Love at First Like

by Hannah Orenstein

  I don’t know what’s worse—to alienate my new followers by saying yes, or to defy Haley by saying no. I take a deep breath.

  “Look, it’s unfortunate that we live in a world in which girls are groomed from infancy to view marriage as a prize. There’s a conveyor belt that takes us directly from watching Disney princesses have their happily-ever-after kiss with their prince to watching grown women chasing engagement rings on The Bachelor.” I can feel my voice getting stronger. “I didn’t create this system. I only live in it. I sell engagement rings because I have a lifelong passion for jewelry, and my sister and business partner happens to be a talented designer. If you find something problematic about the sudden spotlight on Brooklyn Jewels because of a development in my personal life, I understand that point of view. Getting engaged isn’t an achievement and shouldn’t be treated as such. But if I shy away from that spotlight, it only hurts my bottom line. And I don’t see anything feminist about avoiding an ethical profit.”

  I lean away from the mic, satisfied. The air in the room is very still. I think I nailed it. Haley’s mouth twitches up into a half smile.

  “Ethical,” she says slowly. Her gaze flashes to my ring. “Let’s talk about blood diamonds.”

  Now this is a question I’m prepared for. “We don’t use them. In fact . . .”

  Ten minutes later, I’m off the air. Haley slips off her headphones.

  “Your speech was impressive,” she says. “I don’t know if I agree, but you defended yourself well.”

  “Thanks for having me.”

  The assistant asks me and Haley to pose for a photo together. Her follower count is huge, so of course, I say yes. When we’re done, I head to the elevator and check my phone. There’s a stream of supportive messages from fans who tuned in and a steady spurt of new followers. One notification in particular catches my eye—an Instagram DM from Raj. He must have followed me.

  “You killed it on air,” he wrote, adding a smiley face emoji.

  I can’t believe he tuned in. I follow him back.

  I toggle through the rest of my notifications, and that’s when I see the email that makes my heart sink.

  My first instinct is to call an Uber, but that’s a splurge I can’t afford these days. I hop on the subway, which is mercifully not too crowded at this lazy dip in the afternoon, and head back to Williamsburg. On the train, I think through how I’ll present this to Sophie. No matter how I relay the news, it won’t be pleasant. But at least I can soften the blow. Wine isn’t the right answer—she’s not really drinking much these days, since alcohol can apparently decrease your chance of getting pregnant. (Yet another reason I’m happy to be uninterested in having children right now, or possibly ever.) But I know her weakness. I make a slight detour from the subway to the shop to pick up a whole steaming hot pie at Joe’s Pizza on Bedford Avenue. It’s worth it.

  Her eyes light up when I carry the white box through the doors of the shop. Sophie’s working on her laptop while Jess helps a couple compare stones on a black velvet display tray. I don’t dare disturb the sale, so I take the pizza to the back room and work quietly until it’s time to close up.

  I’m not even trying to listen in, but the shop is small; I can’t help but notice when I hear Jess ask in a faux-casual tone, “So, how did you hear of Brooklyn Jewels?”

  The female customer’s response is instantaneous and cheery. “You came up on my Instagram Explore feed!”

  “Oh, love that!” Jess chirps, her voice smooth like syrup.

  I hear the couple settle on a stone and a setting. Jess explains that since she doesn’t have the setting in stock in the woman’s size, they’ll need to come back in two to four weeks to pick up the custom order. Jess takes the guy’s credit card information and registers the deposit. I’m glad that Sophie must be hearing this significant sale now; it’ll make the conversation we’re about to have even easier.

  The customers leave a little after six, and I join Jess and Sophie in the front room so we can close up together. The routine is old and well-worn; we’ve divided this ritual into parts ever since we were all kids together at Helen’s shop. There would be upbeat music—disco, more often than not—to guide us through storing trays of jewels into the safe, wiping down counters, and taking out the trash. Here, as adults, it’s no different. When we’re done, Jess grabs her purse from the back room and turns to head out.

