The Blueprint of us

Chapter Two: Coffee and Cross-Examination

The coffee cart outside the building was run by a man named Desmond who'd been serving the same six-block radius of architects, developers, and underpaid junior associates for as long as Adrian had worked in the neighborhood, and who greeted Andrew by name in a way that made it clear this wasn't the first time he'd bought a stranger's rival a peace offering.

"The usual, and whatever he's having," Andrew told him.

"I can order my own coffee."

"I know. I'm being polite. Try to enjoy it, it doesn't happen often."

They took their cups to the low concrete wall bordering the plaza, close enough to the water that the air smelled like salt and diesel and, faintly, the sun-warmed stone under them. It was the kind of July morning that made the whole city look temporarily forgivable — light bouncing hard off the glass towers, gulls wheeling low over the piers, a jogger doing suicidal things with a stroller on the bike path.

"So," Andrew said, stretching his legs out in front of him like a man with nowhere to be, though Adrian knew for a fact he had somewhere to be in nineteen minutes. "Tell me why I'm wrong."

"You're not going to like it."

"I never like anything you say to me. That's not new information."

Adrian turned his cup in his hands, watching the steam curl off it, choosing his words the way he chose the first line on a new drawing — carefully, because the first line decided everything after it. "You design for the skyline. I've seen your renderings for Bellrose — I know people who've seen them, anyway, even if you won't show me directly. Big glass. Cantilevered decks. A landmark building that people will photograph from the Brooklyn side of the river and put on postcards."

"You say that like it's an insult."

"It's not an insult. It's just not what that site needs." He gestured with his cup toward the water, toward the abandoned pier pilings still visible at low tide half a mile down. "That waterfront has been a dead zone for eleven years. Before that, it was working piers — my father poured concrete on three of those buildings when he was younger than I am now. The neighborhood behind it is seventy percent renters, mostly families who've been there two, three generations. If you build something extraordinary and expensive on that shoreline, you don't revitalize the neighborhood. You price it out from underneath."

Andrew was quiet for a moment, which Adrian had learned over the years to read as either him formulating a rebuttal or, more rarely, him actually listening. He could never tell which until Andrew opened his mouth.

"You think I don't know that," Andrew said finally. "You think Reyes and I sat down and said, let's build something beautiful and forget that people live there."

"I think ambition has a way of making people forget things without meaning to."

"That's fair," he admitted, and the admission surprised Adrian more than an argument would have. "But you're wrong about the design. I'm not building a monument on top of that neighborhood. I'm building an anchor for it — something significant enough that the city actually finishes the infrastructure work they've been promising that district for a decade. You know how many times Bellrose has been 'about to be redeveloped' since you were in undergrad? Four. Four different administrations, four different task forces, four sets of renderings that went nowhere, because nothing about the previous proposals was compelling enough to survive a change in mayor."

"So your plan is to seduce the city into finally doing its job."

"My plan," he said, "is to give them something they can't walk away from. You build something quiet and responsible and perfectly reasonable, and I promise you, Adrian, in three years it's back on a shelf while some developer buys the land out from under the whole redevelopment authority and builds luxury condos anyway. I've watched it happen. You build something the city is proud of, something that makes the front page, and you make it politically expensive to abandon."

It was, infuriatingly, not a stupid argument. Adrian hated that about him — that he could make his own self-interest sound like strategy, and that sometimes it actually was strategy, dressed up in the kind of confidence he'd been raised to have and Adrian had had to build for himself, plank by plank, over a decade of being underestimated in rooms exactly like the one they'd both just left.

"You could do both," Adrian said, before he'd fully decided to say it. "Build something ambitious enough to protect the site, and still design the public spaces for the people who actually live there instead of the people who'll visit once for the opening gala."

"Is that an offer to collaborate, Voss? Because I distinctly remember you telling the committee that I don't care about the people who'll use it."

"It's not an offer. It's an observation. You asked why I think you're wrong, and the honest answer is that I don't think your whole vision is wrong. I think it's half a building. It has ambition and no roots. Mine has roots and — " he stopped himself.

