Chapter 20 Molly
Molly
The winter market at Bryant Park started the week before Halloween, and it smells like coffee and sugary waffles and other confections that I want to eat approximately fifteen of.
I’ve walked past it every day after work and this afternoon, when I found myself trying to invent reasons to keep Elijah around, I thought first of the market.
Now, I can’t help the smile on my face while I tow Elijah through the little huts where sellers have set up for the next two months.
We stop at a coffee stand and, as we stand in line, I rub my hands together to try to keep them warm. My cheeks and nose are probably red from the cold too, but it’s not unbearable.
‘Here.’ Elijah unwinds his knit scarf from around his neck and puts it around mine.
I lift my hair over the material while he ties it in a knot over my chest. I am instantly warmer and find myself fighting the urge to press my nose into the fabric, but I refrain because I’m not a weird ass. ‘All right?’
‘Yeah, better, thank you.’
The sun is totally set now, but Elijah still wears his baseball cap, wavy hair peeking out from beneath the brim and over his ears.
‘Ma’am,’ someone calls, pulling me from watching him. So much for not being a creep. I apologise and order a pumpkin cappuccino with cinnamon and when it’s done a couple minutes later, I moan when I take the first sip.
‘Damn, that’s good,’ I say, and Elijah’s eyes are lit with amusement, hands in his coat pockets while he watches me. I offer him the cup to taste and he shakes his head. I bump his arm with my shoulder and lead us down the sidewalk towards some of the shops.
‘So, you can’t eat food, but can you drink things? Does that make you as sick?’ I ask.
‘Some,’ he says. ‘Tastes of drinks don’t usually hurt me, but it’s part of this curse that I can’t enjoy all delights afforded to humans. Balance in all things, as it were.’
‘And is that what it is? A curse?’
‘Depends who you ask,’ Elijah says, the dimple in his cheek accompanying a sort of rueful smile.
‘And if I ask you?’
‘Then I’d say it depends on the day.’ Elijah steers us into a hut with Christmas ornaments hanging from rows of pegs, little ceramic Christmas trees on the tables. I feel all warm and fuzzy just looking at them–I’ve always loved Christmas. It’s just so cosy and familiar.
‘Growing up, my parents would let my brother Caleb and I each choose a new Christmas ornament for the tree every year,’ I tell him, unprompted. The tradition remains, each of us usually finding something online and gifting it to my parents on Christmas Eve.
I run my fingers across a felt ornament of a little ballerina with tiny snowflakes embroidered on her skirt. It reminds me of Caleb’s daughter, the first baby of the family, who’s almost four, but wears a tiny ballet dress and slippers as often as she can get away with.
‘Which was your favourite?’ Elijah asks. ‘From your parents’ tree.’
I try to remember as many of them as I can–the cherry-red Matchbox car ornaments my brother got for three years in a row in middle school, the One Direction ornament from when I was fifteen, a little fox, a tiny typewriter.
‘There’s one of a horse, which I got in high school I think.
I was a kind of angry teenager–just like, I thought the world was out to get me all the time, you know?
It wasn’t, I was just dramatic, but I would ride my bike around the neighbourhood when I got too riled up and about a mile away was a big field with a bunch of horses walking around grazing.
I would sit on the fence and lay my head on my arms and sometimes one of them would come up to me, let me pet her neck and nose.
‘She was a reddish-brown horse, and I think for a little while, she was my best friend,’ I tell him.
I remember telling that horse all my secrets, a daily ritual.
She never judged me, never told me I was too judgemental, or that I should wear my hair straight, or that my body didn’t look like a fifteen-year-old’s–too curvy, too much.
I don’t know what the horse’s name was, but I called her Pecan.
‘I got an ornament that looked like her.’
His eyes light up at the story. ‘I love horses,’ he says. ‘I worked in the stables when I was–well, before.’
‘Glad to know I’m not the only one who was a horse girl in middle school.’
‘I don’t know what middle school is, but I trust you’re right about that.’ He grabs two of the felt ornaments, one reindeer and one ballerina, and purchases them both, tucking the delicate small bag the clerk wraps them in into his coat pocket.
‘Come on.’ I jerk my chin in the direction of the ice rink and he looks questioningly on, but follows anyway.
There’s a rink set up in the square, tall lights pointing onto the gliding patrons and Christmas music playing loud over speakers.
I do so love when music is playing in public, especially the Christmas variety.