  “Greg is actually taking me to dinner tonight,” she explains, a note of excitement in her voice. Greg, her friend with benefits, rarely asks her to hang out beyond the walls of his bedroom. “Otherwise, I’d stay for pizza.”

  I’m glad she’s not staying. The pizza is meant to soften the blow of the conversation I need to have with Sophie.

  “Stay and eat with me?” I ask Sophie.

  “I don’t know . . . I was planning on making dinner tonight,” she hedges.

  “Please,” I say.

  I think she gets it. I let her have Helen’s old leather armchair. I sit cross-legged on a gray folding chair and pull a cheesy slice from the box.

  “So, I got some news,” I say.

  “From Roy,” she supplies.

  “Yeah.”

  She leans back in the armchair. A defeated expression crosses her face. “He said no, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah, he didn’t go for our plan,” I admit.

  A half smile curls around her lips. “So you bribed me with pizza so I wouldn’t get too upset.”

  “I tried.”

  She sighs heavily. “October, then. That’s the deadline to decide whether or not we can keep the shop open.”

  What she does next burns straight into my memory: she looks slowly around the cramped, musty back room. Her eyes roam over the safes, the file cabinets containing stacks of tax documents, her design equipment on the shelf. And then she finally meets my gaze with tears brimming in her eyes. Her voice cracks when she tries to speak.

  “I’m not ready to give all this up,” she says.

  “Not yet,” I say. “It’s not happening yet.”

  She crumples a slice of pizza in half and takes a sad bite. “You can’t say that for sure.”

  “I’m not going to let us go under,” I insist. “We’re going to make this work.”

  I open my laptop and pull up QuickBooks, the accounting software that shows our expenses, our sales numbers, and what’s left in our company bank account. I swivel the laptop to face Sophie and come around the table to lean on the arm of her chair. I tweak the data in the document to reflect projections—how much money we’ll need to pull in by the end of October in order to re-sign the lease at the higher rate. I optimistically increase our sales numbers, too, explaining that we’ve been on the upswing for weeks and can logically expect to maintain a certain level of growth. If the math is right—and I think it is—this proves that we’ll be able to squeak by just fine, as long as our sales continue to grow exponentially.

  “That’s a big if,” Sophie points out.

  I take a deep breath. “I promise I won’t let you down. I want to make this work—it has to work. For both of us, and Jess, and Mom and Dad, too.”

  She finishes her slice of pizza, brushes the crumbs from her hands, and closes the laptop. Her eyes aren’t red-rimmed with tears anymore.

  “I want to trust you,” she says.

  “I don’t want to lose this place any more than you do,” I remind her gently.

  She hugs me tightly. “I know, I know,” she says.

  On my phone, I key up a disco playlist on Spotify. The pulsing opening notes make her grin and groove in her seat. She knows exactly what I’m doing. I heap another slice of pizza onto her paper plate, swirling the dripping strings of cheese around onto the tip. And for the first time in a long time, we relax together—not talking about work, or money, or my fake engagement, or her long road to conception. Instead, we’re just two sisters on a mellow Tuesday night in, trading gossip about people from back home and pulling up photos of fluffier and fluffier
cats on Instagram until it’s dark outside and our bellies are full.

  • Chapter 10 •

  I always thought I’d want a guy to make a grand, romantic gesture. It turns out that’s only because I’ve never had one. In reality, grand, romantic gestures catch you unpleasantly off guard. I learn this the hard way at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon, when I’m hunched over my laptop in the front of the shop and the bell over the door dings. Blake sails through the door holding a bouquet of unwieldy proportions, stuffed with tulips and orchids and miles of greenery—and I’m wearing nearly thirty thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds on my left ring finger.

  I rip off the ring, practically dislocating a joint or two in the process, and shove it in a drawer, where he can’t see it. He’s beaming and apparently doesn’t notice how frantic I am. Maybe I deserve to have Blake figure me out; maybe I shouldn’t be doing this. Having him here in my space only emphasizes my guilt.

