Love Lettering

by Kate Clayborn

  No, that’s not right. I won’t tell Sibby, because Sibby barely acknowledges that I exist for anything other than half of rent and utilities anymore. Instead I’ll tell Reid one of those lies and he’ll leave and I’ll stare down at until my eyes blur, worrying about my unruly hands and my encroaching deadline and my missing inspiration. I’ll wait here until I’m reasonably sure Sibby’s gone to her room for the night and then I’ll go home, and I’ll still feel all the things I felt before Reid walked through that door, be-ing myself into a personal and professional crisis while I wait to find out whether this man is going to spread the word about what I’ve done.

  So instead I unclasp my hands and pick up the program. I don’t think I could meet his eyes for this, so I keep focused on the letters, the ones only he was able to see. The pattern, the code. The mistake.

  “How about I buy you a coffee and we can talk about it?”

  We go to a slick espresso bar on the corner of Fifth and Berkeley. There’s one closer, only a block and a half from the shop, but it closes earlier and it’s also one of the places in the neighborhood where I regularly meet clients, so I’d decided that even though it would mean a longer awkward walk, there’d at least be less of a chance someone would overhear whatever conversation Reid and I are about to have.

  Of course it’d been more awkward than I’d anticipated, completely silent except for one blindingly difficult moment of conversation after I’d stepped away from locking the shop’s front door and gripped the edges of my cardigan to wrap it more tightly around myself against a lingering winter chill in the air.

  Reid had cleared his throat and said, “Would you like my jacket?” and it hadn’t even been grudging. It had been automatic, sort of the same as his very well-mannered “Good evening.” I’d been so taken aback that I’d said, “Don’t be nice to me.” Then he’d done another nod and we’d both pretended to be invisible to each other until we got to our destination. Where he opened the door for me.

  In our seats he seems as stiff as he had in the shop, his back and (still very nice) shoulders straight and his elbows tucked into his sides, God forbid he puts them on the table like a normal person. He’s still got that slight air of distaste about him—he seems suspicious of every surface in this place, had peered at the heavy-lidded glass jars of biscotti and extra-large cookies and chocolate balls rolled in shredded coconut as though they were exceptionally disgusting dead insects pinned inside a display case for the express purpose of grossing him out. When I’d asked him what kind of coffee he’d wanted, he’d said it was “quite late for coffee” (quite late!) and had ordered an herbal tea instead.

  I feel like I’m doing Masterpiece Theatre cosplay.

  “It’ll take me some time to get back to the city,” Reid says when I’m in the middle of the first sip of my cortado (bad choice; I’ll be up all night, but what else could I do in the face of that quite late?), and as a conversation-starter it seems entirely like a non sequitur until I realize he’s urging me to get on with my explanation.

  “Um,” I begin, and suppress a wince at this tic, something I never realized I did so prominently until I started seriously with videos on social media. The first one I’d ever recorded had it pretty much every third word—some letterers prefer, um, a classic Blackwing Pearl, um, with a nice, um, balanced graphite—and it took me four takes to eradicate the “ums” to a tolerable level. My last video—proof of how far I’ve come—had none, even in a single take.

  I try again.

  “I don’t know if I’ll have an answer that’s satisfying to you.”

  “You may not.” He lifts his hands, a palm-up gesture to indicate our surroundings. It’s a we-had-that-awkward-walk-so-you-might-as-well-try gesture.

  I readjust in my seat, a slight shift from side to side that’s really nothing more than a poor attempt at loosening the fabric of my dress, which right now feels sweat-sealed to my ass and thighs. I think about what to say, how to casually communicate the feeling I’d had that day, seeing him and Avery together. How I’d felt later, when I was designing their program.

  “It isn’t that I’ve never seen an uninterested party before,” I begin. “I used to sit in meetings with couples where a groom has never once looked up from his phone to have an opinion.”

  “I don’t believe I brought my phone to our meeting.”

  “They probably don’t have phones where you come from.”

  In the Masterpiece Theatre movie you live in, I’m thinking, but he says, “I’m from Maryland.”

