Rebecca Serle - In Five Years

Bella does a little shimmy in her chair. Her sweater slips from where it sits on her shoulders and I’m met with a slice of collarbone. Bella has always had a zaftig figure, glorious in its curvature, but she looks slimmer to me today. Once, during the month of Isaac, she lost twelve pounds.

Greg. I already have a bad feeling.

“I think we should all go to dinner,” Bella says.

“Who?”

She gives me a look. “Greg,” she says. She sucks her bottom lip in, lets it pop back out. Her blue eyes find mine. “Dannie, I’m telling you, you don’t have to believe me, but this one is different. It feels different.”

“They always do.”

She narrows her eyes at me and I can tell I’ve crossed it. I sigh. I can never quite say no to her. “Okay,” I say. “Dinner. Pick any Saturday two weeks from now and it’s yours.”

I watch Bella as she loads up her plate—first eggs, then a crepe—and feel my stomach start to relax as she eats with gusto. The sky changes from rain to clouds to sunshine. When we leave the streets are almost entirely dry.

Chapter Seven

“What happened to the blue shirt?”

David comes out of our bedroom in a black button-down and dark jeans. We’re already running late. We’re supposed to be at Rubirosa in SoHo in ten minutes and it will take us at least twenty to get downtown. Bella may always be late, but I still like beating her places. It’s how we’ve always done things. Brunch was enough change for one week.

“You don’t like this?” David hunches down and surveys himself in the mirror above the sofa.

“It’s fine. I just thought you were wearing the blue one.”

He heads back into the bedroom, and I check my lipstick in the same mirror. I’m wearing a black sleeveless turtleneck and a blue silk skirt with heels. The weather says sixty-seven degrees, low of sixty-three, and I’m trying to decide whether to bring a jacket.

He comes back in, buttoning the blue one. “Happy?”

“Very,” I say. “Will you call a car?”

David busies himself with his phone, and I check to make sure I have our keys, my cell phone, and Bella’s gold-beaded bracelet. I borrowed it six months ago and never gave it back.

“Two minutes.”

When we get to the restaurant, Bella is standing outside. My first instinct is confusion—she beat me, again. My second is that it’s already over with Greg and we’re going to be having dinner alone. This has happened twice before (Gallery Daniel and, I think, Bartender Daniel). I feel a wave of irritation, followed by one of sympathy and inevitability. Here we go again. Always the same thing.

I get out of the car first. “I’m sorry,” I start, just as the restaurant door opens and out onto the pavement walks Greg. Except he’s not Greg. He’s Aaron.

Aaron.

Aaron, whose face and name have been running in my head, on a loop, for the last four and a half years. The center of so many questions and daydreams and forced replays made manifest on the sidewalk now.

It wasn’t a dream. Of course it wasn’t. He’s standing here now, and there is no one else he could be. Not a man I’ve spotted at the movies, not an associate I once traded work jabs with. Not someone I shared a plane ride seated next to. He is only the man from the apartment.

I reel back. I do not know whether to scream or run. Instead, I’m cemented. My feet have merged with the pavement. The answer: my best friend’s boyfriend.

“Babe, this is my best friend, Dannie. Dannie, this is Greg!” She snuggles into him, her arms looping around his shoulder.

“Hey,” he says. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

He picks up my hand to shake it. I search his face for any sign of recognition, but, of course, I come up empty. Whatever has happened between us . . . hasn’t yet.

David extends his hand. I’m just standing there, my mouth hanging open, neglecting to introduce him.

“This is David,” I sputter. David in the blue shirt shakes Aaron in the white shirt’s hand. Bella smiles. I feel as if all the air on the sidewalk has been sucked back into the sky. We’re going to suffocate out here.

“Shall we?”

I follow Greg/Aaron up the steps and into the crowded restaurant. “Aaron Gregory,” he says to the hostess. Aaron Gregory. I flash on his license in my hand. Of course.

“Aaron?”

“Oh, yeah. My last name is Gregory. Greg just kind of stuck.” He gives me a small smile. It feels too familiar. I don’t like it.

I feel like I’m sinking. Like I’m falling through the floor, or maybe the floor is falling, too, except no one else is moving. It’s just me, catapulting through space.

Time.

“Aaron.”

He looks at me. Dead on. I hear David behind us laugh at something Bella has said. I smell her perfume—French rose. The kind you can only buy at the drugstores in Paris. “I’m not one of the bad ones,” he tells me. “Just because I know you think I am.”

I exhale. I feel dizzy. “I do?”

“You do,” he says. We start following the hostess. We snake around the bar, in between the two-top tables with couples bent together over pizza and deep glasses of red. “I can tell by the way you’re looking at me. And what Bella has said.”

“What has she said?”

We pass through an archway and Aaron hangs back, holding his arm out to let me pass. My shoulder brushes his hand. This isn’t happening.

“That she has dated some guys who maybe didn’t treat her right, and that you’re an amazing friend, and you’re always there to pick up the pieces. And that I should be warned you’ll probably hate me at first.”

We’ve arrived at the table. It’s in the back room, pushed up against the left-hand wall. David and Bella are upon us.

“I’ll slide in the corner,” Bella says. She shoves herself in first and pulls me down next to her. David and Aaron sit across from us.

“What’s good here?” Aaron asks. He gives Bella a wide smile and reaches across the table for her hand. He strokes her knuckles.

I don’t need to look at the menu, but I do anyway. The arugula pizza and Rubirosa salad are what we always get.

“Everything,” Bella says. She squeezes and releases his hand and shimmies her torso. She’s wearing a short black ruffled dress with roses on it that I bought with her on a shopping trip to The Kooples. She has neon green suede heels tucked under her, and dangly green plastic earrings clank against her cheeks.

I need to avoid Aaron’s face. His entire person—him—seated twelve inches across the table from me.

“Bella tells us you’re an architect,” David says, and my heart squeezes with affection for him. He always knows the things you’re supposed to ask—how you’re supposed to behave. He always remembers the protocol.

“Indeed,” Aaron says.

“I thought architects didn’t really exist,” I say. I’m keeping my eyes on the menu.

Aaron laughs. I glance up at him. He points to his chest. “Real. Pretty sure.”

“She’s talking about this article Mindy Kaling wrote like a million years ago. She says that architects only exist in romantic comedies.” Bella rolls her eyes at me.

“She does?” Aaron points to me.

“No, Mindy,” Bella says. “Mindy says that.”

I think it was in the Times . Titled something like: “Types of Women In Romantic Comedies Who Are Not Real.” The architect thing was anecdotal. Incidentally, Mindy also said that a workaholic and an ethereal dream girl were not believable stereotypes, either, yet here we are.

“No handsome architects,” I say. “To clarify.”

Bella laughs. She leans across the table and touches Aaron’s hand. “That’s about as close to a compliment as you’re going to get, so enjoy it.”