Chapter 17: The Ordinary Days
1071 Words
The thing nobody tells you about being with someone is how good the ordinary gets.
Not the significant evenings. Not the deliberate moments. The in-between parts — the Tuesday mornings and Thursday afternoons and the texts that arrive without occasion and mean nothing except that someone was thinking about you and wanted you to know.
Those parts.
That was the discovery of the weeks that followed.
---
We settled into a shape without designing one.
Tuesdays and Thursdays were class and Harlow Brew. Fridays were variable — sometimes the bookstore, sometimes walking, sometimes her reading group which I did not attend but heard detailed accounts of afterward, Greg's reflexive contrarianism apparently having escalated into a position that media theory itself was overrated as a discipline.
"What did you say?" I asked.
"I asked him to name one framework he found genuinely useful." She paused. "He couldn't."
"And?"
"He's been quieter since." She said it without satisfaction. Just fact.
Weekends were the loosest — the most themselves. Saturday afternoons sometimes together, sometimes not, the easy rhythm of two people who had their own lives and chose to bring them alongside each other rather than replace them.
---
She met Peter properly on a Wednesday.
Not by arrangement — he appeared at Harlow Brew while we were there, which I suspected was not entirely coincidental given that I had mentioned we would be there, but I did not press this point.
He came in, bought coffee, spotted us, and came over with the expression of a man attempting casualness with moderate success.
"Peter," I said.
"Daniel. Prisca." He sat down. "Hope I'm not interrupting."
"You planned this," Prisca said.
Peter looked at her. Then at me. "She's perceptive."
"Constantly," I said.
Prisca looked at Peter with the direct, assessing attention she gave new people — unhurried, genuine, not unkind. Peter, to his credit, held it without fidgeting, which was something.
"Daniel talks about you," she said.
"Good things I hope."
"Honest things," she said. "Which is better."
Peter blinked. Then he laughed — the real one. "I like her," he said, to me directly.
"I know," I said.
---
Prisca and Dora had their own ecosystem that I gradually came to understand without fully entering.
Dora updated me occasionally regardless.
She sent a text one Thursday afternoon that read: *She keeps your last text open while she's working. Thought you should know. Don't tell her I told you.*
I did not tell her.
But I kept thinking about it in a quiet, warm way throughout the day.
---
The Rachel Voss call happened on a Thursday evening.
Prisca texted me before: *Call in twenty minutes. Nervous in the good way.*
And after, forty-five minutes later: *She wants to see a sample reel. Whatever I have. She said send it by end of month.*
I replied immediately.
*Prisca.*
*I know,* she wrote back.
Then: *I'm shaking a little.*
*That's allowed.*
*Is it?*
*Yes. You just got seen by someone who matters in the field you want to work in. Shake if you want to.*
A long pause.
*Thank you Daniel.*
By name. As always.
---
I added a mark to the map that night.
Parrish & Sons already had one. The Brattle. The corner of her street. Now I added the spot on Harlow Avenue outside my apartment building where I had been standing when her text came through.
Nineteen marks.
---
Abdullahi met her the following week.
This one was arranged — dinner, the four of us, a Thai place on Tremont Street that Peter had been recommending for a month.
Abdullahi arrived first, of course. He was already at the table when we got there, water ordered, menu reviewed.
He stood when Prisca approached — a small, genuine courtesy that I noticed her notice.
"Abdullahi Hassan," he said, extending a hand.
"Prisca Hayden." She shook it. "Daniel speaks highly of you."
"He speaks accurately of me," Abdullahi said. "Which is the better version."
Prisca looked at him for a moment. Then at me. Then back at him.
"I think I understand why you three work," she said.
---
Dinner was easy in the way good dinners are — food that required attention, conversation that did not.
Abdullahi asked Prisca about her work with the focused curiosity he brought to everything he found genuinely interesting. She answered with the same directness she used everywhere, and somewhere in the middle of a discussion about documentary ethics I watched something settle in Abdullahi's expression — not approval exactly, more like recognition.
Afterward, walking to the T, he fell into step beside me briefly while Peter and Prisca were ahead.
"She thinks in complete arguments," he said quietly.
I smiled. "Someone told her that when she was thirteen."
He nodded once. "She's good for you."
"I know."
"You're good for her too," he said. "That matters equally."
---
The nights I liked best were the quiet ones.
Her apartment or mine — floor or couch, books and food and the particular ease of two people who had stopped needing everything to be arranged.
She read with total focus — a stillness that felt different from sleep, more like concentration made physical. I learned early not to interrupt it. I would work at the desk or read my own thing and the silence between us was the comfortable kind, the kind that does not ask to be filled.
Occasionally she would look up and say something — about whatever she was reading, about a thought that had arrived unexpectedly — and the conversation would go somewhere for a while and then return to quiet.
Those evenings felt like the truest version of the thing we were building.
---
One evening in late November she looked up from her book and said, without preamble:
"I'm glad you weren't just walking that Saturday."
I looked over from my desk.
"The bookstore," she said. "Commonwealth Avenue. You said you were just walking."
"I know."
"I'm glad you weren't." She looked at me steadily. "I've been meaning to say that."
I turned in my chair to face her properly.
"Me too," I said.
She held my gaze for a moment — warm and direct and completely unhidden.
Then she went back to her book.
I went back to my work.
Outside Boston moved through its late November evening, cold and ordinary and lit.
Inside everything was exactly as it should be.
- Writer