  I cannot tell if he is joking. But if he was, he’s certainly blanked the humor from his face before I can recognize it, and now all that’s clear to me is that he wants to get back to business, and I guess I owe him that. None of my usual chipper, customer-servicey distractions.

  “I guess I thought you were . . . um. You were . . . you had a way of being absent, I guess, even though you’d finally come. You seemed very unhappy, and honestly . . . she did, too. She hadn’t seemed that way before, when it was only the two of us meeting.”

  He sits back. It’s maybe the first time his spine has made contact with the chair.

  “You didn’t like anything she’d picked; I could tell just by looking at you. But then you blinked once and wiped all opinions from your face.” It had looked so familiar to me, that blanking. I’d seen it between my own parents for years and years, a practiced disconnection after one of their fights. “She wanted you to have an opinion, too. She was disappointed.”

  “Yes,” he says, completely matter-of-fact. “I did disappoint her. Often.”

  On instinct, I want to backtrack, to soften all the hard edges of this conversation, to keep the peace.

  “Listen, I don’t know you. And I don’t know her. Maybe you’d had an off day. Or, I don’t know, maybe you had some kind of arrangement together, how your relationship worked, and I misunderstood. It was completely wrong of me to—”

  “You didn’t misunderstand,” he says quickly. Then he moves his hand, curls his thumb and fingers around his cup, turns it in a move that’s precise, like a quarter-turn to mark the time. I don’t imagine he’ll say anything else, and I stare down at my own cup. I’m surprised when he speaks again, his voice lower now, almost as though he’s not talking to me at all.

  “I . . . went along. She led, and I followed, because it took less effort. It’s how it was with us.”

  I blink across the table at him, a smooth, small, Spencerian script unfurling in the space between us, probably the first spark of creativity I’ve had in weeks. it spells, but I don’t say anything. In the silence, we both sip our drinks, and since mine is basically a defibrillator in a cup, I’m the first to get back in the game.

  “I didn’t intend it,” I say plainly, my voice an eraser over that script connection between us. “Sometimes it just happens, and I realize it later.” I feel a strange, unfamiliar temptation to tell him the whole thing. The letters, they work on me sometimes. When I’m stressed, when I’m tired, when I’m lonely. When I’m blocked . . . I can’t draw at all, or when I try—I end up saying too much.

  But telling him all that, what good would it do? It’s nothing to him, and it’s detrimental to me. I don’t need him leaving here and spreading the word, not after everything I’ve worked for and am still working for. I thought maybe I’d fixed the problem when I stopped with the wedding work; I thought all the effort I’d put into my own business would give me a sense of ownership, a sense of control. Sure, it’d be other people’s plans, but the idea for the planners, the execution—it had been my idea, my vision.

  But I’ve started to slip again, at such a critical time, and Reid doesn’t need to know it.

  “I loved doing the job,” I say, back in that cheery register. “I really did. The play, the tribute to your first date—”

  Trench-brow, back again. “What first date?”

  “Your first date with Avery. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare in the Park?”

  “That
wasn’t our first date. Our first date was coffee in the lobby of my office building.”

  “Oh,” I say. Meanwhile, this coffee shop now feels like an inferno to me. I wish I had asked him to do whatever the opposite of going to a coffee shop is. An outdoor vending machine that dispenses sleeping pills? Literally anything but an echo of his first date with his ex-fiancée, whose life I have possibly ruined.

  “Her father arranged it.”

  “That’s . . . nice.”

  It is not nice, not judging by the way trench-brow disappears, replaced with a single quirk of the left one. Do you really believe that? Left Quirk says.

  “He is also my boss.”

  “Oh, God,” I groan. “Did you get fired?”

  “No, I am”—he blinks down toward his tea again—“valuable to him. And it was amicable.”

  “Must be awkward.” Probably not more awkward than this meeting, but still.

  He shrugs, a slight lift of those broad shoulders, and it’s a sloppy-looking, uncharacteristic gesture on him. Unexpected. “It’s business.”

