As if she can read my mind, she cocks an eyebrow at me, but doesn’t say anything. Instead she reaches for her coat and her bag. “You ready to go?”
“I am if you are,” I tell her.
She gives me a smile, and just that smile is enough to wash away months of pain and loneliness.
God, even if I only have just this one night with her—I’ll savor each moment for the rest of my days.
I follow her down the stairs and out the door.
“Where’s your car?” she asks, scanning the street.
“It’s that one,” I say, pointing to a black Volvo sedan.
She raises her eyebrows. “Damn, you really have changed.”
“Oliver wasn’t a big fan of the sports car, and I wasn’t a big fan of muddy paws all over the seats,” I explain. “So I traded it in.”
“Smart,” is all she says in response. I unlock the car and open the passenger seat for her, and she slides in. So far, so good. I think. Though of course we’re only about five minutes in. There’s still plenty of time for me to fuck things up.
The drive to the restaurant takes about fifteen minutes of light conversation that feels charged with electricity.
I keep trying to remind myself that this isn’t a normal first date. I have, after all, already seen her naked. But that only makes things worse, because it sends my mind down a fantasy slip and slide of memories of being inside her, and how much I want that again.
The restaurant is loud and bright, which is exactly why I picked it. I didn’t want low lighting and soft music to give us too much time to get awkward. Sportello is arranged like a high-end diner, with patrons sitting around an enormous bar, the waiters walking around to serve drinks and take orders from behind it, and the kitchen staff preparing all the meals in an open kitchen along the back wall. It’s like being in a Waffle House, if Waffle House made truffle risotto and penne alla vodka from scratch. I give the hostess my name, and she leads us to a spot right in the center, where we’ll have a great view of the chef to distract us from any awkwardness that might occur.
But Cadence has other ideas.
“No private room? No bottle service? My, how you’ve changed,” she says.
“Well, I’ve got a little less money than I used to,” I reply.
“Oh? Where did all that money go, anyway?”
I shrug. “A variety of places. I endowed a scholarship. I put a lot of it towards building the new firm. There’s a small foundation that pays for a lot of the pro bono clients that come through. I gave to quite a few charities.”
“And left yourself with?”
“My salary at Cabot Essex Maxon and the building that houses it. That’s pretty much it.” I shrug, leaving off the fact that it took a lot of convincing to get my financial planners to realize I wasn’t losing my mind or the victim of a brain tumor, and that yes, I really did want to get rid of it all, and no, I wasn’t interested in a tax shelter or other offshore accounts of any kind.
Which, by the way, I discovered was my father’s specialty, and untangling all of those after inheriting the estate took weeks and quite a lot of doing. Turns out giving away money is a lot harder than I anticipated, and required that I pay an awful lot of it to people who absolutely didn’t want to do it.
“And how does it feel to be poor?” She asks. She’s awfully feisty tonight, definitely not into taking any shit from me, or letting any shit slide.
I like it. I like her.
“I’m hardly poor,” I tell her. “Despite my lack of stock options and bonuses, I still have a pretty nice salary. Anyway, what about you? What have you been up to?”
And then the seal is broken. We spend the next hour talking over glasses of pinot noir and bowls of fresh pasta and braised pork shoulder. She tells me that she’s been temping for the last month while she looks for a permanent job, and that she’s been surprised to find that she likes administrative work.
“Turns out I thrive on being organized and organizing for other people,” she explains between bites of risotto.
“And your art?” I ask, thinking back to the canvas in her apartment.
“Frankly, it’s better if my art is separate from my paycheck. It makes it easier to create. To be honest, my painting has never gone better than when I took a seemingly mindless office job. I’ve been working on a series of little city details. I’m only a few works in, and I’m still getting the feel for it, but I’m happy with the direction.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” I tell her, and I am.
She tells me that she managed to scrape together the money to move out of her parents’ house (with a little bonus money her dad snuck her on the side) about a month after she left Maxon Law. She thought about getting roommates, but she managed to find her tiny studio and loves living alone for the first time in her life.