“Ouch,” he said with a wince.
“Yeah. I went through that semester in a fog. Fortunately, I already had almost all the credits I needed to graduate and just had a few classes I needed to focus on. That’s the main reason I didn’t come to the city when my friends did after graduation. I think a part of me was still hoping he’d come to his senses and want to get back together again, and I wanted to be nearby when he did. Then one day it was like someone flipped a switch, and I suddenly didn’t care anymore. It was all gone.”
“That was when you came to New York?”
“I was looking for a fresh start, I guess, and I felt like I’d held myself back for too long, so I needed to work overtime to make up for it.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know his answer, but I felt it was only fair that I should ask, “And you?”
He studied his plate, pushing the tines of his fork through the sauce. “I don’t think so, not really. I did date some in college, but I don’t get close to others easily. I might have had feelings, but it was difficult for me to show them, and by the time I got the courage to show or tell someone how I felt, she’d have given up on me and drifted off. That’s why it’s good we met at work. That way, I had a chance to get comfortable with you before you’d expect me to say or do anything.”
“I never imagined someone like you would be into someone like me.”
He seemed genuinely surprised. “Really? Why not?”
Embarrassed now, I focused on the piece of bread I was shredding into crumbs. With a shrug, I said, “Because guys generally don’t notice me that way, so I don’t expect them to, especially not guys who look like you and who are successful. You could have anyone you wanted, so I don’t expect you to want me.”
The look he gave me nearly stopped my heart with its intensity. “You should see what I see.”
It was a good thing I was sitting down or I might have swooned and hit the ground from the way he said that. I was dying to ask what he saw, but that would have been fishing for compliments. I settled for blinking back tears.
Fortunately, he said without prompting, “You’re intelligent and perceptive, and you’re really lovely in a way that goes straight to your soul. I don’t have to worry about you losing your looks because no matter what changes on the outside—the color of your hair, your skin, your size—it won’t change your essential loveliness.”
Impulsively, I leaned over and kissed him. “And that’s why I love you,” I whispered. “One of many reasons. But, wow.”
He turned bright red and abruptly changed the subject. “Do you want to get dessert?”
“Not now. Maybe we’ll stumble across a place that looks good on our way home, and then I’ll be hungrier for it.” Plus, at the moment my stomach was too busy doing cartwheels of joy for me to imagine eating anything.
We left the restaurant snuggled together, his arm around my shoulders. “I think this has been the best first date I’ve ever been on,” I said. Well, aside from having a creepy audience the whole time, but at least the restaurant didn’t burn down and a fight didn’t break out. Even better, McClusky seemed to have given up on catching Owen doing something evil and had left after he finished his dinner.
“It was good, wasn’t it? We’ll have to do it again. Not the first date part. We can’t do that again. But another date, yes.” He sounded as flustered as I felt.
We walked in the general direction of my apartment, and then at one corner he stopped, turned to face me, and kissed me. Just when I was getting into it, he whispered in my ear, “We must have done a pretty good job of convincing him we’re not a danger because our friend is heading in a different direction.”
“Time to turn the tables?”
“You’re reading my mind.”
We lingered a few moments more, then turned and headed down the crosstown street Mr. Gray had taken, keeping far enough behind him that he wouldn’t spot us. The streets weren’t terribly crowded, but there were enough people out to allow us to blend in, though I wondered if they were real or illusion. Surely there weren’t that many people imprisoned here. If they were illusions, would he know the difference between the illusions and us? We might have been more conspicuous than we thought.
But he didn’t seem to notice us as he turned to go uptown. We were getting close to the prison’s boundaries, where we’d looped back to Lincoln Center, but he didn’t slow down. At the last crosstown street, he turned again and headed into a tiny park on the corner, one of those Manhattan pocket parks filling the gap where a building once had been. There was a tall fence around the park and a gate that closed and locked behind him.
