Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Abby and Evan’s first date occurred nine days after their first kiss, though neither of them used the word until the evening was nearly over.
Evan chose a small restaurant near the river, made a reservation for six because he knew Abby got tired early, and asked whether she wanted him to pick her up or meet her there.
She asked him to pick her up. The decision felt more revealing than the kisses they had shared in her kitchen, as if allowing him to arrive at her door turned private attraction into something with a place in the rest of her life.
Evan appeared at five forty-five carrying tulips in a vase. Abby had mentioned once that flowers created another task because she had to cut them and find a vase and she suspected he remembered.
“You’re early,” she said as she opened the door. “I still need to change my shoes.”
“I can wait in the hall.” Evan glanced toward the bedroom without stepping inside. “Or I can come in if you want me to.”
“Come in.” Abby moved aside and accepted the flowers gratefully.
“These are beautiful, thank you.” She returned to the chair near the sofa after setting the flowers down on the kitchen windowsill.
At the sofa, two pairs of shoes waited. “I can no longer bend far enough to fasten the black ones without losing my breath.”
Evan closed the door behind him. “Do you want help, or are you choosing the other pair?”
“The other pair.” Abby slipped her feet into low flats and stood. “If I ask you to buckle my shoes before our first date, I don’t think my pride will recover.”
As Evan’s eyes moved from her shoes to the blue dress she had barely fit into, Abby watched him try to find the right words for the occasion.
“This is our first date?” Evan asked, and though it was meant lightly, his gaze held her for a few seconds. “I wasn’t sure whether we were calling it that,” he said quickly, as if he might have overstepped.
“You made a reservation on a Saturday and offered to pick me up,” Abby replied, matching his tone but unable to keep the smile from her lips. “If this is still friendship, you’ve made it unusually formal.”
Evan pretended to consider this, weighing her words with exaggerated solemnity. “Then it’s a date,” he agreed. “And you look beautiful,” he added, so quietly she almost thought she’d imagined it.
She flushed, but the compliment didn’t feel like an obligation or a performance.
Abby had spent most of her adult life learning how to accept praise as a polite fiction, a necessary gesture to be acknowledged and brushed aside; but when Evan said it, the words seemed to come from a place of genuine surprise, as if he had only just realized he was allowed to say them.
“Thank you,” she said, forcing herself not to deflect or diminish. “You look good too.” She meant it.
He opened the door for her, and they navigated the small elevator and the lobby with the awkward choreography of two people who had known each other long enough to remember old habits but not long enough to invent new ones.
In the car, Evan queued up a playlist of late-nineties indie rock, apologizing for the nostalgia.
Abby told him not to apologize. She liked nostalgia, liked the idea that a song could call up a memory even if she didn’t share it.
The restaurant was on the river, a narrow cabin with mismatched furniture and tables spaced just far enough apart to reward eavesdroppers.
Evan had requested a window seat, and Abby found herself grateful for the view.
Neither of them spoke for the first two minutes; she watched the current pulling a line of ducks downstream while Evan read the menu twice through, then set it down and said, “I haven’t been here since college. ”
Abby waited for him to say more, but he let the statement hang.
She fingered the edge of her napkin. “Was it always this expensive?”
“It was cheaper if one of your friends worked in the kitchen,” Evan said with a wry smile, “and he gave you the friends and family discount. I used to steal from the bread basket to feed the ducks.” He pointed at the river, where a cluster of mallards now floated in lazy formation.
“That was probably a health code violation.”
He made her laugh, and the tension—so easy to build, so hard to dissolve—drained from her shoulders.
They ordered, and the food arrived in small, careful portions, each dish punctuated by the server’s description and Evan’s attempts to guess the ingredients.
Abby liked the way he gave his attention to whatever was in front of him: sometimes the food, sometimes her, sometimes the flicker of a candle at the next table.
He did not seem to prefer one over the others, which made her feel less like a test and more like a companion.
