Love Lettering

by Kate Clayborn

  Wall Street Reid.

  It shouldn’t really be a surprise. Reid picked the day and time, coordinating with a meeting he mentioned having in the area, and it makes sense that the meeting would have to do with his fancy job. But somehow it still startles me to see him this way, and it’s almost as though he knows it, because for a few seconds after nodding a greeting he simply stands, looking up at the still, serious, sewing man.

  I clutch my list so tightly it’s nearly folded in half in my hand. “Neat, right?” I finally say, moving to stand beside him. “Is this your first time seeing it?”

  “No.” He looks over at me, then turns his head to stare across Seventh. “There’s a bridal shop over there I’ve been to.”

  He hasn’t said it with any malice, but it’s possible we’ve released some kind of awkward nerve gas into the air. Everyone within a half-mile radius probably pauses where they stand and winces.

  “Right,” I say, hoping my whole head hasn’t turned into the cringe emoji. “Lots of bridal shops and fabric shops around here.” The strangeness of our agreement, of our being together in any context at all, washes over me again, and part of me wants to bolt, to forget the whole thing.

  I’m jolted by the shoulder of a passing pedestrian, part of a small group of tourists who are laughing and staring down at one of their phones, and when I bump into Reid’s side from the impact, he steadies me with a hand on my elbow and snaps, “Watch it, asshole,” at the pedestrian. I’m pretty sure the guy doesn’t hear him, but the line is enough of a surprise to shake me out of my inhibitions.

  “Whoa,” I say, my eyes wide as I look up at Reid. “You called that guy an asshole!”

  That flush I waited for the other night in the shop—it shows up now, faintly, right at the outer swoop of Reid’s cheekbones.

  “I mean, I don’t imagine you saying a word like asshole.” He furrows his brow, so I clarify. “I thought your insults would be—I don’t know. ‘Rogue.’ ‘Scoundrel.’” Old-timey.

  “Why would they be like that?” His voice is still flat, but his eyes are interested, and his hand is definitely still on my elbow, which is a brand-new erogenous zone I’ve never known about.

  I shrug, dislodging his hand. Probably I shouldn’t share the Masterpiece Theatre thing. “You sounded like a New Yorker.”

  The muscles in his jaw tick. “You mentioned there was a lot to see around here.”

  “Yes, right!” Too cheerful, again. I try to less cheerfully pass him my list, and he looks down at it for a few seconds, his brows still lowered.

  “We should switch the first three with the last two,” he says. “It’s more efficient.”

  I peek over his shoulder at the list, then swipe my thumb across my phone, stare down at my map. Shoot. He is correct.

  “That was rude,” he says suddenly, and I look up at him. He looks tired around his eyes, the bright, piercing blue somehow wearier. “To use that word.”

  I smile. I know which word he means—I’d pictured it written out, very sans serif, as soon as it had come out of his mouth. Asshole. But I feign ignorance.

  “Efficient?” I say, widening my eyes dramatically.

  He seems to appreciate that, the swoonsh back briefly, and it doesn’t quite break the tension between us, but it makes it more manageable. I have a flashback to every time a teacher made the class count off into partners: those initial minutes where you’re sitting next to someone who feels new to you, no matter that they’ve only been sitting a few rows away for the whole school year.

  It starts out well, it really does. The first three signs—efficient, indeed!—are still visible, and while the first one is a little bland, not much more than different sizes of the same basic block lettering, the second and third are winners, basically giant, hand-painted banners on the brick sides of buildings, multiple advertisements stacked on top of one another with lots of lettering styles. For both of those, we stop, tucking ourselves out of the way as best we can so I can take photos without getting in the way of people walking, and it becomes a sort of rhythm between us as we move through the next few on the list. A couple of times, Reid takes my phone from me and gets a better angle, his height and long arms a real advantage. Sometimes he crosses the street or straightens himself beside a parked car to get closer. When we talk, it feels safe, focused—he asks me what I call a certain type of lettering, or asks me to explain some term I use for a specific part of a letter. At one point, I tease him about watching some of the short tutorials I’ve done so he can practice the basics, handing him one of my own business cards and directing him to my website. For some reason, it makes my stomach flutter to see him holding it, to see him looking down at its careful design. It’s as though I’m peeking in on the same private moment I’d had when I’d held his card in the shop.