  He must be speaking of the work he does, but somehow, it seems “It’s business” is also what he means by Avery, by their engagement. Their breakup, however amicable it was.

  “I apologize for calling you a shopgirl,” he says, a change of subject abrupt enough that it takes me a second to realize what he’s said. “I obviously think you’re very talented.”

  It’s so surprising that I make a quiet snort of disbelief. If nothing else has been confirmed by this extremely wrenching conversation, at least it’s fair to say that I’ve got a pretty good instinct when it comes to Reid Sutherland, and no part of our interactions today or a year ago have indicated that he thinks I have any talent at all.

  “Obviously?”

  “Yes,” he says. “Everything was . . . well, Avery was very pleased with all of it.”

  “But you weren’t.” As soon as it’s out of my mouth, I regret it. What am I doing? Baiting a very messy hook, fishing for compliments from a guy I mostly need to forget me five minutes after he leaves here? I need him to never think about my talent again, given what he knows about how I’ve used it.

  “I was . . .” He moves his cup again, another quarter-turn. “I was affected by it. I looked down at your letters and—they felt like numbers to me. Something I could read. They felt like a sign.”

  I know how that feels. The first time I saw—well, really saw, really paid attention to—a hand-drawn letter, it was on an old sign in this city. And that’s how it’d felt to me—something I could read, sure. But also something that was full of possibility. Look at all the ways this letter says something. It gives me a strange, secret pleasure to hear Reid say this about some of my own letters.

  But I can’t and shouldn’t take what he’s said—that my work affected him—as a compliment. What I do—it’s petty, secretive, immature. I’m not meant to be writing signs for people. I’m meant to be writing plans for them, plans they’ve already made for themselves.

  I have to stop this. I have to find a way to break the habit for good. Get back on track, get unblocked. Make my deadline, the one that could take my still-in-startup-mode small business to the next level.

  “I won’t do it again,” I say, more to myself than to him, but immediately I wish I’d made this declaration privately. Stand-in-front-of-the-mirror-in-my-bathroom privately. I sound as if I’m begging for his silence with this promise, and the way his mouth flattens even further tells me he doesn’t appreciate the shakedown.

  “I assure you, I have no interest in talking to anyone about this ever again.”

  That’s his promise back, I guess—his version of I’ll never tell, and it should make me happy, or at least relieved. Instead I feel like I’ve done whatever the Masterpiece Theatre version of a drug deal is. I guess it would still be a drug deal, but an old-timey one.

  When Reid moves, as though to stand, I get a strange sense of panic at leaving it this way, with this clandestine promise between us, and so I speak—the first question I can think of.

  “Why now?”

  Left Quirk is the only response he gives me before straightening in his chair again. He turns the cup one-quarter and looks at me.

  “I mean, why come to me now, if you saw this then? Before the . . . before the wedding, I mean.”

  “It wasn’t the most urgent thing on my to-do list,” he says dryly, but somehow he has managed to telegraph directly into my brain every single way I probably screwed up his life—his relationship, surely his living situation, his job, possibly his friendships. “And I suppose I’m running out of time.”

  “You’re running out of time?” This last part is high-pitched enough to sound almost hysterical. Is there something wrong with him? Am I on this man’s bucket list? My eyeballs feel like they’re in a 3D movie, jumping right across the table into his face.

  Please, don’t let something be wrong with him, I think, with a startling amount of feeling.

  “Ah, no,” he says quickly, obviously disconcerted by my 3D eyeballs. “I’m leaving New York. Probably by the end of the summer.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  I’m sorry? What do I have to be sorry for? This is good for me, that he’s leaving. This is the best possible outcome for this meeting, short of Reid developing spontaneous, highly specific amnesia about me and his wedding program.

  The noise he makes—it is a scoff. Nothing so sloppy as a snort. “I’m not.”

  “You don’t like New York?”

  “I hate New York.”

  It almost makes me recoil, the way he’s said this. Bold, sans serif. No caps, but italics for the It’s not a harmless, pedestrian “I hate this song” or “I hate those chocolate balls rolled in shredded coconut.” It’s not one of those small, meaningless hatreds that shear the word of its meaning.