They talked about her pregnancy and the ways in which having a child seemed to rearrange every expectation.
Evan told her he had been counting the days until baseball season.
They didn’t talk about Hudson or Makayla, and the memory of them seemed very far away.
The conversation skipped and meandered, sometimes landing on familiar ground, sometimes veering into places neither of them had planned to go.
At some point, Abby became aware that she was watching him for signs of impatience or disappointment.
She had learned to expect a certain kind of restlessness from men when they realized she would not be performing a role for them, that dates would not be scored by how quickly she could make herself available, how gracefully she could transition from dinner to sex.
But Evan did not seem restless. He seemed—if anything—content to remain in the long, unhurried conversation.
He refilled her water glass twice and suggested they share dessert even though he claimed not to have a sweet tooth.
After dinner, Evan offered to walk with her by the river.
The path was lit by string lights looped over the trees, and Abby was aware of how the cold brought them closer together, pairing their shadows on the gravel in a way that felt conspiratorial.
They reached a bridge, and she stood at the railing, watching the water for a long moment before she realized Evan had leaned in beside her.
“It’s really not that different from the lake,” she said.
“Except it’s moving,” Evan said. “And it always leads somewhere.”
They talked a little more, about rivers and lakes and whether they preferred them, and then Evan asked, “Do you want to walk a bit more, or head home?”
Abby chose the latter, though she could have stayed out in the cold with him for hours. His gentleness made her braver than she expected to be; she found herself inching closer, standing within the radius of his body heat, resting her hand on his arm when she thought he might not notice.
In the car, Abby watched the city pass outside her window, trying to decide if this night would be something she remembered with affection or regret. She was still undecided when they reached her apartment, and Evan parked and said, “Can I walk you up?”
She nodded, biting her lip with uncertainty. He followed her cautiously to the elevator, then the hallway, then stood with her at the door as she fished her keys from her bag.
He kissed her at the threshold. It was not a question, but it was not quite an answer either.
The kiss was longer than the ones in her kitchen, measured and careful but with a certainty that unsettled her in the best possible way.
His hands settled at her waist, and she let herself lean into the space he created between them.
When she pulled back, Abby felt less dizzy than she expected. She turned the key in the lock and hesitated, unsure if the next move was hers or his.
“Would you like to come in?” she asked, and the words did not feel like an invitation with strings attached, but something simpler, a continuation of the pleasure she had found in his company.
Evan grinned and said he would. Inside, they settled on the sofa, both pretending the other might not be nervous.
She poured them each a glass of seltzer and asked if he wanted to watch a movie, and he said only if she picked.
She chose a documentary about documentary director hunting down a disgruntled RV salesman who accidentally became a viral video legend for his angry, profane, rants, because it was short and because she wanted to see if Evan would laugh at the same parts she did.
He did. They watched the film at a careful distance, then closer, then with her legs tucked sideways and her head against his chest. At eleven o’clock, she told him she was tired.
Evan stood and helped her up, kissed her once before the door and again in the hallway, then left without asking whether he should stay.
Abby locked the door after him and stood for a moment in the dark, listening to the hum of the building and the echo of footsteps receding down the hall.
She realized she was not disappointed to be alone; she wanted to enjoy the anticipation, the slow unfurling of what might be happening between them.
The slow pace suited her. Desire had entered their friendship without consuming every other reason they enjoyed being together, and Evan did not treat restraint as a favor he expected her to repay.
Over the next two weeks, they saw each other four times. One evening ended with Evan asleep for twenty minutes on Abby’s sofa while she read beside him, his head tilted against the cushion and one hand resting near hers.
When he woke, he apologized and tried to leave. Abby made him eat the dinner she had saved before allowing him to drive home.
The hospital pilot had begun three days earlier, and Evan’s team worked in shifts while the new system tracked supplies across six departments. He spoke about the early results carefully, refusing to treat a promising week as proof that years of work had finally succeeded.