The Seven Year Slip

AND THE SUMMER SPUN on.

Humid June mornings finally gave way to stormy July afternoons, washing into golden-colored evenings, and Iwan had truly disappeared. I kept looking, though, thinking maybe I could find him on the crowded sidewalk or dining at a table in an upscale but unpretentious restaurant in Chelsea or the West Village that might’ve fit his homegrown personality, but he was always just a bit too far out of my reach. I was looking everywhere for someone who—above everything else—didn’t want to be found. If he did, then he wouldn’t have made it so hard, and I was beginning to wonder how much these last seven years had changed Iwan. I wondered if I’d recognize him on the street.

I wondered if I’d already met him, if we’d sat beside each other on a subway somewhere, if we’d shared a joke in a dark bar, if I’d eaten his food, accidentally stolen his seat on a crowded bus.

Maybe it was time to let this go.

So, slowly, I stopped looking as hard.

Besides, my friends were very good at distracting me—well, dragging me into their schemes, anyway.

The hallway of Strauss & Adder Publishers was dark until I moved in my cubicle, and the motion-sensor lights activated. Everyone had left early for the Fourth of July weekend, so I stretched and enjoyed the silence. Summer was always humid in the city, and my aunt’s apartment didn’t exactly have central air. The window unit worked as best it could, but it never quite shrugged off the heat.

“Clementine!” Fiona singsonged, finally dragging Drew out of the bathroom, where they had both been for the last twenty minutes, changing into their fine-dining attire. “Are you ready?”

“We’re going to be late,” I replied, planting my hands on the armrests of my chair and pushing myself to my feet. Fiona had conned me into a terrible purple dress that made me feel like a grape about to be squashed into wine. “We can just call him and tell him we’re not going.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Drew agreed, fixing her tie. She wore a fresh pink dress shirt with white suspenders and dark-wash skinny jeans. Gone was her tried-and-true tweed jacket and comfortable slacks. The things she did for her wife—the things we both did for Fiona. “We can just say we all caught a cold.”

I pointed to her. “Exactly.”

Fiona rolled her eyes. “We are going. This guy is perfectly nice! He lives in our building. He even pays his own rent, which is rare because we live in a building full of hedge fund babies. And you,” she added, snapping her gaze to me, “are going to have fun.”

As I had feared, Fiona hadn’t forgotten about our conversation on the subway, and she’d asked about Iwan a few days later. I couldn’t exactly tell her that my aunt’s apartment decided to stop bringing us together, so I never got his name, and my almost stalkery googling had resulted in absolutely nothing, so instead I told her something I now absolutely regretted—

“The timing wasn’t right.”

She immediately assumed that he was engaged to someone else, or getting a divorce, or moving to Australia, so she took it upon herself to do the one thing that best friends were wont to do:

Make me feel better.

So I slipped on my heels and let her drag me to the elevator and down into the waiting Uber. The restaurant my date had chosen was on the Upper West Side, a small Italian place that grated your cheese for you right at your table, and my date in question was—indeed—incredibly nice. Elliot Donovan had a kind smile. He was tall and broad, with a head full of curly black hair and chocolate eyes, and he talked about books, and events he’d gone to at the Strand, and his favorite authors. Fiona and Drew sat at a table on the other side of the restaurant, but I could feel Fiona’s gaze on me the whole time—and so could my date.

Halfway through dinner, he leaned forward a little and said, “Fiona is a bit intense, isn’t she?”

I shoved a piece of bread into my mouth before I could say anything I’d regret, and instead mumbled after a moment, “She has her heart in the right place.”

“Oh, I’m not disputing that,” he replied, but then he took a deep breath and said, “but I don’t think this is going to work out, is it?”

On paper, Elliot was perfectly good. He was the exact kind of man I wanted to date—hardworking, with a good job and a decent book collection. He had a nice sense of humor and a lovely laugh, but when I looked at the menu, all I could think of was Iwan telling me about a romance in chocolate, a love letter in a string of fettucine, and I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay! I have to admit, I came here hoping it’d be a good distraction,” he added in embarrassment.

“There’s someone else?”

He nodded. “And you?”

“Yeah, but the timing was all wrong.”

