David lived in a one-bedroom condo called Hillclimb Court, so close to Pike Place Market you could feel its pulse through the walls. It was the type of building architects in the eighties thought was cutting edge. It reminded me of an office space or a parking garage; all steel and concrete with a private courtyard to shield residents from the tourists that perused the street outside. To add some much needed creative flair, they threw in a wall of glass tile. Ooh la la! The residents made an effort to warm the place up with plants and that went a long way. It had a parking garage/greenhouse vibe. David’s unit faced the Puget Sound where you could see the Olympic Mountains spread out in front of you like nature’s buffet.

I was expecting something small and dingy, perhaps a place where he had roommates and a stained brown sofa with cigarette burns. But, it was none of that. It was industrial. I imagined the light was beautiful when it came in through the large west-facing windows. Brick walls, concrete floors, Edison lights that hung above the kitchen glowing yellow. He had copper pots and pans, and he drank water out of mason jars, which I wasn’t surprised about. There was art hung tastefully on the walls, oil paintings of female nudes. And his one piece of furniture was an oily looking leather sectional that faced the television. I was especially impressed when I searched for a video game console and found none. David flicked a switch and a fire jumped to life below the television. He made us espresso while I looked around and we sat near the fire to drink it.

“You’re wondering why I drive such a shit car and have such a nice place,” he said.

“Yeah, I suppose I am.” I set my espresso cup on the floor next to me.

“It’s my aunt’s place. She rents it to me.”

“Oh,” I said. “Where does she live?”

“Out on Bainbridge. She bought this twenty years ago when she worked in the city. She’s attached, I guess, doesn’t want to sell it, so she lets me stay.”

“Lucky you,” I said.

A slow lazy smile spread across his face, and he pulled me toward him. I liked the way he smelled, and I liked that he was wearing pink boxer briefs under his black clothes. And I liked the way he’d looked at me tonight while he was onstage. I tried to make as many of their shows as I could, especially if I wasn’t working.

I once had a musician friend tell me that the hours coming down from a show were the loneliest he’d ever felt. “You go from a hundred miles an hour to ten. One minute everyone is screaming for more, the next you’re at home in your boxers folding laundry and making yourself toast.” I wanted to ask David if he ever felt that way, but he wasn’t the depressive, melancholy type. Even now he was cleaning up our coffee mess with a small smile on his lips. I suddenly had a hankering for toast and beans, and I was about to ask him if he had any when he walked out of the kitchen.

“Take off your pants and lie on your back. I want to taste you.”

My eyes glazed over, toast dreams forsaken. I didn’t need those extra calories anyway.

My favorite thing about David’s condo was the taproom connected to his building. It was one of those trendy joints that has a mini-pretzel warmer and five gazillion types of beer. Hipster Christians had Bible studies at the tables downstairs, and there was always at least four men wearing slouchy beanies and plaid. On rainy nights we’d walk over and sit under the strings of Edison lights, drinking pint after pint until they shut the place down. We made a lot of noise when Ferdinand and Brick joined us—sometimes they brought girls who reeked of fruit perfume and cleavage and said fuck a lot—that always made the Bible study guys pack up early and leave. When we were sufficiently drunk, we’d stumble the ten paces back to his building and make grilled cheese with the nasty cheese slices that come in plastic sleeves. I bought a nice hunk of fancy cheese from Beecher’s in the Market, but it molded in his fridge and eventually I threw it out.

I learned that Americans have nostalgia for taste buds. This was proven to me when I lived in Miami. A girl I bartended with who was originally from Ohio suggested a road trip to Georgia. She was craving White Castle, she told me, and was willing to take a three-day road trip to eat it. I’d expected magic, maybe In-N-Out on crack, but after my first bite I’d put my sandwich down and asked her if we’d really driven to Georgia for hamburgers or if there was something else going on.