  He carefully tucks it inside the inner pocket of his suit jacket, giving it a single, serious pat, as though he’s really planning to watch one of those videos, and I feel my face flush in pleasure.

  But sometime around the sixth sign, things start to take a turn for the worse. Two in a row, we can’t find—either because I’ve got something wrong from my searching or because they’re covered up. The next is too faded to see. After that, my dressmaker sign, the one with so much potential—I don’t know if I’ve written the address wrong, but nothing from the image I saw online looks familiar around the address I’ve written down. I check the map again, zoom in on various satellite views; I ask Reid to try a different app while I’m looking. I feel pressured, embarrassed, and it’s Reid who has to suggest we move on.

  And on top of that, the sidewalks seem to grow steadily more crowded. Our strategy of staying out of the way now seems more difficult to master. Reid’s already always-stiff demeanor stiffens; he looks tense and impatient—I hate New York—and I’m flustered, too. I see signs that aren’t on my list, wonder if I should stop, then struggle to refocus. The sky has turned grayer than it was when I arrived, as gray as the buildings that seem to loom on all sides, and this seems to make the signs harder to discern.

  Around Sixth and 36th, there’s a sign I caught sight of on a blog, but when we get close, my heart sinks—the parts I can see are faded, and there’s construction scaffolding everywhere, obscuring the view. The noise is unreal—grinding, metallic, miserable. Reid and I have to shout at each other to suggest angles at which we might see better; at one point, misunderstanding each other completely, we turn in the exact opposite direction from each other, and I have to reach out to tug on his sleeve so that he follows me under a scaffold sidewalk to get closer to the sign. Through the brief length of it, the noise from the construction seems even louder, inside-your-bones loud, and the space is warm with the body heat of everyone passing through it. I look up at Reid when we emerge, see his jaw work, as though he’d been clenching his teeth the whole way through.

  “We’ll just try and see this one.” I’m already opening the camera app on my phone.

  “You still can’t see it. Maybe two of the letters.”

  He’s right, but I don’t want to give in to it. I look around, as though some new route will open up, some new staircase to the sky that’ll let me get closer. This one, it feels important—the background a deep red; the one W I can see has a drop-shadow, which none of the other signs had, and beneath that, I’m almost sure there’s a script. “What if I—”

  And then it starts raining.

  It’s not a drip-drop kind of situation, either. It’s the kind that starts right in the middle of things, big, soaking sheets all at once. People-scattering rain, and everyone around Reid and me is running to duck for cover, most of them cramming back under the scaffolding Reid was so relieved to be free of. One advantage to the massive, slouchy bag I carry is that I can put it over my head, though this feels pretty silly when Reid shifts his own bag long enough to pull out an umbrella. Even though he knows words like asshole, he definitely isn’t one, because he puts it over my head instead of his own, and points across the
street to a blue awning, where a short, harried-looking woman is tugging a rack of fabric bolts back into her store. As we jog, our feet slapping against wet concrete, our clothes misted by the cars we dodge, Reid stays a half step behind me. I can’t say for sure, but I think I feel the way he keeps his hand hovering at my back.

  Not touching. But hovering.

  When we’re finally undercover, there’s a few seconds where we’re both surveying the damage. My tights soaked up to the knees, my dress stuck wetly to my thighs. His suit blackened with moisture, his hair copper-brown. I look up at him, feel a solidarity smile spread over my mouth. It’s funny, isn’t it? It’s funny how this went?

  “You don’t have an umbrella?” he says, and it’s . . . not funny.

  It’s scolding.

  I stare at him, a long second of censure at his tone, at that haughty way he’s looking at me.

  “Yes, I have one. But not on my person, obviously.” I think about my crinkly bag full of stuff. On the train I reached in for my box of Altoids and found a single sock, one of those half-foot ones that you can’t see beneath sneakers. It’s truly appalling that I don’t have an umbrella in there, but it’s also truly appalling that he’s pointing this out.

