Chapter 2
THE ALMOST-BOYFRIEND
The word I gave the nurse did not begin in that hallway.
Before the hospital, before the slope, before any of it — there was the pastry.
Third date. He showed up with the pastry in a paper bag.
Not a box. Not a ribbon. A brown paper bag, slightly damp on the bottom from the cream, which he held out to me on the snowy corner of Saint-Denis and Rachel with the expression of a man who was not entirely sure this was a smooth move or a weird one.
"The lady almost didn't sell it to me," he said. "I think she thought I was lying about knowing someone who likes these."
I stood there on the sidewalk, holding a religieuse in January, and my sternum did a thing I was not prepared for.
But first: the version of me that showed up to those dates.
The preparation ritual took two hours. Sometimes two and a half.
Not because I'm high-maintenance — though I absolutely am, but in a way I've carefully rebranded as "having standards" — but because there were steps. There was an order. There was a system.
Step one: outfit. Which sounds simple, except each option had to pass the triple filter — does it look effortful enough to show I care, casual enough to show I don't care too much, and weather-appropriate enough that I won't die on the walk from the métro?
Montreal in January reduces your wardrobe options to "puffy" or "hypothermia," and neither of those is a vibe.
Step two: makeup. The kind that's engineered to look like I'm barely wearing any.
Brown-black mascara, not black-black, because black-black announced itself.
Twenty minutes of foundation, concealer, setting powder, and one careful coat calibrated to communicate I woke up like this, if "this" required a color-correcting primer and a beauty blender.
Step three: the mirror debrief. Turning slowly. Checking angles. Asking myself the question I asked before every date, every job interview, every first impression I'd ever made: Would someone look at this person and think she has her life together?
The answer had to be yes. The answer was always yes. Because I made sure of it.
And then I'd walk out the door, get on the 55 bus or the orange line, and become someone else entirely.
He never questioned it. Why would he?
I should describe him. The sketch version, I mean — the one I was constructing in my head during those first few dates, before everything got rearranged by a hospital bed and an icy slope.
Ethan Morin was — is — a person who takes up more space than he means to. Not in an arrogant way. In a structural way. Wide shoulders. Forearms you get from pulling people out of things for a living.
The first time I saw him was at a vernissage on Saint-Laurent — a friend of a friend's photography exhibit, one of those openings where everyone holds a plastic cup of wine at the exact same angle and pretends to have opinions about composition.
My friend Marc had dragged me. "You need to stop working on Friday nights," he'd said, which was rich coming from a man who answers emails during brunch, but I went because saying no to Marc requires more energy than saying yes.
Marc introduced us how people introduce two humans they don't think will matter to each other: "Nora, this is Ethan. Ethan, Nora. Ethan's a firefighter." Then he wandered off to get more wine.
I remember thinking two things: he looks like he could carry a couch up a flight of stairs without stopping, and his smile does something to his eyes that I find structurally inconvenient.
Laugh lines. Deep ones. The kind that come from finding things genuinely funny, not from performing amusement for social convenience. I could tell the difference.
We talked for maybe fifteen minutes. Pleasant.
Forgettable. A conversation where someone asks what you do and you say "graphic design" and they say "oh, cool" and that's the entire creative exchange.
He mentioned his cats. I mentioned my deadline.
We said "nice to meet you" and that was supposed to be it.
Except two weeks later, I landed a project — community safety branding for a nonprofit — and I needed someone who could walk me through fire safety procedures for the visual storytelling component. And I remembered the firefighter from Marc's vernissage.
I texted Marc: Hey, can I get Ethan's number? I have a work question.
Marc sent it with a winky emoji. I ignored the winky emoji.
I called Ethan. Professional. Breezy. "Hi, we met at Marc's show? I'm working on a design project and I have a few questions about emergency protocols — could I buy you a coffee?"
He said yes.
I told myself it was a work meeting. I told myself this while changing my outfit three times and applying the kind of makeup designed to look like I wasn't wearing any.
The coffee was at a place near his station.
He arrived seven minutes early, which I know because I was twelve minutes early and already hiding in the bathroom pretending I'd just gotten there.
"You're early," he'd said, smiling.
"I was in the neighborhood," I'd said, which was a lie. I lived forty minutes away by bus.
The work question took about four minutes. The coffee took an hour and a half.
On the second date, dinner at a place in Little Italy that I'd picked because the lighting was flattering and they served the portions small enough that I wouldn't have the how am I supposed to eat spaghetti attractively crisis, he'd walked me home in the snow and we'd taken the long way through Parc Jarry because neither of us wanted it to end but neither of us was going to say that.
The snow was the dry kind that stacks on branches like confectioner's sugar, and Montreal looked how it does in the tourism ads — the way that makes you forget about the potholes and the February wind chill that feels like a personal attack.
He walked on the downhill side of the sidewalk. Every time. Without mentioning it.
I noticed. I filed it away in the folder in my brain labeled Things That Are Making This Worse, which was growing faster than the folder labeled Reasons To Be Cautious, which was supposed to be the bigger folder.
And on the walk through the park, with the snow falling into his dark hair and his hands stuffed in his jacket pockets because he'd forgotten his gloves — he was always forgetting his gloves, this man who ran into burning buildings for a living could not remember to bring gloves — he'd said:
"I like walking with you. You don't talk just to fill the space."
Which was ironic, because at that exact moment I was running a silent internal monologue at roughly three hundred words per minute about whether the gap between us constituted "friendly distance" or "someone who's going to kiss me distance" and whether my nose was red in a cute way or a Rudolf way.
I said: "I like silence."
