Love at First Like

by Hannah Orenstein

  He gazes at me with a grateful look. “Thank you so much for being here with me,” he says, leaning in so his lips brush my ear.

  The host explains that he’s been on the association’s board for more than two decades, after his brother passed away from a heart attack. His voice doesn’t waver when he tells the story of his sibling’s death. It’s clear that he’s given this same speech too many times to count. The room’s self-congratulatory aura dims to a somber one.

  “And that’s why it’s so important to keep the American Heart Association going,” the host concludes. “Thankfully, along with the money raised here tonight, I’m sure it will continue for years to come. I’d like to introduce our first guest. . . .”

  The host brings up three guests to share their stories. Each has been affected by heart disease, either personally or because of a loved one, and they offer emotional speeches about how the association has saved lives. As they speak, waiters discreetly circle each table to take our orders.

  When the speeches are over, the host returns to encourage us to eat and mingle. The blonde next to me shifts in her seat, shoots me an awkward glance, and turns back to her fiancé. When she sees him glued to his phone again, she sighs and takes a long sip of champagne.

  “I’m Stephanie,” she says suddenly, turning to me and thrusting out her hand.

  Her grip is firmer than I expected. “Eliza. So nice to meet you.”

  “Eliza!” she exclaims. “I had a hunch that was you.”

  I falter, opening and closing my mouth like a fish hooked on a dangerous line.

  “I’m sure you’re sick of hearing this all the time, but I thought I recognized you from Instagram,” she says. “I followed you back when Teddy and I were still just dating. Loved your pieces. I wound up falling in love with this other designer—no offense—but seriously, your stuff is so gorgeous.” She absentmindedly runs a finger over her engagement ring, a flashy cushion-cut rock set in platinum, surrounded by a halo of tiny diamonds. I’d guess it’s two and a half, maybe three carats.

  “Well, thank you so much for considering us,” I say, dropping my voice’s volume to avoid catching Blake’s attention. I can hear him talking to his friends, but I don’t dare risk letting this woman ask any further questions. Instead, I go on the offensive and ask questions of my own to keep her distracted. “So, when did you get engaged?”

  She happily chatters about her Christmas Eve proposal, the headaches of planning a destination wedding in Napa Valley, and her plans to honeymoon in Florence and the rest of Tuscany. The whole time, I freeze my face into a huge grin and punctuate her every sentence with an enthusiastic nod.

  “But wait, wait, enough about me,” Stephanie says. Her eyes go wide and she drops her voice even lower. “Is this . . . him?”

  She gestures in the least subtle way possible to Blake. I want the marble floors to swallow me up.

  I feel too nauseated to speak. I can’t think straight—one wrong word from this woman, spoken just loudly enough for Blake to hear, and everything could crumble. I settle on a response that’s as noncommittal as possible: a smile and a raised eyebrow, which I hope makes me look mysterious and coy, rather than deranged.

  “If you’ll excuse me for just one moment,” I tell Stephanie.

  I turn to tug on the sleeve of Blake’s jacket. “Can you come with me for a sec?”

  He’s mid-conversation with Dan, Arielle, Peter, and Jeff, but doesn’t protest. Instead, he scoots out of his chair and places a hand on the small of my back as I weave through the sea of tables. As we walk, I notice how women’s eyes flit up to Blake and I feel a swell of pride. I’m not ready to lose him.

  I pull Blake into a secluded corner of the venue by the coat check. Whoever mans the station appears to have stepped out. Panic unspools in my chest like a flock of birds, frantically flapping their wings to get out. I don’t know what to say to Blake—I only know that I have to say something, anything to justify pulling him away from dinner. We can’t go back to that table. Not with Stephanie poking around with her nosy questions.

  “Is everything okay?” he asks.

