2. Aster
ASTER
I’m twelve minutes early because the anticipation has been unbearable and I decided at some point in the last week that Daniel is the kind of man worth being twelve minutes early for.
Six weeks. That’s how long it took for him to become—not just someone I was messaging, not just an app match I hadn’t yet filtered into the disappointment pile—but someone I actually thought about between conversations.
Someone whose responses I read twice. Someone I described things to that I’ve never described to anyone, including the therapist I stopped seeing in year five of a marriage I was trying to save by being tactful.
I told Daniel I wasn’t always good at being tactful. He said that was fine. He said the thing I actually needed was someone who could handle what I was being tactful about.
I’ve been thinking about that sentence for three weeks.
The restaurant is warm and low-lit. I’m wearing the navy dress that makes me feel like myself—the one I reach for when I want to start something right.
I give my name to the host and he leads me toward the back—table twelve, already occupied, and I’m walking toward it telling myself not to look up yet, not to do the thing where you assess from ten feet out and spend the first minute recalibrating from whatever you’d imagined —
I look up.
Rye Calloway is sitting at table twelve.
My stride breaks. Actually breaks—I take an extra half step and have to compensate. The host has already drifted away. I’m standing five feet from a table that has Rye Calloway at it in the restaurant where I’m supposed to be meeting someone named Daniel for the first time.
Rye and Connor were best friends from college.
Rye was at our wedding. Rye was at every birthday, every New Year’s, every dinner party where Connor drank too much and talked too loud.
Rye sat at the end of the table being quiet in a way that always made me feel like he was the only other person in the room who was listening.
“Rye.”
He looks up.
He looks at me the way he’s always looked at me—like he’s reading something, like I’m information he already has but is confirming. I’ve always found it slightly unnerving. I used to think it was just the way he looked at everyone. I don’t know what I think now.
“Aster.”
His phone is face-up on the table, screen lit, something open on it. He slides it toward me.
It’s the dating app. The profile. My profile and—Daniel’s, the one I’ve been messaging for six weeks. And the messages. All of them. My messages. Every one.
I read the first three lines and my stomach drops so completely and thoroughly that for a moment I’m not sure I can stay standing.
“Sit down,” he says. “I’ll explain everything.”
“That’s my—” I stop. Start again. “Every message was?—”
“Me.” He holds my gaze. “Every message was me.”
I should sit. I don’t sit. I reach for my bag with both hands, hold it against my chest, and think about the messages in week four, the things I said to “Daniel” that I only said because I thought it was safe, because he was a stranger, because there were no stakes, because I’d been holding that truth for years and I finally found a container that felt big enough.
He has all of it.
“If I walk out,” I say, “you still have all of it.”
“Yes.”
“The messages. The voice notes. The—” I stop before I say the rest. Before I say the one from week four, the one I sent at nearly midnight about a man and a parking lot and the word sure.
“Yes,” he says again. Just that. Not apologetic. Not threatening. Just a fact he’s laying on the table next to the phone.
“You built a fake profile to?—”
“To reach you. Yes.”
“We’ve known each other for nine years.”
“Eight years and four months.”
“And you couldn’t just?—”
“Could you have heard this from me? Nine years ago? Three years ago? Six months ago the day the divorce finalized?”
I hate that he has a point. I hate that I can feel myself doing the math and arriving at the same answer he has.
The Rye I know—controlled, certain, the quietest person in any room he entered—is not a man I would have received this from in any order that made sense.
This is the only order that makes sense, and I hate that too.
I turn toward the door.
“Aster.”
I walk. I get through the restaurant, I push through the door, I walk to the parking lot that’s mostly empty at 7:15 on a Thursday and I’m digging in my bag for my keys and I hear his footsteps behind me—not hurried, not chasing. Steady. Like he already knows where I’m going.
I get to my car. I put my hand on the door handle. I hear him behind me, feel the air change when he gets close—and then his hand is flat on my door. Palm open, above the handle, on the frame. Not grabbing me. Not touching me. Just there. Between me and the door.
“Move,” I say.
“No.”
I’m breathing too fast. The parking lot is quiet, lit by two overhead lights that leave a long stretch of dark between them. My car is in that stretch. I am standing in the dark with Rye Calloway’s hand on my car door.
