Through Glass

Jade

I did not go straight home.

I walked out of Ardsley and turned left instead of right, away from the direction of the nearest cab line, and I just walked. The city at this hour was doing what it always did, loud and indifferent and full of people moving with purpose in every direction, and I moved with them without any particular destination in mind because I was not ready to be alone in my apartment yet with nothing between me and my own thoughts.

The night air was sharp. October in Manhattan had a specific quality to it, clean and edged, and I pulled my coat tighter and kept walking.

I had sat across a room from Hayes Calloway for the better part of two hours tonight. I had watched him sign a bill he did not look at. I had heard his voice for the first time in three years say two words in my direction that meant absolutely nothing. I had felt him walk past me without a glance, and I had sat with all of that and held myself completely together, and now I needed somewhere to put it.

I found a bench outside a small plaza off Sixth Avenue and sat down.

The city moved around me. A couple walked past arguing quietly. A delivery cyclist cut through the intersection without slowing. Two women came out of a restaurant laughing at something, still laughing as they disappeared around the corner.

I sat with my clutch in my lap and my coat wrapped around me, and I stared at the concrete between my feet.

I had built three years on the certainty that I was done with this. Done with Hayes Calloway as anything other than a name I recognized and a chapter I had closed. I had been intentional about it. Every morning I chose Ellis Noir instead of whatever it was I used to feel, and I had done it so consistently and for so long that I had started to believe the choosing was the same thing as not feeling.

Tonight proved it was not.

I had sat eight feet from him for two hours and felt every single thing I had spent three years deciding I did not feel anymore. Not the same way as before. Not with any of the hope or the softness that had existed in me at twenty-two when I was still foolish enough to reach for people who did not want to be reached. This was different. Harder. The feeling had calcified over three years into something that did not have a clean name. Not grief exactly. Not anger exactly.

Something in between that lived in the chest and did not move.

I sat on that bench until the cold worked its way through my coat and into my shoulders. Then I stood up, flagged a cab on Sixth Avenue, and got in.

“West 14th,” I said.

The driver pulled out into traffic, and I leaned my head back against the seat and closed my eyes for a moment. The city moved past in the amber and white of streetlights through my closed eyelids.

I was almost calm by the time we turned onto Hudson Street.

Then the cab slowed.

Ahead of us a light had turned, and the block was backing up, a knot of traffic that happens on side streets when a delivery truck takes a corner too wide. We rolled forward and stopped. Rolled and stopped. I opened my eyes and looked out the window at nothing in particular.

Then I went completely still.

Twenty feet ahead on the sidewalk to my right, Hayes was walking Lena to the entrance of her building.

I knew her building. A converted warehouse on the edge of the meatpacking district, twelve floors of exposed brick and floor-to-ceiling windows that she had moved into two years prior. I had been inside it a hundred times. I had never had a reason to be unable to look at it before now.

Hayes walked beside her with one hand in his pocket, unhurried, his head turned slightly toward her as she said something. The entrance canopy of her building threw a clean white light over both of them. Lena had her hand on his arm the way she had at dinner, easy and familiar.

I could not look away.

I sat in the back of that cab with the window between me and the sidewalk, and I watched them stop at her entrance. Lena turned toward him. She was still talking, her face tilted up toward his, and even from here I could see the brightness in it. Hayes listened with the same composed patience he gave everything. His expression did not change, but he did not step back either. He stood there and let her talk, and that willingness to simply be present with her was its own kind of intimacy.

The traffic moved two car lengths forward and then stopped again.

I pressed my thumbnail into my palm.

Lena finally reached up and touched his jaw briefly, lightly, the unselfconscious gesture of someone who had earned that right, and then she pulled her hand back and walked toward the entrance. She turned at the door and said something else. He nodded once. She went inside.

The door closed behind her.

Hayes stood on the sidewalk alone.

He did not move immediately. He stood with his hands in both pockets now, looking at nothing specific, and there was something in that stillness that I recognized from years of watching him exist in rooms from a careful distance. He always looked like this when he was by himself. Like he was somewhere inside his own head that nobody else had access to.

The cab finally moved forward.

I turned my face forward and looked at the back of the driver’s headrest, and I kept it there until we pulled up outside my building and I could get out and go inside and be done with this entire evening.

I paid the fare and stepped onto the sidewalk.