We stepped out into the night and the city exhaled around us. Neon. Hum. Somebody arguing lovingly with a kebab. He took my hand...simple, easy...and I felt my shoulders drop an inch. I didn’t know I’d been holding up.
“You realize,” I said, “we just had a date that was 70% beans.”
“Hot,” he said.
“Spicy.”
“God help us,” he agreed, smiling. “Walk?”
We walked the long way, past the laundromat with the hand-painted sign, past a dog that looked like a loaf of bread, past a stoop where a cluster of aunties conducted a conversation that required both volume and hand choreography. At my building, he didn’t follow me in. He just stood under the awning, hands in pockets, eyes on me like there was nothing else to see.
“Text when you’re upstairs,” he said.
“I will.”
We didn’t kiss. We didn’t