“Move or I’ll call?—”
“Your phone is in your bag and you haven’t reached for it.
” He’s behind me, close enough that I can feel the heat of him.
He’s tall—I’ve always registered this about Rye, the sheer mass of him, the way he occupied space in a room without trying.
In a restaurant I could manage it. In a parking lot at 7 PM with my hand on a door he’s blocking, it’s something else entirely.
“You reached for your keys. You went for the car. You want to drive away. You don’t want the police. ”
“You don’t know what I want.”
The silence that follows is exact. It lands between us with weight.
“You wrote me a message on a Thursday at 11:47 PM,” he says. “You sent it and went quiet for twenty minutes and then asked if it was terrible. It wasn’t. You want a man who already knows. You want someone sure enough to take it without asking.” His voice is low, even. “You sent that to me.”
My spine does something complicated. The back of my neck is hot.
“That was for?—”
“For a stranger. I know. I made myself a stranger because that was the only way you’d say it.
” He doesn’t move. The hand on my door doesn’t move.
“I’ve known you for eight years and this is the most honest thing you’ve ever told anyone.
You can be angry that I engineered the scenario. You can’t be angry that I listened.”
“Get away from my car.”
“Tell me to mean it.”
I push at his chest with both hands. He doesn’t move.
Six-two of cybersecurity CEO. Eight years of apparently wanting this.
I am pushing at a wall. My hands are against his chest and I can feel the warmth of him through his shirt, and I tell my hands to push.
They don’t push hard enough. They stay there.
“Your hands aren’t pushing,” he says.
“I’m pushing.”
“You’re feeling. There’s a difference.” His free hand comes to my waist. Just his hand, spanning it. I am five-three. His hand goes almost all the way around and I hate how my body reads that information. Hate it. “You’re shaking.”
“I’m angry.”
“I know. You’re also wet.”
I make a sound. Not a word. Something between fury and—something else.
Something that has been in the message I sent at 11:47, something that has been in the voice notes I sent him while sitting at the kitchen table, something that has been in every version of this fantasy I’ve never told anyone until I told a stranger who was never a stranger.
“Let me go.”
“Tell me to mean it.”
I say stop and he turns me around. My back is against the car now—cool metal through the navy dress.
Rye is in front of me. The parking lot light catches his face and he’s looking at me the same way he’s always looked at me, reading, confirming, but something else now underneath it. Something that isn’t controlled.
I push at his chest again. One hand. The other hand is gripping the front of his shirt.
That second hand. I hate knowing it’s there. He notices it too.
“You wrote about this,” he says, low. “A parking lot. A man who doesn’t ask. A car.”
“Stop.”
“Your back is against a car.” He puts his forearm on the door beside my head.
Caging me. I could go sideways—left, toward the light.
I go left. His other arm comes down on that side too, both arms on either side of me.
I’m enclosed by him in a way that makes it extremely clear what six-foot-two of person means when you are five-three and your hands are in his shirt.
“You said sure. Like your yes was already known information.”
“I said stop.”
“I know what you said.” His mouth is close. I can feel his breath. “Tell me to stop and mean it.”
My thighs press together. My hands are twisted in his shirt—not pushing, holding, which is different, which is a fact my body has decided to announce regardless of what my brain is doing.
“Rye—”
“Mean it.”
I don’t mean it.
He reads that on my face the same way he’s apparently been reading me for eight years through cameras I didn’t know existed, through a profile I thought was a stranger, through six weeks of messages I sent into a dark I thought was empty.
He reads my body over my words—the flush in my neck, my thighs pressing together, the hands that have my grip in his shirt—and he makes a decision I never gave him.
My body’s been making it for me since the moment I read every message was me. Since I understood that the safest I’d felt in years had never been with a stranger at all.
He lifts me. Both hands under my thighs, my back against the car door, and I make a sound against his mouth that isn’t a word—I’m going to say it was in protest and the sound I made was not protest. He catches it with his mouth. I bite his lower lip.
He makes a noise that is not patient, not controlled, not the Rye who sat at the end of dinner tables being the quietest person in the room.
He kisses me back like he’s been waiting for eight years. Which, apparently, he has.