I was twenty minutes early.
10:40, and the table I'd claimed had a clear view of the door, and nobody had come through it yet. I put my phone down. I picked up the cortado. Put it back. Picked up the phone.
Phone out, you look distracted. Phone away, you're sitting there watching the door. I couldn't win either way.
Verse is narrow and warm. The kind of coffee place that takes up the ground floor of a converted bungalow on Fountain. Exposed beams overhead, white-painted brick along one wall, a long oak counter with the espresso machine and the pour-over rig and the small handwritten sign apologizing for the price of the seasonal beans. Good smell. Not burned, just the smell of equipment run by people who knew what they were doing, the warm acid of fresh grind and the steamed-milk sweetness. A strip of four small tables ran along the window. Sunday-morning regulars at most of them. A man in his sixties reading a paperback that didn't have a cover anymore, two women with a stroller between their feet, a barefoot guy in his thirties working on a laptop at the corner two-top who seemed to have been there long enough to be considered furniture. The barista had asked if I was waiting for someone when I ordered. I'd said yes. She'd nodded like that was useful information to have.
10:51.
I put the phone face-down and left it there.
She came through the door at 10:58.
I didn't see her open it. What I saw first was the couple at the nearest table. The woman had been mid-sentence, something about parking, and she stopped. Not because anything interrupted her. She stopped. The man across from her sat quiet for a beat. The man at the next table had his phone up, thumb on screen. The thumb stopped moving.
None of them were looking at Amber. They were looking at what they'd been looking at. They had, briefly, stopped.
Then she was crossing the floor and I understood.
Hair down today. The platinum fell past her shoulders, near-white, almost silver in the coffee-shop light, and against her tan it did something the gym fluorescents had only hinted at. Jeans, a dark top the fabric of which was losing an argument with her chest. Three seconds before she reached the table. I used all three on the inventory: her tits out of that top and in my hands, how full they'd feel, my mouth on them, what sound she'd make. Then she sat down and I composed something that resembled a face.
She sat down like nothing had happened to the room.
"I ordered already," I said. "Cortado."
"Good." She signaled the barista without looking over. "Pour-over, please."
She turned back to me. Eyes in better light: deep blue, clean, direct — the same attention she'd given my squat. High cheekbones. Pale-pink mouth. When she listened her mouth went still in a specific way that made the listening visible.
"How's the squat feeling?"
"Different. Correct, I think. I can feel the things that are supposed to be working."
"Good." She moved past it. The squat wasn't why we were here. She gave me her full attention then, the same focus she'd put on my squat, except slower, and aimed at all of me instead of my knees. "How long have you actually been in LA?"
A year, I told her. San Diego before that. College, then the job.
"What's the job?"
"IT support. I've explained it three times to my parents and once to a guy at a party. The company does logistics software. I support the internal systems."
"What does the software do?"
"Optimizes routing for freight. Predictive scheduling. Variance modeling on delivery windows." I watched it land. "The part I do is when someone's Outlook won't open."
Her mouth tipped at the corner. "When someone's Outlook won't open," she repeated, slow, like she was setting the line aside to use on me later.
"Is that what you planned on doing?"
"Fallback plan. Well-considered. I knew what I was doing when I made it."
"What was the plan?"
I gave her the actual version: systems security, the specific thing I'd been aiming at before the salary-and-rent math in a city where I knew people started suggesting a different sequence. She asked if I was still doing it.
"Not right now."
She went quiet. Most people fill that silence. She didn't.
Her pour-over arrived, in a small ceramic cup whose color matched her top closely enough that the colors had a quiet conversation when she set the cup down between us. She wrapped both hands around it. The fingernails were short and clean and unpainted.
"Do you have friends here? From before?"
"A few. Two from college. Marcus, finance, ended up here the same year I did. We get drinks. Functional social life."
"Functional."
"It's accurate."
She let that sit. She didn't reach to fill the quiet, didn't do the thing people do where they're loading the next sentence behind their teeth while you're still talking. She just watched me, patient and a little amused, like my turn wasn't up until I said it was.
"Where are you from?" I asked.
"I travel. I like cities. LA for about eight months."
She picked up her cup.
The Sunday light came in flat and low through the window beside us, and she was asking me things.
"What did you actually think it was going to look like. Not the plan. What you thought was going to be true."
She wasn't asking the version I'd given her. She was asking the one I'd kept back: what I'd actually pictured at twenty-one. The title. The version where the work was mine.
I told her.
She went quiet for longer than before. The barefoot guy in the corner had not noticed any of this. The man with the paperback turned a page. Outside on Fountain a delivery truck idled, ticked, moved off.
"Okay, now you," I said. "Where did you think you were going to end up?"
She smiled. Not the professional one. Not the polite one. Something else, smaller, like it was answering a question I hadn't asked.
"It's a long story. The ending isn't the one you'd expect."
"That's not an answer."
"No. It's not."
She didn't give me the answer. She picked up her cup, and by the time she set it down we were somewhere else, and the question had moved past without anyone noting that it had. Cleanly enough that I almost didn't catch the move.
I caught the move.
She noticed the Korean BBQ place as we were leaving Verse. She'd been meaning to try it. I said the same.
We went.
