The restaurant was warm and low-lit, all dark wood and candles in little amber glasses, the kind of place where the waiters move like they have somewhere to be but are in no hurry to get there. David looked relaxed when we sat down, easy in his shoulders in a way I took, foolishly, as a sign. He ordered a bottle of wine we would normally have rolled our eyes at, the two of us doing the math on the price and deciding we were not those people. When it arrived he lifted his glass and looked at me across the flickering candlelight and said, ten years deserves something decent.
I smiled at him. That almost sounds romantic, I said.
Don’t get used to it, he said, grinning, and I laughed, because it was the kind of thing he always said and it had always charmed me, this refusal to be caught being sincere, this way he had of undercutting every soft moment before it could become dangerous.
Dinner was easy at first. Genuinely easy, the way our best evenings were. He told me a story about a guy from his office whose fiancée wanted a destination wedding in Italy, three days of events in Tuscany, and how the poor man was quietly going broke trying to keep her happy. I laughed at all the right places. I even noticed, distantly, that the story was about a wedding, and I let myself read it as a good omen, as evidence that the subject was in the air, warm and welcome, and not the loaded thing I had always feared it was. That is the cruelty of hope. It reads every sign in its own favor. We shared a dessert, some molten chocolate thing that we fought over with our two spoons, knocking them together and laughing, and at one point he reached across the table and brushed his thumb slowly over the inside of my wrist, a gesture so familiar and so tender that it disarmed me completely. It felt normal. It felt safe. And that, more than anything, is why I chose that moment, because after ten years of careful timing I had finally stopped being careful, because I trusted the warmth in the room and the warmth in his eyes and the ten years behind us to hold the weight of an honest question.