I didn't like silence. Silence terrified me. Silence was the space where someone might look at you too long and see through the whole production.
But he smiled — that structural-damage smile with the laugh lines — and I thought, okay, I can be a girl who likes silence. I can be that. I can be whatever this moment needs me to be.
The first kiss was an accident.
Or at least, that's what we both pretended.
Date four, leaving a screening at Cinéma du Parc — some French film about a woman who moves to the countryside and befriends a goat, which turned out to be more emotional than it sounds and left us both pretending we hadn't gotten misty-eyed over livestock.
We were standing on the sidewalk saying the specific kind of goodbye that means I don't want to leave but I'm not sure I'm allowed to stay, and he'd leaned in to — hug?
Adjust my scarf? Check something on my face?
— and I'd turned my head at exactly the wrong angle, and suddenly there were lips.
Brief. Off-center. His nose was cold against my cheek. I tasted the salt of the popcorn we'd shared and something warm underneath.
He pulled back. I pulled back. We stared at each other for one and a half seconds — I know because I counted — and then we both laughed, and the laugh was the kind of laugh that says that just happened and we're both going to pretend it was an accident because facing it head-on would require a level of emotional vulnerability neither of us has budgeted for tonight.
"Sorry," he said. "That was—"
"No, I— it's fine, I just—"
"The scarf was—"
"Totally the scarf's fault."
We nodded. Like diplomats. Like two adults who had just negotiated a minor international incident via scarf displacement.
I went home and replayed it frame by frame for forty-five minutes before I remembered to take off my coat. My first thought hadn't been about how it felt. My first thought — instantaneous, reflexive, absolute — had been a glance at his face to check whether my lipstick had transferred.
It hadn't. Because it was a transfer-proof matte. Because I'd planned for this.
That night, brushing my teeth, I caught my own reflection and saw a woman who had just experienced her first kiss with someone she genuinely liked, and whose first instinct had been quality control.
Nora, I thought. You are a very specific kind of insane.
The second kiss was deliberate.
Date four and a half — the one that got interrupted when his station called.
We were at a bar in Mile End, one of those places with exposed brick and craft beer menus longer than some novels, which we'd been to twice now because neither of us had formally suggested it but both of us kept ending up there.
He'd been telling me about a call from earlier that week — a kitchen fire in a Villeray triplex, everyone got out fine — but the way he talked about it, the way he glossed over the part where he'd carried someone's cat down two flights of stairs and focused instead on how the cat had spent the entire trip trying to destroy his glove, told me more about him than any direct answer ever had.
He deflected the brave parts. He lingered on the funny parts. He made himself the clumsy character in his own story so he didn't have to be the hero.
Oh, I thought. We're the same disease in different packaging.
Then his phone buzzed. He looked at it. His face did the thing it does when work calls — a micro-expression between resignation and duty, like a light switching from warm to cool.
"I have to—"
"Go. Of course."
My chest tightened — brief, involuntary, gone before I could name it. Be careful, I almost said. But that was a girlfriend thing to say, and I wasn't that, and saying it would mean admitting I'd already started calculating the risk profile of dating someone who runs into buildings that are on fire.
He stood up. Put on his jacket. Paused. Looked at me with an expression I hadn't mapped yet — something between apology and intention.
Then he leaned across the table — not far, because it was a small table, one of those bar tables designed to force intimacy on people who haven't consented to it — and kissed me. On purpose. Deliberately. A real one.
It lasted three seconds. Maybe four. Long enough for me to forget about the lipstick. Long enough for his hand to touch the side of my jaw — light, barely there — and then he was gone, and something in my chest pulled after him before I could tell it not to.
He pulled back, and there it was again — the eyes, the laugh lines, the exact problem I kept pretending I didn't have.
"à bient?t" (see you soon), he said. And left.
I sat there for eleven minutes after he'd gone, staring at my beer, running a full post-game analysis: Was the kiss too short? Did I respond correctly? Was my face doing the right thing? Did I seem surprised? Should I have seemed surprised? Was I supposed to text first or wait for him to —
Somewhere in minute eight, a small, tired voice in the back of my head said: You liked it. Can that be enough?
No, I told it. It cannot. Because liking something has never protected me from ruining it.
After four and a half dates — one coffee that was supposed to be a work meeting, one dinner walk, one pastry delivery, one accidental kiss at the movies, and one deliberate kiss interrupted by a station call-in — this is what we were:
Not together. Not not-together. Going on dates without dating. Existing in the grammatical space between "seeing each other" and "with each other," which in Montreal is wide enough to park a snowplow in and still leave room for ambiguity.
He texted every day. Not a lot — a photo of Poutine looking disgusted, a link to something he thought I'd find funny, a bonne nuit that landed in my phone around 11 PM like clockwork. He never pushed. He never asked what are we. He never tried to close the distance I was so carefully maintaining.
And I — I kept the performance running. I showed up looking effortless. I laughed at the right moments. I was warm but not too warm, available but not too available, interested but not so interested that he could see the machinery behind it.
It was working. We were working. The system was holding.
And part of me — the part that stayed up after brushing my teeth and stared at herself in the bathroom mirror — knew that the system was the problem.
That every layer of mascara was a layer of distance.
That the girl he was texting bonne nuit to every night was a draft I kept revising, and sooner or later the gap between the draft and the real thing would become structurally significant.
But that was a future problem. A problem for when — if — things got real enough to require the truth.
And then Sophie's car slid down a slope, and time ran out at exactly the speed of gravity.
But that's not what keeps me up at night. What keeps me up is this: I had time. We had time. The ice would hold. And I was never going to use it.