I turn into a real jolly person come November and December. I think it’s the nostalgia.
‘Ice skating,’ Elijah says, awed at the rink in the middle of the park.
‘You’ve done it before, right?’
‘Not for over a century.’
I grin, a new pep in my step as I pull him by the sleeve to the skate rental. I teach him how to lace them up and then let him hold onto my forearm as I bring him wobbly to the ice.
‘I’ll help you,’ I reassure him, as we step onto the ice. ‘I’m very, very proficient.’
‘Proficient is a ringing endorsement for a tutor if I’ve ever heard one.’
I laugh and let him get his balance before grabbing his arm and pulling him along. In the middle of the ice, a couple does tricks that boggle my mind and look both dangerous and elegant. It’s not as crowded as I’m sure it’ll be in a few weeks, but like everywhere in the city, it’s still busy.
‘Why did you move here? It’s far away from home,’ he says and I nod, pushing us forward past two little kids scooting slowly on the ice.
‘Got a scholarship to a master’s programme here.
Plus, I always wanted to come to New York.
The big city has always seemed so exciting.
Romantic.’ I thought if there was anywhere in the world to make it as a writer, it was probably New York City.
Now I think you can make it anywhere so long as you’re dedicated enough. So long as you don’t quit.
‘And has the city been what you thought it would be?’
I shrug and tuck my hair behind my ears. ‘In some ways, sure. I was right that it was both romantic and exciting for a while. I felt so cool living here, like the main character in my own movie. But it’s been lonely, too,’ I admit.
‘I met Matt today,’ Elijah says and I think for a moment that I couldn’t have heard him properly.
‘Matt… Lemming?’
‘The one and only.’ My brain is having an impossible time imagining those two together in the same place. ‘I brought Dylan dinner and met Matt in the elevator. Wanted me to tell you hello.’
He doesn’t sound particularly happy about the message, and his eyes watch my face for a reaction.
I can’t help my nose from scrunching at Matt talking about me at all.
I feel like he should have forfeited the right to consider me ever again when he started fucking his coworker while I was at home waiting for him.
‘Well, if you see him again, I don’t say hi back.’
This makes a smile crack over Elijah’s face, and I wonder just what happened in this meeting.
Matty is notoriously charming and pleasant–extremely easy to get along with.
And Elijah seems to like everyone, so I’m not sure why he looked so displeased to be speaking his name.
Unless Elijah is holding a grudge with me, in solidarity.
I have way too much fun on the ice with him skating in circle after circle, holding hands, or arm in arm, until my feet hurt and my stomach growls.
‘Pizza?’ I ask, though I know he won’t eat it anyway.
‘Would love nothing more than to get you a slice of pizza,’ he says. It feels way too much like a date, but maybe if we never call it that, we can live under the emotional safety net of friends with benefits forever.
I get a cheese slice and a Diet Coke and teach him the differences between Coke, Coke Zero, and Diet Coke. He listens, never appearing bored by the things I tell him.
‘Why not just have the full sugar one?’ he asks after I’ve talked for too long about diet culture and its many woes.
‘Because I’ve now convinced myself that this one tastes better.’ I wave the silver can around. ‘Plus, I have cavity-prone teeth and, unfortunately, you only get the one set of teeth to take you through all of your adult years.’
I finish the slice and soda and let Elijah wrap his scarf around my neck before we go back into the cold night.
I wonder if he’ll ask for it back, and hope, like the hat I still have in my apartment, that he won’t.
I don’t know why I want to keep it–I have my own things, my own scarves, my own hats.
It’s not like I need his, but I have an undeniable urge to keep them.
It’s not normal how much I want to snoop around his closet, his pockets, his desk, picking up his things and pocketing what I like best. It makes me feel like a lunatic, or a kleptomaniac, but only for the belongings of Elijah Thorne. It’s better not to think about it.
As we walk around, I tell him things I think would be important to know if I’d been living under a rock for the last century and, even if they’re things he knows already, he listens intently, asks questions, makes jokes, and this non-date is better than any date I’ve gone on in the last three years.
Again, not that this is a date. It’s research for him, basically charity for me.
‘Here’s one,’ I start. ‘When I was a kid, you told someone you were more than platonically interested in them by saying you like-liked them.’
‘Like-like?’
‘Yes. Emphasis on the first like.’
‘Good to know that human courting rituals have progressed past the need for more than a declaration of like-like,’ he exclaims, making me snort.