  “It wasn’t supposed to rain,” I say.

  Reid mumbles something from beside me.

  “What?”

  “I said forty percent.”

  I keep staring. There is a single droplet of rain quivering on the end of the hair that curls at his temple.

  “Forty percent chance of rain,” he clarifies. “On my weather app.”

  “Forty percent isn’t one hundred, is it?”

  The drop of rain falls onto the collar of his suit jacket. He looks entirely confused by what I have said, and his jaw clenches again. As if we’ve been cued, both of us turn to stare out at the street in front of us, the rain coming down impossibly faster. There’s a slice of space between us that’s charged with the strange energy crackling between us.

  “This new project,” he says eventually, his voice louder to compensate for the thudding rain on the awning above us. “Will you give up your clients, if you get it?”

  A gust of wind blows a mist at us, and I take a step back, watching the pavement get wetter around the toes of my shoes. I feel defensive, prickly—the walk getting off track, the umbrella censure, the way I can still feel where he touched me.

  I shrug, playing at a flippancy I don’t feel. “Probably not. I like working with my hands. But there’s only one of me. This job would give me a cushion, and new opportunities. I definitely could take on fewer clients.”

  “Everything you do now, it’s freelance?”

  I look over and up at him, but he’s giving me his profile, his eyes still on the street. “Yes,” I answer, slowly. Suspiciously. I don’t know how much longer I can play at flippancy in the face of this.

  “What if you have a lean month?”

  I purse my lips. On the one hand, I don’t want to sound like a pompous jerk. On the other, Reid is being one with this question. “I pick up work easily. I’m in demand.”

  He nods. “But if there were lean times,” he says. “You have an LLC, or something? Do you pay yourself a salary out of that?”

  Oh my God. Whatever is worse than man-splaining, this is it. This is man-terrogating. Before, at the Promenade, his questions—they were blunt, too abrupt. But they didn’t feel this way, at least. These are vaguely accusatory and not-so-vaguely superior.

  “Remember how you said you weren’t a business consultant?”

  “Yes,” he says, grimly; then he goes quiet. But when there’s a long stretch of silence, the rain slowing to a steady but still serious shower, Reid clears his throat and speaks again. “What do you do for health insurance?”

  “Hey, look,” I say, nodding my head across the street. My voice is still cheerful, but nothing inside of me is. “There’s the None of Your Business Store. And right beside it, the boutique called Things You Have No Right to Ask.”

  I don’t look at him, but I know—I know what he’s doing. He’s looking across the street, too. He knows those aren’t real signs, but he’s looking anyway.

  “I only meant that health care costs are at a premium, and many people in creative industries—”

  “Reid.” I turn to face him, crossing my arms over my chest and feeling a fresh mist of rain blow against my whole right side—my clothes, my face, my hair. I never really knew what people meant before when they said someone was “pushing their buttons.” Right now, I am made of buttons.

  I take a deep breath, wait for him to look at me. I feel electric.

  “Let’s get something straight between us. I don’t feel sorry for you, and you have no reason to feel sorry for me, either. I’m not some manic pixie dream girl who needs your stabilizing influence. I’m good at my job. I built a business in one of the toughest cities in the world that now people are coming to me to expand. I only thought it’d be nice to have a—”

  I break off, startled, my face heating. I was going to say friend. Jesus, what am I doing? Why am I saying all these things to him?

  “A what?” he asks.

  “Company,” I finish, limply. “Like I said before.”

  “You do have a company.”

  “No—” Oh, my God. This is so . . . it’s so frustrating, how it is between us. How he presses me on every single thing, how he baits me into saying what I shouldn’t say. How he doesn’t let me keep it light.

  “That’s not what I meant,” I say.

  The whole world seems to quiet around us, the rain suddenly slowing, barely a drizzle now. Fat globes of it drop from the edge of the awning we stand under, and within seconds there’s twice the number of people on the street, emerging from whatever shelter they took during the downpour. Reid watches them, looking tense and handsome and sad, and even in spite of the frustration, I still feel that thing—that sympathy, that connection.