  When Reid Sutherland says he hates New York, he really, really means it.

  “Why?” In my head I see a very whimsical arrangement of letters asking me “why” I would even want to know this. It’s unusual for me to press this way—to want to press this way. I keep it light; I keep it cheerful.

  I keep the peace.

  But everything between me and Reid feels a little unusual.

  He still has his hand on his cup, but he hasn’t turned it, not yet, and I sense that when he does, it’ll be the end of this, whatever this is. He pulls his lips to the side, and I may have no earthly idea what his job entails, but I’ve got a feeling this is the expression he wears when he’s doing one of those math models. That he wore when he looked at my letters for the first time.

  “Let’s just say it has not been an easy place for me to understand,” he says, finally. He makes the last turn of his cup and lifts his eyes to mine. “There haven’t been many signs for me here.”

  I have a sudden, shocking urge to protest. But there are signs everywhere here! Street signs, business signs, billboards, subway ads, window decals, graffiti . . .

  Of course I know it’s not what he means. But it’s part of what the city means to me.

  But I can’t get my thoughts together before he stands, taking his cup and saucer with him in one hand.

  “I am grateful for yours, I suppose,” he says, and then he holds out his free hand. On autopilot I shake it, feel the warm, dry strength of his palm enveloping mine, a gesture that feels shockingly unbusinesslike to I’m sure me alone. Good thing I’ll never see him again, because these are highly inappropriate feelings to have for this particular man.

  When he releases my hand he gives me one of those devastating nods.

  “Goodbye, Meg,” he says, and with one stop by the counter, tidily returning his cup and saucer to the bussing tray, tall, triple-take-face, time-machine-transported Reid Sutherland walks right out the door.

  Chapter 3

  I wake up to three unusual things: a hangover-sized headache, the rectangular press of my phone underneath my left shoulder, and the sound of Sibby still in the apa
rtment.

  I can thank the evening espresso for the headache, that plus staying awake until 3:30 a.m., finishing up the May spread I’d stumbled over, determined to keep my renewed promise to myself—no tricks, no codes, no signs allowed.

  I’d tried to sleep after, but that had been futile, my head full of Reid Sutherland’s words and manners and shoulders and face, my hands fairly itching with the need to make headway on my new project. When that had been another creative bust (be you’ve lost your touch), I’d still worked late, as though I was doing penance, crossing off item after item on my regular task list, first at the small desk I have shoved underneath the lone window in my room, then eventually—uncharacteristically—from my bed. I’d lain in the dark with my phone, tapping out generic but friendly replies to the commenters on my latest videos (xoxo, thanks!—M; keep practicing! XO—M; try using a bigger drop shadow! <3 M), scheduling posts for today, organizing some deliveries for planners I’d finished over the weekend. Usually I keep a hard and fast rule about working this way, doing my level best to follow all the advice out there about screen time at night, about setting work-life boundaries in your space, particularly when you often work from home, but last night I’d been doing anything, everything, to get that meeting with Reid out of my head.

  They felt like a sign, he’d said.

  I roll to the side and unstick my phone from my skin (Reid is clearly not out of my head, since I picture the face of mild to moderate disgust he’d make at this), squinting at the screen to confirm my suspicion that it’s way too late for Sibby not to be at work on a Monday, and yeah—9:30, when she’s usually out the door by 7:00. On instinct I sit up quickly, grabbing for my sweatshirt off the back of my desk chair. I’m still pulling it over my head when I open the door, still pushing a cloud of wavy frizz off my face when I step out.

  She’s coming from the kitchen, her laptop closed and tucked under one arm, a mug of coffee in her other hand as she crosses to the couch. Her curly black hair is piled high and messy on top of her head, her face clean of the winged eyeliner and red lipstick she wears almost every day, no matter that the five- and seven-year-old she spends most of her waking hours with could give a shit about how she looks. But Sibby loves a dramatic face, always has, and it’s jarring for me to see her this way at this time of day.