The Dinner
1000 Words
POV: Ava Sinclair
I stand in front of my mirror at seven in the evening and I have an honest conversation with myself that goes like this.
I ask: are you ready for this?
I answer: that is the wrong question.
I ask: what is the right question?
I answer: whether you are going to keep using not ready as a reason to stay inside a perimeter that stopped being necessary weeks ago.
The answer to that is no. The perimeter was real and it was useful and I built it for good reasons and I am done hiding behind it.
I get dressed. I look at myself in the mirror one more time. I say out loud to the empty room: you walked out of a field and kept walking and built something. You are allowed to want something now. You are allowed to walk toward it.
I go.
He has chosen a restaurant that is quiet and considered and entirely unlike a business dinner. A corner table in a place that does not need to be seen or to see, no long sightlines, no industry faces, no performance of any kind required. He is already there when I arrive and he stands when he sees me come through the door.
It is a small gesture. It lands like something larger.
We sit. We order. We talk, and the talking is different from the project room because there is no design to hide behind and no crisis to manage and nothing professional to use as structure, and without those things what is left is just us, which turns out to be more than enough.
He asks about my life before the studio. Not the rejection, not the pack history, not any of the things that are on official records somewhere. He asks what I wanted when I was young and had not yet had anything taken from me.
I tell him more than I planned to.
I tell him about the professor who told me I had instinct but needed discipline and how that sentence made me more determined than any praise ever had because something in me needed to be told I was not finished yet, that there was more to build. I tell him about the first project I was genuinely proud of, a small restaurant space that took me four months and paid almost nothing, and how I went back six months after it opened and sat in a corner and watched strangers sit in it and felt the particular satisfaction of a space doing exactly what you built it to do. I tell him that is why I do this, not for the drawings or the materials or the contracts, but for that moment when a space becomes itself and people feel it without knowing why.
He listens to every word. The completely present listening, the kind that has no gap in it for his own thoughts to be assembled while I am still speaking.
When I finish he says: “That is the same reason I built the company. Not the company itself. The moment when something you made starts working without you holding it up.”
I say: “Tell me something true about yourself. Something you do not usually tell people.”
He looks at me across the table. He considers it. He says: “I did not want to take over the company.”
I wait.
He says: “I was twenty years old and both my parents were gone and the company needed someone and the pack needed an Alpha and there was no one else. So I stepped into it. I was competent quickly because I had no choice and then I was good at it and eventually it became who I was.” He pauses. “But for about a year I was twenty and exhausted and running things I had not chosen and I did not tell anyone because there was nobody to tell.”
I look at him across the table in the quiet restaurant.
I say: “Is there someone to tell now?”
He holds my gaze. He says: “Yes. I believe there is.”
We finish dinner slowly and neither of us rushes it and the conversation goes to other places, lighter and darker by turns, and I learn things about him that the building has not given me and he learns things about me that I have not given anyone, and by the time we leave I feel the particular kind of tired that comes from being fully present for a long time, the good kind, the kind that means something real happened.
He drives me home. He pulls up outside my building and cuts the engine and we sit in the quiet of the car with the city moving outside and neither of us moves immediately toward the door.
He says: “I have been thinking about what you said at the hearing. That you know what it costs to be on the wrong side of someone else’s choice.”
I say: “Yes.”
He says: “I am done making choices that put you on the wrong side of anything.”
I look at him. In the dark of the car his face is the real version, the open version, the one I have been watching him allow more and more frequently. He is looking straight at me and there is nothing managed about his expression and nothing held back.
I say: “Show me.”
He looks back at me. He says: “That is what tomorrow is for.”
I do not sleep for a long time, i just lie in the dark and I think about tomorrow and what it is for. Then I press my fingers to the scar at my throat and it is warm, steady and entirely certain.
It has known for a very long time.
I am just finally catching up.
- Writer
