4. Fated Mates
4
Fated Mates
ROSE WAS LIKE an encyclopedia of the night. She knew exactly what restaurant had the best deconstructed burger, and which warehouses housed the most recent silent rave. (And how to get there.) She knew which cellar jazz bars made the best sidecars and the best diner for 3:00
A.M.
hangover cures and the cheapest cocktails at the local artisanal bar where the next Franzen lamented about not having the time to pen his Great American Novel. She came from a small town in Indiana, with only a duffel bag and money stuffed into her shoes, and somehow, she’d made New York City her home in a way I never could.
I think it was the stars. I missed the stars too much. Especially the way they looked from the brick steps of my parents’ front porch.
There really wasn’t a sight like it.
There also wasn’t a sight like whatever murder back alley Rose led me to that night. There were three streetlights, and every single one of them flickered like they were all auditioning for the world’s
most cliché horror movie. I followed Rose down the narrow alley, one hand stuck in my purse, around my pepper spray.
“You’re going to murder me,” I said. “That’s it, isn’t it? You want my Gucci crossbody bag.”
She snorted. “I don’t know how many times I have to tell you that it’s fake.”
“You can barely tell.”
“Yeah, if you close your eyes.” Then she stopped at what I realized, a moment later, was a door, and knocked.
“Who are your murder accomplices?” I asked. “Is it Sherrie from HR? Or my new hunky editor—”
The almost-hidden door gave a creak and swung open to reveal a tweed-dressed grad student with small round glasses and gelled-back hair. Rose motioned with her head for us to go inside, and I followed her.
I didn’t know what I expected, but it definitely wasn’t a narrow low-lit bar with wooden round tables. It was crowded, but everyone was whispering, as if they didn’t want to break the mood, so it was surprisingly quiet. Rose found us a table near the back, a single flickering candle in the center. At the front of the bar, where we came in, there was a stage with a microphone and a single amp. The crowd was a strange amalgamation of tweedy-professor types and boho artists who painted themselves naked and pressed their tits to a canvas to make art. Some of those art pieces were on the walls, actually.
“What
is
this place?” I asked, baffled.
“Colloquialism,” she replied.
“Bless you.”
She rolled her eyes. “A bar, Florence. It’s a bar.”
I looked for a menu on the table, or maybe it had fallen to the ground—but there wasn’t one. “I’m definitely not cool enough for this.”
“You are
more
than cool enough,” she replied, and when the bartender slipped out from behind the slab of cherry oak that served as a bar to greet us, Rose ordered something that sounded very fancy.
“Oh, I’m good with Everclear—”
Rose put a hand on my arm, giving me a warning look, because the last time we’d gotten drunk on Everclear was in college and it had been dumped into a tub of Jungle Juice. Neither of us remembered how we’d gotten from Bushwick to the Lower East Side that night, but some mysteries were better left unsolved.
I shifted uncomfortably at the table, feeling so incredibly out of my element in a too-tight black dress, ordering a too-expensive cocktail, in a quiet hole-in-the-wall bar full of people who probably all were so much cooler than me. I was half-afraid someone would come up and ask for my artistic credentials, and when I took out my Costco card and a cardboard-printed membership to a smutty book club—
Well.
Much like with Ben Andor, I feared I was not tall enough to ride this ride.
Rose slipped a credit card out from her glittery silver clutch and handed it to the bartender. “Put everything on this, please.”
The bartender took her card with a nod and left.
Everything?
How long were we going to stay? I guessed it didn’t matter anymore, did it? We could stay all night, or only a few minutes, and I would still wake up tomorrow not knowing how to write that scene. The bartender returned with two very fancy drinks named the Dickinson, and Rose held hers up to cheers with me. I stared at her like she was no longer my roommate, but an alien entity who had assumed my dear Rose’s smokin’-hot body. She gave a one-shouldered shrug. “What? It’s a Mastercard.”
“I thought you were trying to get
out
of debt.”
“Florence Minerva Day, you deserve someone to take you out and treat you nice once in a while.”
“Are you going to take me back to your place and have your way with me after?” I teased.
“Only if I get to be the little spoon and you let me make you pancakes in the morning before I leave and never call you again.”
