Just One Night 1_ The Stranger(15)

And right then I knew Dave and I were alike. He followed the rules. He was responsible, pragmatic—he wasn’t governed by temptation or rash whims. Dave was steady. And standing there by his side, a Harvard grad with a mountain of student loan debt and not a single job offer from a company I had any desire to work for, well, steady seemed nice . . . even sexy.

And I had wanted to be near him, too.

He pushes the rose farther forward so now the petals are touching the base of my neck. The gesture brings me back to the present.

“Don’t change, Kasie,” he says. “You’re the only thing about this city that makes it bearable. When I’m with you, I feel like I’m not really so far from the town where I grew up. When I’m with you, it feels like home.”

And now he takes another step forward; the rose remains where it is, delicate petals against my skin. “Don’t change. Please don’t change.”

This is the man who I wanted to blame for my own misbehavior. This is the man who I betrayed twice in one week. This is the man who sees me as I want to be seen. In his eyes I’m a lady, a deadly weapon in a designer bag. Dave sees the aspiration of what I want to be while Mr. Dade sees the woman I’ve been running from. Dade sees the version of me that I tried to bury in a garment bag.

I should have seen that, should have understood before I accepted the invitation to digress.

I have never had to search for my role in life. It’s always been assigned to me. By my parents, my teachers, by this man with his white, white roses. My sister chose a different path. No one in my family talks about her anymore. Like the Ancient Egyptians who would erase the image, and names of the gods who had fallen out of favor, my family has simply erased my sister from our lives. I live the life I’m expected to live and I’m loved for it. Why change patterns now?

“I’m going to buy you a ring today,” Dave says.

And I nod and smile.

* * *

STORE AFTER STORE, ring after ring, none of them feel right. One’s too heavy, another too murky. Diamond after diamond, each one is sharp enough to cut glass. Each one of them speaks to a convention that dates back to the fifteenth century. A history splattered with blood and greed. There are more innocent traditions. In colonial times, men would give women thimbles as an expression of eternal companionship. I wouldn’t know what to do with a thimble.

But I’m not sure I know what to do with a diamond, either.

“Maybe another stone?” I suggest, eying the bold red of a ruby.

The woman behind the counter smiles the smile that all salespeople smile when they smell money. “It’s untreated.” She pulls the ring out of the glass case and hands it to me. “Just pulled out of the ground, cut and polished.”

Dave wrinkles his nose. He doesn’t like the sound of this but I’m entranced. I hold the gem up to the light.

“All rubies have their little imperfections,” the saleswoman continues. “Incursions of rutile needles. We call them silks. The ruby is a more complex stone than the diamond. Their imperfections distinguish them.”

Silks. I warm to the term. Even the imperfections are made to sound elegant.

“We want a diamond,” Dave says definitively. “It’s more . . . pure.”

I don’t know if that’s true. Decades of oppression of South Africans verses the brutish military dictatorship of the ruby-rich Myanmar. Injustice and pain all for pretty little stones that are supposed to symbolize love. Still, maybe that’s fitting when you consider the actual nature of love.

“Would it be so inappropriate for us to do something different?” I ask Dave.

Dave hesitates. I can see the conflict in his eyes. I know he’s measuring the size of his guilt over last night’s rudeness against his true wishes.

But the guilt wins. “If you really want the ruby, you should have it.” He kisses my cheek and slips his arm around my tensed shoulders. “I want you to be absolutely and truly happy.”

As I slip the ruby onto my finger I wonder if it’s wise to wish for anything as fleeting and insubstantial as absolute happiness.

* * *

HOURS LATER AND minutes after Dave has gone off to play racquetball with one of his firm’s partners, I sit at home, contemplating . . . well, everything.

I don’t have the ring with me. The price had exceeded the budget Dave had carved out. So we had walked away; he told the saleswoman he wanted to think about it, and she had assured us both that she would talk to her manager to see if she could get us a slightly lower price. Dave told me it was just the first step in a bargaining process, that the markup on gemstones was so high, not haggling was an act of audacity. But I would have my ring. He would put it on my finger and it would stay there . . . forever. Just as we had always planned.