Chapter Thirteen
AVIANCE
I don't tell Petra about the dinner until two days later, which for me and Petra is practically a national secret.
We're in her kitchen, and she's making pasta the way she always does when something important needs to be discussed — with excessive amounts of garlic and a glass of wine she keeps refilling between stirs.
"So," she says.
"So."
"Jayceon."
I take a sip. "He's a client."
"He was a client for approximately forty-five minutes." She turns from the stove. "You've been glowing for two days, Avi. I know what you look like when you've been near someone who actually sees you. You look like that."
I look at my wine glass. "It was just dinner."
"That's fine. Tell me about it."
So I do. I tell her about the way he sat — unhurried, genuinely attentive. I tell her about the moment I told him about Moore and how he didn't make it weird, didn't over-correct into reassurance or perform sympathy. He just received it, and then he offered something honest in return.
I tell her he said I'm not trying to fast-forward to a version of this I've already scripted.
Petra points her wooden spoon at me.
"Aviance."
"I know."
"That is a man who has done some work."
"I don't know anything about him. I've known him for a week."
"So get to know him."
"That's what I'm doing. Wednesday. Ten o'clock."
She turns back to the stove, and I can see her smiling from across the kitchen.
"Client meeting," I say.
"Sure, sweetheart."
I don't argue because she's probably right, and also the garlic smells too good to waste breath defending a point we both know is mostly theater.
The Wednesday meeting is professional.
Jayceon has pulled samples — raw oak, black walnut, white ash — and laid them across the work table in his studio so I can see how the grain reads under the light in his space versus how it'll read under track lighting in the Lantern dining room.
He's made three preliminary sketches for the bench seating and two options for the host stand.
I look at everything methodically. I ask technical questions.
He answers them with precision and quiet enthusiasm that never tips into performance.
When he doesn't know something off the top of his head he writes it down and says he'll follow up, and he does — by five o'clock that same evening, a detailed email with material sourcing and lead times.
He's exceptional at his work.
That's the professional observation. Here is the other one: standing at the table in his studio with morning light coming through the high windows and sawdust on the workbench and coffee in both our hands, I feel easy.
I feel like someone who is allowed to occupy her own body.
I feel, for the first time in a long time, chosen — not by him yet, not in any formal sense, but by the moment, by the fact that I drove here and I'm here and I'm not performing anything and neither is he.
It's small. But it's enormous.
We wrap up the meeting in ninety minutes.
He walks me to the door.
"Thursday there's a vintage architecture exhibit at the Frist," he says, at the threshold. Not a client meeting. Clearly not a client meeting. "I thought you might — given your interest in how space makes people feel."
"I thought you weren't scripting anything."
He smiles. "I'm not scripting it. I'm offering it."
I look at him for a moment. His hands are in his jacket pockets and he's got a small stain of wood stain near his left wrist that he hasn't noticed. He looks patient and hopeful and not at all afraid that I might say no.
"Thursday," I say. "What time?"
"Six?"
"Six."
I walk to my car and I do not look back because if I look back I will probably smile in a way that gives absolutely everything away.
Thursday is not a client meeting and we both know it.
The exhibit is everything I needed it to be — dense with material and intention, full of details that reward looking closely. We move through it slowly, side by side, and the conversation flows the way water moves through familiar channels — without force, without resistance.
At some point in the second gallery, our hands brush.
I don't move mine away.
He doesn't move his.
We walk the rest of the exhibit with my hand in his, and it's so easy and so exactly right that I have to remind myself to breathe normally.
After, we walk along the waterway path outside and the city is doing that thing it does in early evening when the light goes golden and everything feels like a thing worth preserving.
"I want to be clear about something," I say.
He looks over. "Okay."
"I'm not a woman who needs saving. I'm not a project. I'm not — I'm not looking for someone to rewrite the ending of what Moore did by being demonstrably better than him. That's not what this is."
"Okay," he says again, simply.
"I mean it. I've been that version — the one who's grateful for baseline decency because she's been so long without it. I don't want to be her."
"You're not," he says. "I can see that from here."
"What I'm saying is — if this is something, I want it to be because we are specifically choosing each other. Not because proximity filled a need. Not because the timing was convenient."
He stops walking.
I stop too. We're facing each other on the path and the water is behind him and the evening light is doing everything it can.
"I've been thinking about you since the day you walked into my studio," he says.
"Not as a rebound. Not as a warm body in a convenient moment.
I've been thinking about you — the way you move through a room like you're cataloguing it, the way you get quiet before you say something that matters, the way you held your breath when you touched the table and then looked at me like you hadn't meant to show me that.
" He pauses. "I want to choose you specifically.
I want to do it slowly enough that it's real.
But I don't want to pretend I'm not already choosing you, because I am. "
I am looking at him very carefully.
"Jayceon."
"Yeah."
"That's the best thing anyone has said to me in a very long time."
He reaches up and touches my jaw — one hand, light and deliberate — and he tilts my face toward his and kisses me.
It's not frantic. It's not desperate. It's slow and warm and sure, the way everything about him is sure, and I kiss him back with my whole self and the evening holds us there for a moment that feels like a full breath after a long time underwater.
When we pull back he's looking at me like I'm a solved equation he's very pleased about.
"I've been wanting to do that since Wednesday," he says.
"Why didn't you?"
"Because you'd just told me about your marriage and I didn't want to be a man who hears something vulnerable and immediately moves."
I look at him.
"I know," he says.
"You're very—" I start.
"Careful?"
"I was going to say decent," I say. "In the original sense of the word."
He smiles and takes my hand again and we start walking, and I think about the word I chose — decent — and how strange it is that a simple word like that should feel so radical, so specifically targeted, like a word I've been waiting to mean something for a long time.