  “Hi,” he says in his low, steady voice. He leans a hip against the edge of the counter and peers into the case. “Nice shop you’ve got here.”

  “H-hi. Thank you.”

  He’s still beaming, like he should get so many brownie points for, what, using Google to find out where I work and bringing me some flowers? I wish he would disappear, because if he’s Googled my company, that means he very well could have discovered my scheme online. I feel terrible for hiding the truth from him. But wait, no—if he stumbled across anything incriminating, he wouldn’t be wooing me with a gorgeous bouquet the size of the Empire State Building. That realization spurs me to breathe again.

  “Those are beautiful,” I say, taking the flowers from him.

  “They reminded me of you,” he says.

  Jess simply stares. “Hi,” she says, wide-eyed. Her dinner date with Greg last night was a bust; low on romance, high on him watching football over her shoulder.

  Blake introduces himself.

  Sophie, who had been sketching a new collection in the back room, emerges at the sound of his voice. Her eyes glitter in a way that tells me she knows exactly who this is.

  “You must be Sophie?” Blake asks, extending his hand to her. “Eliza has told me so much about you. I’m Blake.”

  “Hi,” she breathes, still starry-eyed.

  Great, even my married lesbian sister thinks my fake boyfriend is hot.

  “I should go put these in water,” I say, somehow feeling like I’m interrupting. “Uh, I’m gonna run upstairs for a sec to grab a vase from my kitchen. I’ll be right back.”

  I slip past Blake, take the stairs to my apartment two at a time, and proceed to sift through the cabinet beneath the sink, past a clanging, jangling mass of pots and pans I haven’t used since potentially the last presidential administration, in order to unearth the one vase I own. I unwrap the flowers as fast as I can, fill the vase with water, and squeeze the bouquet inside. It’s a tight fit. When I make it back downstairs, Blake, Sophie, and Jess are in a rapt discussion of the shop’s wares, which makes my skin crawl with nerves. They don’t necessarily know every single detail of what I’ve told Blake; they could trip up my ruse at any minute.

  But mercifully, Blake appears to be just fine. He admires some of the pieces in the glass case, asks Sophie about where she sources some of her materials, and sends me a sunny smile when he sees me holding the overflowing vase.

  “I wanted to drop by to see if I could take you out tonight,” he says simply, as if men who could pass for male models swing by for surprise date nights all the time.

  “I’ll close up,” Jess blurts out before I can answer.

  Blake shrugs like it’s a done deal.

  I do a mental check of my life. True, at least my engagement ring is off, but I definitely did not shower this morning and not a soul on this planet would describe my underwear as “cute.” I have, like, a solid amount of armpit stubble. It’s not the most ideal moment for a date. But I can’t turn him down.

  “Uh, yeah, I guess I’m free?” I say. And then, more persuasively, “Yes, I’d love to go out with you tonight.”

  Walking with Blake feels like floating. He slips his hand into mine and our fingers interlock seamlessly. He rubs his thumb along the inside of my palm as we wind through hip Williamsburg, into stately DUMBO, and toward the majestic entrance toward the Brooklyn Bridge. Somehow, walking across one of the most romantic stretches of steel in the world, toward the glittering Manhattan skyline—of course, it’s glittering, Blake probably arranged for the sun to set at the exact right time, because he would—feels natural with him.

  That doesn’t mean I’m comfortable. Oh, lordy, no. I’m well aware that our conversation is a minefield; it’s entirely too possible that he’s seen my boastful Instagram Stories taken inside his apartment (maybe a friend tipped him off?) or that he’s stumbled across my engagement announcement. Maybe he’s even turned off by how aggressively I arrived at his doorstep the other night. (Unlikely, but still.) I feel bad for lying to him. I feel like I’m teetering on a high wire, one step from doom: I have to lead Blake away from conversations about my personal and professional lives while simultaneously entrancing him into falling for me. The thought of it leaves me breathless.

  “I figured it was my turn to surprise you,” he says, breaking my reverie as he steers us around a group of tourists. I have to speed-walk in order to keep up with his long legs.