  “I’m falling in love with you,” I blurt out. Then I freeze, horrified by what I’ve just done. Blake’s mouth twitches and his eyes go wide. “I mean, I know it’s so soon. Too soon? And this isn’t the time. Or the place. But I just wanted you to know, and—”

  Blake places a finger to my lips. We lock eyes. I don’t feel confident enough to breathe. I’m digging myself an even larger hole.

  “I think I’m falling in love with you, too,” he says, voice quavering. He shakes his head. “No, I am falling in love with you.”

  “You are?” I ask. His words feel like an uncomfortable jolt of electricity.

  “Yeah,” he says, tucking a stray piece of hair behind my ear.

  When he kisses me, his hands slip easily over the green silk of my dress to pull me close to him. The sturdiness of his hands on my hips feels like an anchor, even as my heart pounds dangerously fast.

  The past sixty seconds are giving me whiplash. I dropped the L-bomb purely because I needed something wild to distract him. I don’t know why that was the first thing to come to mind. My only goal was to get him away from Stephanie—it hadn’t even occurred to me until this very moment that Blake might actually be falling for me. We’ve only known each other for a month. I had no idea that a person could fall in love so quickly.

  And yet.

  Blake has acted more tenderly toward me than any man I’ve ever known. He’s made me eggs most mornings this week, runny in the middle, just the way I like. It’s clear that he genuinely listens when I speak, rather than waiting for his turn to interject his own stories, like so many other guys I’ve dated. He triple-checks for cars before we cross the street together, muttering “precious cargo” under his breath as we walk hand in hand. Just two days ago, I caught him staring at me with a soft smile spread across his face. When I asked what was up, he simply shrugged and said, “I like you.”

  Truthfully, I don’t think what I feel for Blake is love. Yet. I can imagine it blooming someday. He’s a good, solid guy, and I feel lucky to know him. I like spending evenings curled up in his apartment, and I like being here with him. But love is something else entirely—I remember vestiges of it from my relationship with Holden: at first, the obsessive way his name was always on the tip of my tongue, the giddy fireworks I felt every time we kissed; later on, the deeper understanding that he was someone special, despite his myriad flaws. Love isn’t a choice. Strategizing every minute of my relationship with Blake is. I feel almost nauseous with guilt, but I’m too involved now to change course.

  I have to play this next move carefully.

  “Do you . . .” I look up at Blake with big, adoring eyes. “Do you wanna get out of here and celebrate?”

  He looks over my shoulder at the seated crowd behind us and laughs. “Ha, you mean, like, now?”

  I worry that I’ve gone a step too far—that this is the move that will sink me. Asking him to leave his favorite event of the year must be wrong. But he drops a kiss on the top of my head and agrees to go. “Sure, they’re almost wrapping up anyway.”

  “I’ll get our stuff from the table,” I offer, stepping backward already so he doesn’t have time to protest.

  I don’t think I’m overreacting; I don’t want to risk an interaction between Stephanie and Blake.

  I retrieve the phones we both left on the table, along with my purse. My phone lights up with a new text that must have come in while I was distracting Blake.

  “Hey. It’s Raj. I just wanted to apologize in case anything that happened the other night was out of line. . . . I know things ended kind of suddenly. Is everything okay?”

  I can’t help but imagine him hunched over the bar, biting his lip, punching out this apology text. I hate that he feels guilty at all. I slow my walk back to the door so I can respond appropriately.

  “Hey! No, no, everything’s really cool between us.
Just wasn’t feeling well all of a sudden. I can’t talk now—but let’s hang soon?”

  I make a mental note to text him tomorrow. Raj is cool and hanging out together feels effortless; I don’t want to mess up our budding friendship. I slip my phone back into my purse and approach Blake with another kiss. It’s the kind of kiss that would’ve made me soul-crushingly jealous just two months ago. I know we look so right together. So smitten. His hand lingers on the small of my back when we finally break apart.

  “I haven’t ever shown you my rooftop, have I?” Blake suggests.

  “You haven’t.”

  “What do you say to you, me, a bottle of champagne, and a good view? It’s a nice night.”