The place was a small storefront on a sidestreet off Vermont, the kind of LA-Korean place with a hand-lettered window menu in two languages, a low awning over a single glass door, and the smell of mesquite and beef coming out of the kitchen extractor strong enough to be tracked from half a block away. The interior had eight grill tables, three of them occupied at eleven-forty-five on a Sunday. The hostess seated us at a table by the back wall under a string of paper lanterns that were on even though it was midday. The grill at the center of the table was already lit when we sat. A small blue flame around the edge of the cast-iron well, the surface starting to warm.
Different banchan from my Koreatown regular. Heavier on the pickled vegetables. Pickled radish in three colors, a sharper kimchi than I was used to, a small dish of seasoned bean sprouts. She asked one question about the pork belly marinade in a way that told me she'd asked similar questions in many cities. She ordered with clear preferences. When the meat came and the grill was hot she leaned in over it with the focus of someone who took the outcome seriously. Not performing enthusiasm. Present with the food.
I ate my galbi combo and tried not to make it obvious I was watching her tend the grill.
I finished mine. She looked at what was left on my side. I pushed it toward her without comment. She accepted it and ate it without comment.
"I've been here a year and never made it to Silver Lake."
"Why not?"
"It's far."
She looked at me. "It's twenty minutes."
"In my car. On the Metro it's —" I thought about it. "I didn't say far in absolute terms."
She held on that a second. The corner of her mouth moved. Not a smile. Close.
The reservoir was close, she said, if I wanted to walk.
The path loops the water in something like a mile-and-a-half. Narrow asphalt with a low railing on the inner side, the reservoir surface flat and gray-blue and shining where the late light caught it, the houses on the surrounding hills white and small and pasted onto the slopes like an architectural model. Joggers in pairs. A man with a Doberman that paid us no attention. A trio of teenagers on bikes coming the other way. The path narrowed where the railing curved and widened again after, and she went ahead on the narrow stretches and was beside me on the wide ones. Flat-gold of late-afternoon LA light off the water. Heat bleeding out of the day.
"What do you like about LA?" I asked.
"The light. The kind that makes everything look like it happened somewhere else. Like there's a version of events playing out and what you're walking through is the aftermath."
I said I knew what she meant.
"You mentioned the things you don't think about."
"The unsolvable ones."
"What's on that list right now?"
"The job. Some math about where I'm going that doesn't add up yet. Nothing urgent. I just don't look at it."
She was quiet a second.
"Does it get easier?"
"Usually. You leave it alone long enough and one day you realize you already know what to do. You just didn't know you knew yet."
"Do you have things like that?" I asked.
"I used to." A pause. "I'm not sure anymore."
I almost asked a follow-up. Something in her voice didn't have a follow-up at the end of it. Finished, was the word. I left it.
A longer straight stretch ran along the south end of the water. She was beside me, almost no space between her shoulder and mine, neither of us moving to fix that. I noticed it, and again on the next bend, when nothing had changed. The hills on the far side had gone the soft brown they get when the light starts to go.
Late-afternoon light on her hair.
On the walk back I went back over what I knew about her.
She traveled. She liked cities. She'd been in LA eight months. She liked the light. Something she used to think about, she didn't anymore.
That was it. She'd asked me everything. I'd told her. The conversation had felt full, and what she'd given me, in actual content, was four sentences.
She was very good at that.
She said my neighborhood was the direction she was going.
I didn't stop to ask how she knew which direction that was.
We ended up outside my building at five-forty, the sky having gone from flat-gold to the lower softer color it takes on once the sun is behind the buildings on the west side of the block. Koreatown around us doing its Sunday-evening thing. A guy unfolding the metal patio chairs in front of the soju place across the street, a woman walking a small fluffy dog who stopped to sniff a parking meter, the low hum of an extractor fan over a kitchen somewhere two doors down putting the smell of cooking garlic into the air at sidewalk level. She stopped on the sidewalk and looked up at my four-story walk-up in the unremarkable beige of a building painted once and not thought about since.
She looked at me.
"Can I come up?"
Not ambiguous. Not sometime or maybe. Direct question, no buffer under it.
"Yes."
No interval between the question and the answer. There was nothing to think about.
She looked at the building one more time. I looked at my keys. We went in.
I went ahead on the stairs because the staircase was narrow and because I needed something to look at that wasn't her coming up behind me. I was aware of exactly where she was anyway. Four flights to my floor, and every step was another item in the apartment I was about to show a woman who looked like that.
First flight: the framed print. Street market watercolor, bought at an art fair the second Saturday after moving in because the walls were empty and empty walls implied something I didn't want to imply. Twenty dollars or forty, I couldn't remember. I started drafting what to say about it.
Second flight: the kitchen table. Mail, charging cables, the gym bag. Gym bag was in the bedroom. Fairly sure it was in the bedroom. Acceptable.
Third flight: the couch, the TV from the neighbor two floors down who'd moved to Portland. The bank calendar on the wall. I had a bank calendar from an actual bank on my wall. I was twenty-three years old. I had never cared about the bank calendar before right now.
Fourth flight: the crack in the ceiling by the window. Eight months on my list to tell the building manager about.
She was not going to notice the crack.
I got my keys out at the door. The lock took two tries. Standard. I pushed the door open.
She was behind me in the doorway, looking past me into the apartment.
"Hm," she said.
"The framed print is a street market. I bought it because the walls were empty and I didn't want to imply I lived in the kind of apartment that —"
A pause.
"I wasn't looking at the print," she said.
I had nothing for that. I stepped back from the door. She walked in.