He laughed. “That’s always the most tragic, isn’t it?” Then he glanced at Fiona and Drew’s table again—and Fiona had the gall to pretend like she was looking at the wine menu instead—and said, “We can pretend for your friend’s sake, though, yeah? Give them a good show?”

I smiled. “Absolutely. And then we can pretend to get in a fight at the end of dinner, and never talk to each other again.”

“Ooh, I like that idea. What should the fight be about?”

To which I asked, “What is your hottest book take?” Because I knew that a man who was that well-read, who had lived his entire life in the upper crust of society, working on Wall Street, absolutely had a good one.

And oh, he did.

FIONA THREW HER HANDS into the air as we descended into the bowels of the subway. After our fake fight, he’d caught a cab back to his apartment, and Drew, Fiona, and I walked to the subway station. “I can’t believe you picked a fight over Dune!”

“Look, it’s not my fault his opinion was wrong,” I replied, trying to bite in a grin.

“He was perfect—perfect! And then you had to go and pick a fight,” she went on, ranting, waving her hands in the air. “I am disrespected! Humiliated! I have to see him in the elevators in my building. I’m going to have to look him in the eyes and know that he thinks Dune is the best sci-fi book of all time.”

Drew shook her head. “The disrespect to Anne McCaffrey.”

“Look, I will not have some dead man hogging up my shelf space. Real estate in New York is already outrageous,” I said matter-of-factly.

Fiona narrowed her eyes. “You say that and yet you own four different editions of Lord of the Rings.”

“I could have five,” I threatened, and she threw up her hands again.

“Fine! Fine, I’ll vet them first, and then we’ll try again—”

I grabbed her hand gently, and we stopped in front of the turnstile. There weren’t a lot of people in the station at this time of night, and those who were just went around us. “How about let’s not?”

Her eyebrows knitted together in confusion. “What do you mean?”

“I’m not really looking right now—I don’t want to look right now,” I amended. “I appreciate all of this, but . . . I’m over Iwan, I promise. I’m really okay alone.”

And I meant it. Even though my parents were paragons of a successful romance—they fit each other’s quirks and hang-ups like puzzle pieces—my aunt had lived alone almost her entire life, and it wasn’t all that bad. Rhonda had a successful life, and she didn’t have a significant other, either. They were shining examples that I could do it, too. I just needed to concentrate on work right now, like Rhonda did. Besides, I was tired of this whole dance. It wasn’t that I didn’t want a partner—I did; thinking about going through the world alone made my stomach drop into my toes—but I didn’t really want to look right now.

I didn’t want to sit across from another decent man and not feel anything and plot how best to end the date so we never had to see each other again.

Drew pulled her arm through her wife’s and added quietly, “She’ll find someone when she’s ready.”

Fiona let out a sigh. “Fine—but until then, you’re our third wheel. And you’re going to like it.”

I raised my hands in surrender. “I would love to be your sidecar.”

“Good,” she replied, though she sounded a little defeated. She looked like she wanted to say something else, but then she thought better of it and dug her MetroCard out of her purse. We rode the 1 downtown to the Q together, and then they got off at Canal to transfer to the R, and I waved them goodbye.

Fiona’s heart was in the right place, so I couldn’t quite blame her. And besides, the food tonight was pretty good. Not as good as the place Drew had taken us last month—the Olive Branch—but it was nice.

The subway alert announced the doors closing, and I sank down into my seat, finally letting my walls down. My feet hurt in my shoes, and I couldn’t wait to escape my Spanx.

Keep moving forward, keep my eyes straight ahead, that was the plan. Nothing stayed—that was something I should have expected, something I should have remembered back when I met Iwan.

I was fine.

Beside me, two girls bent their heads in to whisper, looking at their phones. “Oh my god, MoxieGossip says he was just spotted in SoHo. Coming out of his restaurant.”

“The new one?”

“Yes!”

“Was he with anyone?”

“No! I think he’s single again.”

They tittered together, looking at an Instagram story, and I pulled out a pen and the guide to New York City that I had swiped last month and opened it up to the section about the subway. There I began to sketch the girls bent together over their phones, and settled in for the ride uptown.