  But I’m wrong, clearly.

  I step out from underneath the awning. A big drop of rain falls from the edge of it and hits me on the forehead, right where the pimples are. No umbrella, no dignity. What a freaking day.

  “Meg,” he says softly, and for a second, I think his eyes might be—pleading? But his mouth closes again. He’s got nothing at all to add. This whole thing has been painful for him, from start to finish.

  He tries to hand me his umbrella, but I wave it off.

  “This was a mistake,” I say, and this time he doesn’t cough when he hears me say the word. That word.

  He only looks at me, holding that stupid forty-percent-chance umbrella, and I guess it’s as good as an agreement.

  I turn and walk away, and I feel as if I’m trailing the letters of that fateful word behind me.

  By the time I get home, I’m a wet, straggly-haired, angry mess. I am basically a feral cat, if feral cats got harassed two times on the subway, once by a man who kept insisting I take his seat and then called me a “rude bitch” when I finally told him I really preferred to stand, and once by his friend, who said he always liked a “gal” with a temper and then stared meaningfully—disgustingly—at my crotch. On my way off I discreetly stuck my gum to the strap of his backpack, but unless it has the power to expand and seal him and his douchebag friend into a suffocating, chewed-up cocoon of my feminist rage, it’s a pretty hollow victory.

  “Hey, you’re home!”

  It’s a sign of how angry, how not myself I am that I don’t even feel a spark of gratitude or relief or hope to find Sibby here, greeting me as though it’s a welcome part of her day to have me home. She’s sitting at the small, two-seat table we have off the kitchen, a takeout box of noodles in front of her, and all I feel is annoyed. Her hair is not only dry but also not at all straggly. Her winged eyeliner is back in top form, whereas I’m well aware that half my mascara is half down my face. Don’t get me started on the fact that her skin is clear. Plus those noodles are from my favorite place.

  “I need
a shower,” I say, and she looks slightly startled. For the last couple of months, I’ve been a lot of things with Sibby—questioning, polite, probably even desperate. But never angry or curt.

  “Oh, sure,” she says, waving her plastic chopsticks. Actually, they are my plastic chopsticks, which is obviously not as bad as getting harassed on the subway, but even so I wish I had a piece of gum in my mouth.

  “Do you think you’ll be out in twenty? I’m headed to Elijah’s, but wanted to go over something with you first.”

  I want to heave the world’s biggest sigh. Whatever she’s about to say isn’t going to make this day any better, but even though that shower is calling my name, I’d rather get this over with. Then I can cry about my shitty fight with Reid and this conversation, all at the same time. Take that, Reid! Who’s efficient now?

  I lift my bag from across my chest and let it thunk to the floor unceremoniously, which earns me another look of surprise. I’m not the tidiest person in the world, but early on in our shared living situation, I learned to keep my messes contained, to keep them mostly out of Sibby’s sight. She’s always preferred tidiness, so I’ve always—ugh—gone along.

  “Just tell me now. I’m sure it won’t take long.” Nothing takes long with you lately. I am being so passive-aggressive that I almost wish I was recording this. I could send it to my mom later. I think she’d be proud.

  “Okay,” Sibby says slowly. “Well, I know I said the end of the summer.” She ends it there.

  I—quietly, imperceptibly—let out the sigh.

  “But a different unit in the same building opened, and, Meg, it’s so much better. There’s this window in the kitchen, and—”

  “Those chopsticks are mine,” I blurt, and she blinks quickly. “Never mind. Take the chopsticks. I don’t care.”

  “Meg, come on.” Her voice is so gentle. But what right does she have to be gentle with me, when it’s been death by a thousand cuts for me in this apartment for months? I press a thumb to my temple, rub my fingers over my still-damp forehead, feel the soreness of the pimples assert themselves. There’s a dull throb of exhaustion in my shoulders, my back, my feet. The truth is, we both know I’m not going to argue with her. Especially not about this. If she wants to go now, she should go. Given the way I grew up—my parents white-knuckling their entire marriage from the time I was born, a “staying together for the kid” cautionary tale—I know that more than anyone.