Chapter 46: About the Future
Evening. A restaurant a few blocks from Central Perk.
They'd walked slowly from the coffee house, talking more than they had on any previous occasion. The last time they'd spent real time together, the conversation had been a vehicle for something else.
Tonight it was the point, and the difference showed — Andrew talked more, Jade listened differently, and by the time they were seated and looking at menus, they actually knew a few things about each other.
"Have you thought about doing something different?" Jade asked, after they'd ordered. She said it carefully, like someone who'd been working up to the question and wanted to land it right. "Professionally, I mean. I could put in a word at the gym — they're always looking for instructors, and you're better at yoga than half the people teaching it."
She wasn't being condescending. Andrew could see that clearly. She was a practical person, and practicality told her that a food truck and a bar gig were not a foundation. She was offering what she had, which was a connection and a genuine belief that he was capable of more stable things.
"I appreciate that," he said. "But no. The food truck is what I want to do."
Jade looked at him. "Why?"
"Because I like cooking. Actually like it — the process, the problem-solving, watching someone eat something you made and seeing their face change." He shrugged. "That's not nothing."
Jade set her fork down. "But the future—"
"The future is fine," Andrew said, with a calm that apparently read as mysterious because her expression shifted.
He couldn't tell her the specific version of why he wasn't worried about the future — that in a few years Apple stock was going to do something extraordinary, that Microsoft and a handful of other companies were going to reshape what wealth looked like in America over the next two decades, that he had a roadmap no one else had access to and was following it deliberately.
The food truck wasn't a career so much as a first engine — something to generate real income while his investment position built quietly in the background.
He'd already looked into brokerage accounts. The plan was simple and patient and would work if he didn't do anything stupid.
What he said instead was: "We're living right now. If right now is good, isn't that enough?"
Jade looked at him for a moment, then smiled despite herself. She was someone who responded to sincerity over strategy, which made her easy to be honest with even when you were being selectively honest.
"Are you coming to the gym tomorrow?" she asked.
"Every morning. Same as always."
She brightened. "What about after dinner tonight? There might still be time for a movie."
"Let's go find out."
The theater was a few subway stops away. Andrew checked what was playing while Jade looked at the marquee photos with her coat pulled tight against the November cold — it had turned properly cold in the last two weeks, the summer warmth gone completely, the city settling into the gray-and-overcoat phase that lasted until March.
"Bram Stoker's Dracula is opening tonight," Andrew said. He had a loose memory of it — gothic, romantic, the kind of film where the horror and the love story were genuinely tangled together rather than one being decoration for the other.
He glanced at the other side of the marquee. A comedy rerelease. Lighter, safer, the obvious date-movie choice.
He looked back at Dracula.
Jade's face said she'd already noted the comedy and had opinions, but she looked at Andrew and then at the other poster and made a quiet, graceful concession. "Sure, whatever you want."
Andrew, who had been weighing horror enhances closeness through shared adrenaline and arrived at a confident conclusion, bought two tickets for Dracula.
They found their seats — center, fourth row, good sightline — with popcorn and drinks and settled in as the house lights were still up.
"Tomorrow morning, after brunch, we could—"
The lights dropped without warning. The screen blazed to life. Jade's sentence cut off as she startled, a small sound escaping her.
Andrew took her hand in the dark.
"You're okay," he said quietly. "I'm right here."
Jade's grip tightened once, then eased. After a moment, barely audible: "Okay."
Bram Stoker's Dracula opened on a medieval battlefield and moved from there into four hundred years of obsession and grief and the particular violence of loving something you cannot keep.
Andrew watched the first third and found his memory of it sharpening as the film ran — the story reconstructing itself from scattered impressions into something complete. He'd seen it once, a long time ago, in a different life, and it came back the way movies did, in images before details.
Beside him, Jade was entirely absorbed. She tensed during the creature sequences, exhaled with audible relief when they resolved, and somewhere around the midpoint quietly started crying at the love story underneath the horror, which was the whole point of the film if you were watching it correctly.
By the final act, she had migrated steadily leftward until most of her upper body was against his arm, the popcorn forgotten in her lap.
Andrew watched Dracula find what he'd been looking for across four centuries and let the film do what films did.
Outside, the city would still be cold and the November streets would still be mostly empty at this hour.
But the movie was good, and the company was better than expected, and sometimes that was the whole of what an evening needed to be.
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