“Perfect.”
“Cheers,” she said, raising her cocktail. “To a good night.”
“And a good tomorrow,” I finished.
We clinked our cocktails together. The drink tasted like strawberries and awfully expensive gin. Definitely not the ten-dollar handle I used to buy at the bodega in college. This stuff was dangerous. I took a larger gulp as a woman in a brown shawl stood from one of the tables near the front and made her way toward the microphone.
“Is this an open mic or something?” I asked.
Rose took another sip of the Dickinson. “Sorta.”
“Sorta . . . ?”
Before Rose could reply, the woman in the brown shawl leaned in toward the microphone and said, “Thank you all for staying with us through our break. Now, for our next reading, I’d like to welcome Sophia Jenkins,” she said in a soft voice that reminded me of a patient kindergarten teacher.
People snapped as she relinquished the mic and a brown-skinned woman with short gray hair came up to the microphone and took out a journal.
“It’s a
poetry reading
?” I whispered to Rose.
“A reading of anything, really,” my best friend replied with a half shrug. “I figured you needed some inspiration. Writing’s lonely, I hear. It’s nice to listen to other people’s words.”
The woman’s short story was about a fish in the ocean who dreamed of being a siren, or maybe she was a siren who thought she was a fish. It was beautiful, and simple, and the entire bar had quieted to listen.
When she was done, everyone snapped politely.
I didn’t realize I needed that until this moment. Just quiet art, spoken to quiet people to appreciate. No secrets. No exchange. No expectations. “You’re a really good friend, Rose Wu.”
She grinned. “You’re right, and any good friend would tell you to go up next.”
“What?”
“I said what I said.”
I hesitated, but it didn’t sound like a terrible idea, when all day writing had felt like pulling teeth. The artisanal Dickinson helped. I
could
go up there. I could read something that I jotted down on my phone a while back. I could put a little bit of creativity into the world that seemed to want to suck it from your very marrow.
I could go up there and be someone—anyone—other than Florence Day tonight.
Because Florence Day would be curled up on the couch with a bowl of mac and cheese, her laptop balanced precariously on a pillow on her lap, trying desperately to write a story she didn’t believe in. Because storybook love only existed for a lucky few—like my parents. They were the exception to the rule, not the rule itself. It was rare, and it was fleeting. Love was a high for a moment that left you hollow when it left, and you spent the rest of your life chasing that feeling. A false memory, too good to be true, and I’d been fooling myself for far too long, believing in Grand Romantic Gestures and Happily Ever Afters.
Those weren’t written for me. I wasn’t the exception.
I was the rule.
And I guess I finally understood the kinds of lies I told people with my witty prose and promise of a happy ending. I promised them that they were the exception. And every time I looked at that blinking cursor in my Word document, trying to unite Amelia and Jackson, all I could see was my reflection on the screen.
The reflection of a liar.
But for one night—one moment—I didn’t want to be that girl I saw in the reflection of my computer screen. I wanted to go back. To pretend that there was true love waiting for me somewhere out in the world. That souls separated by space and time could come crashing together with the force of a single kiss. That the impossible was not quite out of reach. Not for me.
That there was love, true and fierce and loyal, in a world where like called to like . . . and I was no longer the rule.
Where I was the exception.
As if the universe answered, I stood when the emcee called for another volunteer, another person to bare their heart. And so did someone else. Someone near the front of the bar, where the tables were so tightly packed the tweed suits blended together.
I froze.
“Oh, my!” the emcee cooed. “What a treat. Which one of you’d like to go first?”
The man in question turned to see who else had volunteered. Our eyes met. I knew then that it
was
him.
I could recognize him anywhere.
Even after a hundred years, after I’d scrubbed my brain of everything he was, I would know him.
Platinum-blond hair and a loose-cut V-neck and tight jeans and a birthmark just below his left ear in the shape of a crescent moon that I had kissed so many times my lips hurt just thinking about all of the nights I rubbed them raw, trying to forget about it. About
him
.
It was the universe telling me that I couldn’t forget. That if love was true, then love was a lie. That I had been happy once, happy then, but not happy forever. Because that wasn’t my story. That even my stories weren’t mine.
Perhaps they never were.