  (It’s too easy to spot tourists. The sensible sneakers, maps, and cameras are one dead giveaway. But the real trick is to watch their eyes. New Yorkers don’t bother swiveling their gaze to take in the whole view anymore. Tourists walk around with gawking eyes like soup spoons, ready to slurp everything up.)

  “Your turn?” I ask.

  “You know, you showed up at my place last week. It’s my turn.”

  “Oh, so we’re taking turns now,” I say, lifting my chin to look at him. It’s important that I understand his intentions so I can play this right.

  His cheeks turn the slightest shade of pink. “I’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he asks.

  “Of course.” I lean my head onto the edge of his shoulder. It’s time to take a risk. I swallow and stare out at the sharp spikes of the Manhattan skyline to give me courage; I need to remember that I moved to New York to pursue my dreams for a reason, and that if I don’t try every goddamn trick in the book to secure my place in this city, it was pointless to come here at all. “You know, Blake, I like you.”

  He grins. “Really,” he says. It’s a statement, not a question.

  “Like, like-like you,” I clarify.

  “You like-like me,” he says. “I’m flattered.”

  If he were a different person, it’d sound like he was mocking me. Isn’t this how third-graders talk about their crushes? But there’s a sweet note of pride in his voice that’s impossible to ignore. As much as I see him as a prize, he seems to see the same in me. It’s hard to wrap my head around—not just because Blake is such an obvious catch (look up “eligible bachelor” in the dictionary and you’ll literally see Blake’s face), but because for so long, dating in New York has felt like a series of men kicking me when I’m already down. Singledom in this city feels like an unfortunate game of bingo, and I’ve checked too many boxes for the game to be fun any longer: I’ve been stood up; I’ve suffered through dinners in total silence after it became clear that we shared radically incompatible political views; I’ve enjoyed four weeks of sweet, steady dates with a guy who seems like a gentleman—up until I get an angry Facebook message from his current girlfriend; I’ve had hookups that seem dangerously close to what some might call sexual assault.

  I don’t think that what I have with Blake is perfect. I’m not blind to our slightly stilted conversation, which is probably worsened by the fact that I can’t be honest with him about the basic facts of my life. When I’m with him, I get the odd sensation of feeling like I’m acting in a movie about how adults date. I mean, he always wears belts that match his shoes. He has an artfully designed bar cart, flaw
less white sheets without any weird stains, and extra terry-cloth bathrobes just lying around, as if a prop stylist swept through his apartment before I arrived. Right now, here on the Brooklyn Bridge, we sound like we’re fumbling to recall lines from a script: You like-like me.

  Blake is not the love of my life right now—it’s far too soon for that—but maybe he could be someday. I can see it. Our budding relationship feels like finally touching down on solid land after years of struggling against rocky waves. He’s simple. He’s a solution. And he’s easy to like for a thousand different reasons: his old-school charm, his self-assured confidence, his innate ability to make you feel special. I want him to like me, too.

  “Tell me about your watch,” I say, slipping my thumb over the heavy gold band.

  He lets go of my hand and stretches his wrist out in front of him. The gold glints sharply in the dwindling rays of sunshine.

  “It was my dad’s,” he says.

  He grips my hand again tightly and squeezes it. He sounds like he wants to say something more, but he doesn’t.

  “It’s gorgeous. Vintage?” I ask.

  “Twenty, maybe twenty-five years old.” He hesitates. “My dad passed away when I was fourteen. He collected watches. I inherited this from him.”

  “That’s where the idea for Bond and Time came from?”

  He nods. I squeeze his hand.

  “I wanted to create something he’d be proud of, yeah.”

  “That’s beautiful. I’m sure he’s very proud.”

  I know this isn’t about me, but my throat constricts anyway. I want to say the right thing—this time, not just because Blake is a pawn, but because I feel for him. It would be devastating to lose my dad.

  “It was a tough age to have him pass, you know?” he continues. “There’s so much I wish I could’ve talked to him about—things I would’ve talked to him about, if I had been older.”