Two Weeks Later
A stranger holds the door open for me when I arrive at the coffee shop closest to home.
“Thank you,” I say. I rub my hands together when I make it inside, then take my usual place in line.
I stop in here every morning before work. It’s on the way, and I have yet to find a better cup of coffee in this city. I like it here. No one knows who I am, and I usually place my order undisturbed. I casually rub sleep from my eye and stifle a yawn. I really need this to get me going.
I haven’t heard from Stella since that night.
She didn’t come back again. I haven’t seen her since. She left because she had to, and she didn’t leave her number. As for why she didn’t return? Well, I like to think of it as none of my business.
That isn’t to say I don’t think about her. A day hasn’t gone by that I haven’t gone over what happened in my mind, remembered her face, her smell, the feel of her.
I’m a believer in fate when it comes to everything except business. In the business world, nothing’s going to come to you if you don’t go out there and take it by the horns. In your personal life, past trying your best, it doesn’t make any difference to struggle against the inevitable. Actually, it can backfire. If it’s meant to be, it’ll be. If it’s not, then don’t fucking push it.
When it’s my turn, I place my order, throwing in a bagel for good measure. I’m going to need all the strength I can get for the day I have ahead of me. It’s a day packed full of meetings and negotiations – two of the most stressful aspects of my job.
I take a sip at the same time that I turn around, and when I do my eyes lock on a figure outside the shop, on the other side of the glass. Something about her is familiar. I squint, trying to make her out. She looks freezing. She’s bundled up with a hat covering her hair and a thick grey scarf wrapped around her neck and pulled over her chin and cheeks. Her shoulders are scrunched up with one hand stuffed away in her pocket. She moves swiftly, and my entire image of her was little more than a flash over the span of a few seconds. I have to react quickly so I don’t lose her.
“Hey!” I call.
She turns at the sound of her name, or maybe it’s more so at the sound of my voice. It’s hard to tell, but either way, when she sees me, her eyes are already lit up with recognition.
She looks different; her hair is pulled up and tucked under that knitted hat, and she’s holding a pink stainless steel tumbler in one of her gloved hands. She looks businesslike. She looks as though I interrupted her.
“Stella,” I say.
“Cohen.” She exhales the name, her breath freezing in the air between us. The surprise in her voice is painfully obvious. “It’s… it’s good to see you again.”
Why haven’t I heard from you? are the words I want to immediately say, but I hold them back. Now’s not the time for that, and that’s not my style anyway.
“I thought I might see you around someday,” I say.
“Yeah, me too. I usually don’t walk this way to work, but I thought I’d check out the scenery today. I heard they started decorating for Christmas.”
I instinctively look up at the street light above us; a twinkling gold star hangs below it, resting right above our heads. “It’s a little late for that,” I say.
She looks up too. “It always is.” She lowers her head back down, her breath still visible over the top of her scarf. I hold the possible weight of her words in my mind as she continues, “Did you see it last year? They didn’t even start to put them out until the week before. My friend thought it was a bummer, but I reminded her that it’s Christmas.”
She now clutches the tumbler, which I can only assume to be warm, with both hands, and she bounces her knees a bit to keep the blood flowing. She’s still avoiding looking at me, and I can tell that her mind’s not really here.
“I saw. They’re a lot better this year.” The decorations in our town are kind of a big deal. They’re something of a tourist attraction – not a big one, but big enough that people come from neighboring states just to see them. For the last two years they haven’t been putting them up until what seems like the last minute, which isn’t a big deal to me, or apparently to Stella, either, but I guess it’s a big enough deal to make meaningless conversation. I’m just pretending that we’re totally not dancing around some unspoken subject.
“It’s too cold out here for me to keep you,” I say, shaking my head at her attempts to warm herself.
“No, you’re fine. I’m glad we ran into each other.” She raises her shoulders so her scarf reaches the bottoms of her exposed ears. “It is freezing, though.”
I nod. “It is. I’ll let you go.” Really though, can I? The things that happened between us in the span of a few short days were enough to fill an entire relationship. I know Stella knows this, and before she’d left I’d thought she felt the same way. “Look, Stella…” When I breathe deeply, the icy air chills my lungs.
She swallows and I think I see her eyes start to mist, but it could just be the cold finally getting to them.
“I’ll make this quick. I don’t know what happened after you left, and it’s none of my business. Can we just...”
Stella wipes quickly at the corner of her eye.
“Can we just start over?”
She hesitates at first, her gaze darting once more from her feet to the backs of people passing by, and I’m sure she’s going to say no. There was a reason she hasn’t gotten in touch with me in all this time, although I have yet to know what that reason is. She looks at the cars driving in the street, then down at her coffee, at the people who whip past us... anywhere but at me. “I don’t know. That’s an awfully lot to ask.”
I drop my hand. I guess I was wrong.
She smiles weakly at my reaction until she breaks out a small laugh. “Cohen, I’m kidding. Of course we can start over.”
There’s more she’s not saying – I can see it in her attempts at avoidance. But, I think as I pull out my phone, there’s more that I’m not saying, too.
“Are you free for lunch?” I ask. I check my schedule on my phone’s calendar. Nothing’s changed. It’s still packed, but I should be able to move some things around to free up my lunch hour.
“Yeah, I think I am.”
“Why don’t you come by my office at one thirty? I can meet you outside and we can get a bite to eat.”
“Okay. It’s a date.”
I write my office’s address for her on a random piece of paper I found in my wallet, using her shoulder for support of the pen. I glance at her while I’m writing and catch her smirking. I guess it is a cute thing to do.
“Here you go,” I say, handing it over to her.
She takes it and checks it briefly, then sticks it in her pocket. “I think I know where that is,” she says.
“Then I’ll see you in a few hours. Stay warm.”
“You too, Cohen.”
Those unsaid things don’t dissipate as we leave each other. They hauntingly follow both of us, and I hurry now to get to work, those words much more urgent to escape from than any amount of cold. When I turn my final corner, the building of Thatcher Industries comes into view, but I can’t bring my mind where it needs to be, which is in preparation for the first meeting of the day. Instead, my mind remains on her, the way it has secretly been these last two weeks, and the way I know it will continue to be until I have her again. Stella. My Stella, who I pulled out of harm’s way with my own two hands. It feels as though part of her should be permanently indebted to me, and yet I know that’s not the case. I only want it to be, wish it was.
I wish I didn’t feel this way, but I can’t help it, knowing that she’s not yet mine.