Chapter 7: Dinner
1182 Words
It was Jade's idea.
Of course it was Jade's idea. Jade who noticed things. Jade who watched rooms. Jade who said, on a Wednesday evening in Zara's kitchen while Marcus was putting leftover containers in the fridge, "We should all do dinner again. Proper one. Not a rooftop. Somewhere we can actually talk."
Zara said yes before the sentence was finished.
Marcus closed the fridge.
"I'll check with Damon," Jade said, already on her phone. "Saturday works for us if it works for you two."
Marcus looked at Zara.
Zara looked at Marcus.
"Saturday's fine," Zara said.
He texted Damon from the car at 10:47 p.m.
Saturday dinner. Jade's planning it. I couldn't say no without a reason.
The reply came in under a minute.
I know. She just told me.
Can you get out of it?
Not without a conversation I'm not having. A pause. Can you?
Marcus looked at the windshield. No.
Then we go. We sit across a table and we are normal.
We've never been normal.
We were normal at the restaurant.
That was before.
I know that it was before, Damon typed.
We do it again. One dinner. We manage it.
Marcus did not reply immediately. He sat with the phone in his lap and thought about managing it. About what that looked like in practice. Sitting across from Damon with Zara beside him and Jade beside Damon, four people around a table, two of whom were quietly dismantling something that could not be reassembled once it was fully apart.
Fine, he typed.
Marcus.
What.
Don't look at me like you looked at me in the supplements aisle.
He stared at the message.
Don't give me a reason to. He typed back.
He drove home.
The restaurant was Jade's choice. A place on Carver Lane called Henley's, dark wood and low light and small plates that arrived in waves. The kind of place designed for long evenings and deep conversation, which was exactly what Marcus did not need.
He and Zara arrived first. Jade and Damon came in four minutes later.
Damon shook Marcus's hand.
Firm. Brief. His eyes moved to Marcus's face for exactly the correct social duration and then moved away. Textbook. Immaculate.
Marcus thought: he practiced that.
They sat. Jade immediately took the conversation by both hands the way she always did, pulling it somewhere warm and easy, asking Zara about the Kellner account she had been stressed about, asking Marcus about the Halton Grove bridge, filling the table with enough momentum that nobody needed to do anything except follow her lead.
Marcus followed her lead.
He ordered without looking at the menu twice. He said the right things at the right intervals. He asked Damon a question about the restructuring deal because it was the thing he was supposed to ask about and Damon answered it the way a man answers a question he has no feelings about, clean and informative and with no eye contact that lasted a beat too long.
They were doing it. They were actually doing it.
By the time the third round of plates arrived Marcus had begun to believe they were going to survive the evening without incident.
Then Jade put her wine glass down.
She had the expression of someone who had been holding something in her mouth all evening, turning it over, deciding whether to say it. Marcus recognized the expression because he had been wearing a version of it for two weeks.
"Can I say something," she said, "without it being weird?"
"You always say that before you make it weird," Zara said.
Jade smiled. "I've been thinking about the four of us." She gestured loosely at the table. "How easy this is. How it clicked, the first night, in a way that doesn't always happen."
Zara said, warmly: "I thought so too."
"It's rare," Jade continued. "Finding people where it just works. Where nobody has to perform." She looked at Zara first, then Marcus, then she looked at Damon. "I keep telling Damon that I think you two are going to be genuinely close. Like properly. Not just tolerated-for-our-sake close."
She looked at Marcus last.
"There's something between you two," she said simply. "I noticed it the first night. This energy. Like you've known each other longer than you have." She smiled at Marcus with total openness, a woman with nothing to protect because she could not imagine needing to. "I think you're going to be really important to each other."
The table received this warmly.
Zara said: "I thought the same thing. They were talking all night."
Jade said: "Exactly."
Marcus smiled.
It was the right smile, the correct shape and duration, the one that meant that's a lovely thing to say and not you have just described the thing that is destroying me using the wrong words.
He looked at Zara.
He looked at his plate.
He did not look at Damon.
He could not look at Damon.
He knew without looking that Damon was doing the same thing he was doing. Sitting very still inside a normal expression. Holding something down with both hands.
Zara was telling a story now, something about the first time she had introduced two friends who became inseparable, and the table was warm and laughing and the evening had resumed its comfortable forward motion and nobody was watching anyone carefully enough to notice.
Marcus picked up his glass.
Under the table his phone buzzed.
He waited two minutes. Excused himself. Walked to the bathroom at the back of Henley's, the single occupancy one with the lock, and stood under a bare bulb and looked at the message.
Don't say it.
Marcus stared at it.
He typed: I wasn't going to say anything.
You were. I could see it from across the table.
See what?
A pause.
That it landed.... What she said.
Marcus leaned against the wall. The bulb above him was merciless. He looked like what he was in this light, a man locked in a bathroom at a dinner party reading messages from the wrong person.
He typed: She thinks we're going to be important to each other.
Marcus.
She said it like it was a good thing.
Stop.
She's happy about it, Damon. She's sitting out there happy about it.
I know.
Then: Wash your face. Go back out. Finish dinner.
Marcus ran cold water. Looked at himself in the mirror above the sink. The bare bulb showed him everything without mercy.
He went back out.
He sat down next to Zara. She took his hand under the table the way she did sometimes without thinking, an automatic claim, warm and uncomplicated.
Across the table Jade was laughing at something.
Beside Jade, Damon was looking at his plate.
Marcus held Zara's hand and stayed very still and thought about the word important and what Jade had meant by it and what it actually meant and how wide the gap was between those two things.
Wide enough to lose everything in.
- Writer
