’s worth,” she says, “you’re not nothing to me either. In case that needed saying.”
“It didn’t,” I say. “But noted.”
She smiles.
At the park entrance, she finishes the last of her cone and brushes her hands together, and we turn back toward the station, four blocks through the October night, and I walk close enough that our shoulders touch occasionally and neither of us moves away.
Daniela is gone from the bench when we pass it.
I don’t notice until we’re already past.