Rebecca Serle - In Five Years

I take a sip of coffee. Bella lives in a world I do not understand, populated by phrases and philosophies that apply only to people like her. People, maybe, who do not yet know tragedy. No one who has lost a sibling at twelve can say with a straight face: everything happens for a reason.

“Let’s agree to disagree,” I tell her. “It has been too long since I’ve seen you. I want to be bored senseless hearing all about Jacques.”

She smiles. It sneaks up her cheeks until it’s practically at her ears.

“What?”

“I have something to tell you,” she says. She reaches across the table and takes my hand.

Instantly, I’m flooded with a familiar sensation of pulling, like there’s a tiny string inside of me that only she can find and thread. She’s going to tell me she met someone. She’s falling in love. I know the drill so well I wish we could go through all the steps right here at this table, with our coffee. Intrigue. Obsession. Distaste. Desperation. Apathy.

“What’s his name?” I ask.

She rolls her eyes. “Come on,” she says. “Am I that transparent?”

“Only to me.”

She takes a sip of her sparkling water. “His name is Greg.” She lands hard on the one syllable. “He’s an architect. We met on Bumble.”

I nearly drop my coffee. “You have Bumble?”

“Yes. I know you think I can meet someone buying milk at the deli, but, I don’t know, lately I’ve been wanting something different and nothing has been that interesting in a while.”

I think about Bella’s love life over the last few months. There was the photographer, Steven Mills, but that was last summer, almost a year ago.

“Except Annabelle and Mario,” I say. The collectors she had a brief fling with. A couple.

She bats her eyes at me. “Naturally,” she says.

“So what’s the deal?” I ask.

“It has been like three weeks,” she says. “But Dannie, he’s wonderful. Really wonderful. He’s really nice and smart and — I think you’re really going to like him.”

“Nice and smart,” I repeat. “Greg?”

She nods, and just then our food appears in a cloud of smoke. There are eggs and caviar on crispy French bread, avocado toast, and a plate of delicate crepes dusted with powdered sugar. My mouth waters.

“More coffee?” Our waiter asks.

I nod.

“Yum,” I say. “This is perfect.” I immediately cut into the avocado toast. The poached egg on top oozes out yolk, and I scoop a segment onto my plate. I make a vaguely pornographic noise through a mouthful.

Bella watches me and laughs. “You’re so deprived,” she says.

I throw her a disgruntled look as I make my way to the crepes. “I have a job.”

“Yes, how is that going?” She tilts her head to the side.

“It’s great,” I say. I want to add some of us have to work for a living, but I don’t. I learned a long time ago there is a difference with Bella, and our relationship, between judgmental and unkind. I try not to stray over the line. “I think it’s going to be another year, and then partner.”

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.

“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.