Nick looked at me for long enough when I opened the door that I checked the front of my dress.
“What?”
“Nothing. You look lovely.”
“You made that sound like an accusation.”
“I’m adjusting.”
He wore a dark jacket without a tie. I had seen him in better clothes and less flattering ones, but I had never seen him dressed for me. The knowledge made it difficult to decide what to do with my hands.
I picked up my bag.
“Ready?” he asked.
“As much as I’m going to be.”
He smiled and stepped back to let me lock the door.
We drove to a village twenty minutes along the coast. The road climbed between hedges before dropping toward a little inlet where the houses looked as though they had gathered for shelter. I watched the sea appear and disappear through gaps in the trees.
“I’ve never been here,” I said.
“Good.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“I was aiming for unfamiliar.”
The restaurant occupied the ground floor of an old house beside the water. There were candles on the tables, but not so many that I felt required to become a different kind of woman. Somebody had put wildflowers in jam jars. From the kitchen came the sound of a pan meeting a stove with conviction.
Nick had booked. I was more grateful than I wanted to admit for that small evidence that the evening had existed in his mind before he arrived at my door.
We sat by the window. He handed me a menu, then took his own and studied it with unnecessary seriousness.
“Are you nervous?” I asked.
“Very.”
“You don’t look it.”
He lowered the menu. “That’s an expensive education paying off.”
I laughed, and some of the stiffness left my shoulders.
We ordered fish and a bottle of white wine. I offered to share the bill; he said he’d asked me out and would like to pay. I said I would get the next one, then realized what I had said.
Nick’s mouth lifted.
“Noted.”
“Don’t become pleased with yourself.”
“Too late.”
The waitress brought bread and a little dish of olives. Nick took one, discovered the stone and tried to remove it with more dignity than the task allowed.
“You can use your hand,” I said.
“I was hoping to maintain an illusion for at least the starter.”
“I saw the banana in your car.”
“A serious tactical error.”
It was easier after that. We talked about food, first jobs, places we had lived because the rent was cheap rather than because we liked them. Nick had once rented a room above a bakery and claimed it was the happiest winter of his life until the landlord raised the rent.
I told him about my first theater job, where the wardrobe room had been a converted shower and I spent three weeks sewing beside a drain that smelled of old rainwater.
“Did you mind?” he asked.
“Not as much as I should have. I thought suffering proved I was serious.”
“And now?”
“Now I prefer a chair that doesn’t become damp if somebody washes their hands upstairs.”
He laughed. I watched the way his eyes narrowed when he did, the little movement at the corner of his mouth before he spoke again. At the theater, people seemed always to be calling him away. Here, I had time to look.
“What was your first proper part?”
“A tree.”
“Proper part.”
“It was an important tree.”
“Nick.”
He grinned. “A man who comes in during the second act and tells everyone the bridge is down.”
“Was it?”
“Every night. Never repaired.”
“That must have been frustrating for the town.”
“Devastating. Especially on Saturdays when we did it twice.”
I laughed hard enough that the couple at the next table glanced over. Instead of becoming embarrassed, I found I didn’t care. Nick was laughing too, and for a moment the room became somewhere I belonged without having to earn it.
Our food arrived. We ate, and the conversation slowed into something less determined to entertain. Nick asked about my father. I told him Dad had been the person who sat through the whole school play even when I was only credited for scenery, and who could never resist touching a fabric to see how it was made.
“He’d turn the corner of a curtain over in a restaurant,” I said. “Mum used to pretend she didn’t know him.”
“I would have liked him.”
“You met him once. At the harbor fundraiser.”
Nick looked up. “The man who asked how you remember all the words?”
“That was him.”
“He asked what happens if somebody says the wrong ones. He seemed delighted when I said it happened all the time.”
I smiled. “He liked the possibility of disaster.”
“I remember.”
It pleased me more than a general expression of sympathy would have. Dad was a particular man in Nick’s memory, not merely a loss I was explaining over dinner.
“Five years,” I said. “Sometimes I still think I should ring him.”
Nick nodded. “My mother’s alive and still annoyed that I don’t ring often enough. I probably shouldn’t complain.”
“You can complain. I complained about mine all the way through lunch yesterday.”