"And?" Andrew was watching him now with an attention that felt almost physical, the particular focus he used to bring to critiques back at Pratt, when he'd occasionally forget to be competitive and just be curious instead, and those had always been the moments Adrian had found most dangerous about him.

"And maybe not enough reach," Adrian admitted. "There. Are you happy?"

"Deliriously." But he wasn't smiling the sharp way now. He was looking at Adrian with something quieter, something that made Adrian acutely aware of how close they were sitting, of the fact that Andrew's knee was an inch from his own on the narrow concrete wall, of the small scar through his left eyebrow Adrian had forgotten about until just now — from a bike accident their second year of grad school, he remembered suddenly, when Andrew had shown up to studio with six stitches and refused to explain how it happened until a mutual friend from the year below had gotten it out of him at a party three weeks later. He'd tried to do a track stand on his fixed-gear outside a deadline crit and gone straight over the handlebars in front of two professors.

"You're staring," Andrew said.

"I'm remembering your bike accident."

That surprised a real laugh out of him, short and unguarded. "God. I'd almost successfully buried that. How do you even remember that?"

"It was very good gossip at the time. You'd been insufferable about that bike for a month."

"I was twenty-four and had just moved to the city. Everyone's insufferable about something at twenty-four." He turned his cup in his hands, an echo of Adrian's own earlier gesture, though he doubted Andrew would notice the mirroring. "You weren't, though. You were annoyingly composed even then. I used to think you didn't actually experience stress, you just performed calm so effectively that it became real."

"I experienced plenty of stress. I just didn't let you see it."

"Why not?"

The question landed with more weight than Adrian expected, and he took a moment before answering, watching a ferry cut a white line across the water in the middle distance. "Because you were the person everyone assumed I was competing with unfairly matched against. Old money versus a guy on scholarship. If I ever looked rattled around you, it confirmed what everyone already suspected — that I was out of my depth and just hadn't figured it out yet."

Andrew didn't say anything for a long moment. When he finally spoke, his voice had lost its usual edge entirely. "I never thought that. For what it's worth. I thought you were the best designer in our year, and it used to genuinely irritate me that you didn't seem to know it."

"You had a strange way of showing that you didn't think I was out of my depth. As I recall, you spent most of second year trying to beat me in every crit."

"Because losing to you was the only version of losing I could stand," he said, and then seemed to hear himself say it, and looked, for the first time since Adrian had known him, faintly embarrassed. He glanced at his watch to cover it. "I have to go pitch a room full of people why I deserve a waterfront you clearly think I don't."

"Good luck," Adrian said, and found he meant it more than he wanted to.

Andrew stood, straightened his jacket, and for a moment looked down at him with an expression Adrian couldn't read at all — not the competitive glint, not the practiced charm, something rawer underneath both of those things that he usually kept carefully hidden. "For what it's worth," he said, "if I lose this one, I'd rather lose it to you than to anyone else bidding. That's not a concession, by the way. It's an insult to everyone else in the running."

"That might be the nicest thing you've ever said to me."

"Don't get used to it. Normal service resumes the second I walk into that room." He was already turning to go, portfolio case in hand, when he glanced back over his shoulder. "Dinner. Tonight. Not a date — a debrief. Two people who just put their whole careers on a table deserve to not do the post-mortem alone."

"That sounds like a date with extra steps."

"Call it whatever helps you say yes."

He should have said no. He turned it over in his mind even as the word he actually said escaped him — "Fine" — and watched something loosen in Andrew's shoulders, a flicker of relief he probably didn't intend to let him see, before Andrew turned and walked back toward the building, and toward the committee that was, in a few minutes, going to hear his half of an argument Adrian was no longer entirely sure he wanted to win outright.

He sat with the last of his coffee going lukewarm in his hands, watching the ferry disappear around the point, and reminded himself — sternly, and not very convincingly — that this was still, at its core, a competition. That somewhere in the next few weeks, one of them was going to lose, and that losing to Andrew Calloway, however nicely he dressed up the sentiment, was not something he could actually afford, professionally or otherwise.

He just wasn't sure, anymore, which kind of losing worried him more.