Chapter XXI
XXI
James
After too many drinks, we spend another night on Rebecca’s floor. In the morning, I make brioche French toast and fresh raspberry jam. Lucy signs her contract, and we cheer like mad.
By eleven, Lucy is dragging me to the door.
Last night, I made the mistake of admitting that even though I’ve been in the city for nearly two months, I feel like I’ve hardly seen any of it.
Lucy is taking it upon herself to correct that.
She tells me she’s my tour guide and that I’m going to like it.
It’s an assertion that makes me feel dread deep in my bones.
When she tells me we’re on our way to one of the best views in the city, I picture the top of the Empire State Building. I’m already moaning in my head about the long line and the cramped elevator ride.
But Lucy leads us to the Steinway Tower, one of the tallest, skinniest skyscrapers in Manhattan.
There’s no public access, but she sleuthed out an open house for one of the building’s apartments.
We ride this elevator to the eighty-first floor, trying to act like we have an obscene amount of money.
Once we’re in the apartment, we do a terrible job keeping up the facade of potential buyers, but no one seems to care.
We ogle the view from the floor-to-ceiling windows: Central Park on one side, all of downtown Manhattan on the other.
I only realize my mouth is hanging open when Lucy taps my chin.
After that, she leads me to the Museum of Modern Art.
I need a break, but Lucy has planned for that.
Instead of shuffling from room to room, trying to see everything, whenever we find something we both love, we sit on a bench and spend time with it, taking it in silently or chatting about other things entirely.
In front of Chagall’s I and the Village, I take out my notebook and tear out a piece of paper for her.
We draw for a few minutes, then she unveils her masterpiece: a stick figure goat.
I reveal my sketch of her hand resting on her collarbone.
She nearly gasps when she sees it, then kisses me more passionately than is appropriate for a museum.
In the gift shop on the way out, she buys a thin, silver frame for my drawing.
From there she takes me to a tiny banh mi place on Fifty-Second Street she says she researched while helping me figure out my restaurant stuff.
It’s set up in a basement with a small, open kitchen and no space for diners, but they’re making it work.
We carry our sandwiches to a tiny, shaded park across the street.
“How do you do it?” I ask Lucy as she takes an exceptionally large bite.
“Do what?” she responds with a coy smile, as if she doesn’t know.
“Make being a tourist not terrible.” I chew and savor the perfect alchemy of crisp baguette, minced pork, and pickled cucumber.
Lucy laughs. “Seriously. I’m not saying I’m totally converted or anything.
But we’ve been on our feet for hours, we’ve gone multiple places, and somehow I’m not cranky or overstimulated.
I feel like myself, and I don’t like you any less. ”
Lucy laughs harder, her chin lifted to the sky, then she leans in to kiss me.
“You haven’t traveled until you’ve traveled with me, baby,” she says against my mouth.
“Travel doesn’t need rules and expectations.
You make it what you want.” She smirks at me.
“And go with the people you’d want to be with anyway. ”
I kiss her again, then we both turn back to our last few bites of banh mi.
It’s the kind of food I want to make—simple, accessible, and comforting.
“Thank you again for your encouragement with my restaurant,” I say, nudging Lucy’s shoulder with my own.
“The night we met, I never actually told you why I left my job in Philly.” She crinkles her brow and waits for me to go on.
“The head chef wanted me to be her sous. She offered to train me to take over for her in a few years, but I said no.”
Lucy punches me in the arm. “You totally let me think you got fired!”
I laugh. “I mean, it kind of felt that way. That restaurant was one of the top places in the city. I honestly didn’t think I could handle it, so I quit.”
Lucy opens her mouth, undoubtedly to call me an idiot and compliment my cooking in the same breath, but I don’t let her. “These last six weeks, though, you’ve helped me realize that my doubts weren’t actually about my talent.”
I pause to look her in the eye. “I don’t want a Michelin star.
I don’t want to make food people are more excited to take pictures of than actually eat.
I want to make the food I love, food that means something to me.
” I see a swell of pride in her eyes. “Now I’m going to get to do that.
And I’m going to be fucking great at it. ”
Lucy leans over, puts her hand on my thigh, and gives me a deep kiss. “And it’s all because of me,” she brags.
I carefully set aside my last bite and pull her onto my lap. She squirms.
“OK! OK! You get some of the credit!”
Then her lips are on mine, and she presses her body tightly against me.
Sliding my palm up her spine under her shirt, I try to hold on to the fact that we’re in a park and I can’t take all her clothes off right now.
I almost forget and start to unclasp her bra as she rubs her ass into me, making me throb.
But then she pulls her lips away to make eye contact. “Come on. We’ve got one more stop before home.”
“I think we should go home. Now.”
She smirks at me, stands, and starts to walk away. “It’ll be worth it.”
“You’re getting cocky,” I call after her.
“Trust me!” she yells back. And I do.
Thirty minutes later, we’re at a Chinese foot-massage parlor that I had no idea was around the corner from my rental. For a pittance, we book an hour, and any aches I gathered throughout the day fade away. I doze off in the chair, and I wake up to Lucy gently nudging me, her black eyes glowing.
“I’ll go anywhere with you,” I whisper, and she kisses my freckle.
Lucy
The next morning, James tells me he’s taking the reins, and his plan is for us to spend the entire day on a picnic blanket in Central Park. I’ve never done well staying in one place for long without an agenda. Unless the Gilmore Girls or Golden Girls are involved.
But he followed my lead, and I’ll follow his. I make sure my phone is fully charged for emergency doomscrolling while James fills a cooler and stuffs a backpack to the brim.
He spends a good fifteen minutes scoping out a spot for us, and I can feel my patience already waning.
But when he finally spreads a blanket under a massive sycamore tree that will give us shade all day, I have to give him credit.
There are no visible bugs, there’s no mud, and somehow we’re secluded from the walking paths, but there are still plenty of parkgoers for people watching.
I sit on the blanket, trying to convince myself that maybe this won’t be so bad, and James presents me with the first item from the cooler: frozen grapes. They’re exactly what I want. I eye James suspiciously. “How did you know?”
He smirks, the freckle under his eye teasing me.
For the first hour, I’m fidgety, messing with the loose threads of my cutoff shorts, and James keeps pulling things out of his bag of tricks to put me at ease. First it’s a cushion to sit on. Then a crossword book. Then a frisbee.
By the second hour, he’s given me a can of sparkling wine, a scalp massage, and a used copy of The Giver, my favorite book from childhood. When we’ve been sitting on the ground for too long, he pulls up a yoga video on his phone, and we do some stretching and make excuses to touch each other.
By the third hour, I feel like I’m starting to get it.
When I start getting wiggly, I try to hear the yoga instructor’s voice in my head telling me to sink in and find what feels good.
I end up taking a nap and waking under the swaying limbs of the sycamore, my head nestled against James’s arm as he reads Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.
Later, he breaks out tea sandwiches, watermelon wedges, and a party-size bag of Cheetos. I check my phone and am completely amazed to see it’s approaching 5 p.m. I hold it up to show James.
He laughs. “She can sit still.” Then he kisses me, and I pull him in tight so he won’t stop.