Chapter 47: About Them
"So what did you think?" Andrew and Jade walked hand in hand on the sidewalk outside the theater.
The premiere crowd was still dispersing around them — small clusters of people debating plot points, couples angling for cabs, the general pleasant chaos of a Friday night in the city after a movie lets out.
"It was good," Jade said, in the careful tone of someone choosing the safest available answer.
Andrew had been talking for about three minutes — something about Dracula's characterization in the second act, a detail about the production design — before he registered that Jade had been listening politely rather than actually participating. He stopped mid-sentence.
"You didn't like it," he said.
Jade looked up. "I was listening—"
"I know you were listening. You were being very kind about it." He stopped walking and turned to face her under the streetlight. "You don't have to do that. If you didn't like it, you can just say so."
"I didn't not like it," she said, which was technically true. She hadn't disliked it so much as she'd spent ninety minutes waiting for it to be over. Horror wasn't her thing. Neither was tragedy. She'd known that going in and had said yes anyway because she hadn't wanted to be the person who vetoed the plan.
"Next time, tell me what you actually want to see," Andrew said.
Jade looked at the sidewalk. Her face had gone slightly pink. "I just figured — you picked it, and it seemed important to you."
"It was a movie. Nothing about it was important." He reached over and tucked a strand of hair back from her cheek, a small, unhurried gesture. "I'd rather know what you actually think."
Jade opened her mouth to say something and he kissed her before she got there.
When they broke apart she looked a little dazed, which he found genuinely charming.
"I'm not great at considering other people's preferences," he said. "I'm sorry about that."
"I like it when someone makes a decision," Jade said, and then seemed to hear herself saying it and looked briefly uncertain about whether she'd said too much.
Andrew laughed — a real one, unguarded. The feminist movement was currently at a particular peak in American cultural life, and I like it when someone makes a decision was the kind of statement that could get you into a spirited argument at most dinner parties. Jade appeared to be entirely unaware of this, which was part of what made her easy to be around.
"What?" She looked at him, genuinely puzzled by the laugh.
He kissed her again instead of explaining.
They walked the rest of the way to her building slowly, the way people walk when neither of them is in a hurry to get where they're going. The November air had developed an edge — not brutal yet, but no longer just cool. The streets were thinner than they'd been an hour ago.
At the bottom of her steps, Andrew stopped and let go of her hand.
Jade went up two steps and turned, reading the situation.
"Let's take it slow," Andrew said. He meant it, even though part of him recognized the irony of meaning it. He'd been thinking, lately — more than was his usual habit — about patterns. About the ways people replicated what they'd learned, without deciding to, without even noticing. He didn't want to be living on autopilot. He wanted to actually choose things.
This was one of the things he was choosing.
Jade stood on the step and looked at him for a moment. Then something in her expression settled, like something had been confirmed rather than denied.
"Okay," she said, and she meant that too.
She went to the door, put her key in, and looked back once with the expression of someone who is pleased and isn't trying very hard to hide it. Then she was inside.
Andrew stood on the sidewalk and let out a long breath.
Eleven o'clock. November. The city had gone quiet in that particular way it did on cold weeknights when people had somewhere warm to be and had gone there. A few cabs. A couple walking fast, collars up. The amber light of streetlamps on wet pavement.
He started walking.
"Andrew!"
He stopped.
Looked up.
Jade was at the window of the third floor — she'd sprinted up two flights in under a minute, and was slightly out of breath, leaning on the sill with her hair falling forward, face flushed from the run and the cold air coming in.
She looked at him for a moment, gathering herself.
"I like you," she said. Clearly enough to carry to the street.
Andrew looked up at her in the lit window, and felt something in his chest go unexpectedly warm.
"I like you too," he said. Equally clear.
The windows around them, which had been dark, contained a brief explosion of responses:
"Some of us are sleeping!"
"Oh my God, seriously—"
"Take it inside!"
Something incomprehensible from the second floor right that might have been a curse in two languages.
Andrew turned and walked very quickly, and then ran, for three blocks straight, before the sounds faded behind him. He didn't stop until he was far enough away to safely slow to a walk, at which point he took two deep breaths, felt the cold air clean in his lungs, and started laughing.
He felt good. Light in the specific way that comes from a night that went the right direction without being forced there.
In his previous life he'd sat at a desk for years with the feeling that his body was something he carried around rather than inhabited — heavy, underused, a container for a brain that spent most of its time looking at spreadsheets. Running three blocks without thinking about it, feeling his legs work and his lungs respond and the cold air just being cold air rather than a problem — that was still new enough to notice.
He was still smiling when he turned a corner two blocks from his building and almost didn't register the figure sitting at the entrance to the alley.
He slowed down.
The first flakes of snow were just starting to fall — tiny, light, barely there, drifting down in the amber light. Early for the season. The kind that made you look up before you understood why.
The figure at the alley entrance didn't move.
Andrew stopped.
"Hey," he said. "You okay?"
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