He smiled, but didn’t ask for the details. I was glad. I wanted an evening that contained them without belonging to them.
After the plates were cleared, Nick told me about his parents’ divorce. Not the whole story, only a small part: being fourteen, knowing which subjects would make one parent go quiet and which would make the other leave the room. He had become good at changing topics, making people laugh before they said the thing they couldn’t take back.
“I got a lot of practice,” he said. “Possibly more useful than drama school.”
“Is that why you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Keep everyone comfortable.”
He looked at me, then at the glass in his hand. “Sometimes.”
“Not everybody needs to be.”
“I know that in principle.”
He said it without defensiveness, but I could see the conversation had touched somewhere tender. I let it rest. I had no wish to turn dinner into an examination he had to pass.
We ordered one dessert and two spoons. When it arrived, he looked at the small circle of chocolate on the plate and said, “I should have ordered two.”
“You can still.”
“Then I’d be admitting defeat.”
I took a spoonful. “You might want to do it quickly.”
He did, and when the second dessert came, he pushed it toward me and reclaimed the first. It was a tiny, ridiculous negotiation. I enjoyed it more than some holidays I had spent planning.
Outside, the evening had turned cool. There was a pub across the lane with music coming through its open windows, a fiddle and a guitar, somebody singing just behind the tune. Nick glanced toward it.
“Another drink?”
“Are you trying to prolong the evening?”
“Yes.”
The directness of it made me smile.
“All right.”
The pub was crowded but not loud. We found a place near the back, where an elderly woman in a striped cardigan was beating time against the table with two fingers. Nick bought me a small glass of wine and himself a soft drink because he was driving.
I watched him at the bar. He waited rather than pushing forward, then exchanged a few words with the barman that made them both laugh. He was easy with people. I liked it. I distrusted how much I liked it.
When he returned, I said, “Do you ever get tired of being charming?”
He set down the drinks. “Is that what I’m doing?”
“Often.”
“I was asking whether the kitchen still had crisps.”
“And?”
“It did. I didn’t think the conversation needed a darker motive.”
I looked at him, then down at my glass.
“That was unfair.”
“A little.”
He said it mildly, but he said it. I felt an uncomfortable rush of embarrassment.
“I’m trying to work out when you’re being yourself.”
He sat beside me. “So am I, sometimes. But I don’t stop being myself because I know how to talk to a barman.”
I let that settle. The music changed to something slower. Across the room, two people stood and began to dance in the narrow space between the tables.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Nick looked at me. “Thank you.”
He didn’t hurry to tell me I had nothing to apologize for. I liked him a little more for that, though it wasn’t a comfortable kind of liking.
We listened to the music. After a while, my shoulder came to rest against his. Neither of us moved it.
“I am tired, actually,” he said quietly.
“Of being charming?”
“Of making sure everybody has a good time.”
I turned toward him. “You can stop.”
His eyes held mine. “Are you having one?”
“Yes.”
He smiled, smaller this time. “Then I might.”
We stayed until the musicians packed up. I remembered his shoulder against mine, the warmth of the room, the way he listened when I spoke. It was enough to want again.
On the drive home, his phone lit up in the holder on the dashboard. Daniel’s name appeared. Nick glanced at it and let it ring out.
I looked through the windscreen.
“You don’t have to explain,” I said.
“I wasn’t going to.”
That surprised me into turning toward him. His mouth moved at one corner, and I shook my head.
“You’re pleased with yourself again.”
“A little.”
He parked outside my building. For a moment we sat with the engine off, the silence full of everything that had happened without either of us naming it.
“I had a good time,” I said.
“So did I.”
I leaned across and kissed him before he could decide whether to ask. His hand came up to my cheek. It was a more certain kiss than Saturday’s, though no less capable of making the rest of the world briefly disappear.
When I drew back, he kept his hand against my face for a second, his thumb still beside my ear.
“Next time,” I said, “I pay.”
“I’d better choose somewhere expensive.”
“Chips. With a drink.”
He laughed, and I got out before wanting to stay became another decision I wasn’t ready to make.
Upstairs, I took off the red dress carefully and hung it back in the wardrobe. It belonged to a new evening now.