“Yara,” she’d said. “In America, we feed our obsessions. We don’t care if they’re not practical.” She’d then eaten my sandwich and three of her own then ordered a dozen to go, which she put in a cooler in the trunk of her Prius. “They’re not as good heated up, but beggars can’t be choosers.”

I’d gone home wondering if we’d made some sort of drug run I was unaware of. I mean, who drove up the Florida Panhandle and went to another state just for hamburgers that tasted like dirty feet? When I got home, I’d searched the internet and found that people were quite passionate about dirty feet burgers. It was a thing. Also, if you put cheese on anything, they’d eat it: coated, stuffed, sprinkled, saturated—you name it. Cheese sells as well as sex.

We frequented JarrBar across the street too. It was a closet more than it was a bar, barely large enough to host a dozen well-fed people, but it reminded me of the intimate neighborhood bars in England. Sometimes we went after I got off of work. We shared a bottle of Lobo and ate anchovies until our tongues were raw from the salt.

“Am I your type?” I asked him one night as we were walking back to his place. He looked at me like I had just said the craziest thing.

“Of course you’re my type, baby.” His voice was raspy and the wind caught it and carried it away.

“Who did you date before me?” I asked.

I expected him to laugh it off, say something to deflect, but instead, he gave me his memories.

“My last girlfriend was Italian.” He pronounced it Eye-talian to be funny. “She was jealous. If I even looked at a bank teller when thanking her for my most recent transaction, she’d not talk to me for a week. I was scared of making eye contact with any woman over the age of eighteen and under the age of fifty.”

I laughed even though I knew he was sort of being serious.

“You’re not talking about Elizabeth, are you?” I asked, remembering the poor girl he’d broken things off with around the time he met me. We passed a couple of drunk guys on the sidewalk, and David quickly crossed from my left side to my right, placing himself between me and them.

“English, I’ve told you that Elizabeth and I were not a couple.” He pretended to be upset, but it was a farce. We argued about Elizabeth all the time. He insisted they’d never been a couple and I insisted they had.

“My last real girlfriend cheated on me,” he said. “That’s why we broke up.” He grimaced. “She was cheating the whole fucking time we were together. That’s the reason she was always accusing me of something—because she was so damn guilty, you know?”

“What did she look like?”

He made a face at me. “Ah, I see where you’re going with this.” He reached out to tickle me, but we were crossing the street and I danced away from him.

“She had dark hair, dark eyes. Curvy.”

“What about the girl before her, what did she look like?”

He grinned. “She was a redhead. I went through a redhead stage in college.”

“Thin or curvy?” I asked.

“Thin. Tall.”

We reached the door to his building and he pulled out his key.

“What were you saying about your type?” I laughed.

“I don’t have a physical type.” He shrugged. “Is that what you were looking for?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact I was.”

“I like smart women, English. Cultured women. Funny women. Kind women. I like that type in every color and size.”

I liked that.

“When was the last time you had a blonde?” I asked. We were up the stairs and almost to his door.

“Last night when I had you.”

“That’s not what I mean, Lisey.”

“You’re my first blonde,” he admitted.

“So you’re going through a blonde stage,” I joked.

“No,” he said. “No more stages. I found what I’m looking for.”

And then I was stunned into silence, playing his words over and over in my head.

“This is the most beautiful my life has ever been,” David said. “This is what I want.”

I wondered about that when I was away from him. David had barely left the Pacific Northwest. I’d traveled all over the United States and a little bit of Europe—yet I never felt like I’d arrived at a significant moment. I chased that moment so hard I could barely stay still in one place for more than six months, yet he could eat anchovies, his teeth stained with wine, and tell me it was the most beautiful his life has ever been. It was innocent and simple, and all the things I wanted to be. That’s when I realized that David was who I wanted to be. Someone who hadn’t necessarily mastered his art, or his life, but was goddamn trying with everything in him. There was this creeping feeling that sneaked up on me, mostly when I was alone, it made my throat close up like I was eating too many crackers without anything to drink. He was too much and I was too little.