  My chest feels heavy. I don’t want to hurt him. He deserves the truth about who I am and how I feel—not more lies. But I’m not brave enough to come clean right now. “I’d love that,” I say.

  He grins and pulls me close again. “And I love you.”

  • Chapter 14 •

  I’m curled up on Helen’s old leather armchair in the back room of the shop, hunched over my laptop, a stack of printed and highlighted bank statements, and a yellow legal pad scratched up with optimistic math. What’s left of my coffee has gone cold. I have the same looming sense of dread I had while studying at the library in college, staring at numbers that start to swim as my mind turns to mush. But back then, if I made a miscalculation or failed to grasp a concept, the biggest consequence was a bad grade on a midterm or a final. Now the stakes are higher: I could come up short on rent. I could lose the shop. I could sink the business.

  I know exactly which calculations to run by now, after having done them for so many months. All afternoon, I’ve pored over our sales, overhead costs, total income, taxes, rent, utilities, and salaries, double- and triple-checking to see how those figures might stretch and warp depending on what the future holds. Even if we take creative steps, like trimming our salaries and slightly boosting our prices, I don’t see a safe way for us to re-sign the lease at the higher rent. There just isn’t enough money.

  I slump over the desk and let my forehead bang against the keys of my laptop. I can’t fathom running out of money. I’d have to, what, work for someone else again? Relocate to a less charming neighborhood? Of course, I could. But I’ve never been in this position before, and I don’t like it. Growing up, my family veered from comfortable (when we launched Mom and Dad’s business) to very comfortable (when the business was doing well). The only financial hiccup I can ever recall is one year when we were little, when they debated if they could afford sending both me and Sophie to summer camp. By the time we were old enough to start thinking about college, money wasn’t an issue. We knew we could go to the University of Maine and be fine or go to a private school out of state and also be pretty much fine. I chose to study business because I liked understanding the strategies behind running a successful company. It didn’t occur to me until halfway through my first semester of school that running your own business could totally bankrupt you.

  And so I let my thoughts drift off to last weekend with Blake. It’s easy enough, now that I spend nearly as much time with him as I do at Brooklyn Jewels. The hours after the charity gala are a bubbling blur of hot, breathy kisses in the backseat of a cab; the cool rush of air when we stepped out onto Blake’s rooftop, an urban ocean rippling out in front of us. I could see lit-up apartments, dark windows barely illuminated by the blue glow of a television, neat rows of brownstones, tidy squares of greenery that count for backyards, and the iconic lines that make up Midtown Manhattan sprawling out in front of us, sparkling brightly in the night sky. I braced myself against the ledge, drinking in the view. Blake came up from behind me to slip his hands around my waist, dotting my neck with kisses.

  “I love you,” he nuzzled into my ear. “And I want you.”

  He pressed himself closer to me, and I could feel the hard edge of his desire. I felt a sudden flash of guilt—for how grand and downright romantic the evening was, and the hollow way my feelings didn’t measure up to his—but I pushed it away. Instead, I turned around and slid my arms over his shoulders to kiss him. I felt lucky that I didn’t exactly have to fake my passion for him. He was so devastatingly suave in his tux, and I truly did like him. I let him lead me off the roof, down the stairs, into his apartment, hoping that my feelings for him would develop over time.

  Later, after Blake had drifted off against the cloudlike white pillows, I couldn’t sleep.

  “I love you,” I mouthed silently, staring at the ceiling, trying to get my mouth accustomed to forming the words. They rolled around on my tongue like rocks.

  I wondered if I was anything like Holden, who had strung me along for so many years. Was I worse? Holden kept me around while he figured out what he wanted in life—I don’t think he meant to hurt me. I was using Blake outright.

  I open up my conversation with Blake on my phone and hover my fingers over the keyboard.

  “Hey . . .” I tap out.

  I wait for the right words to come. They don’t. I delete the draft. There’s nothing to say that will assuage my guilt, strengthen my relationship with Blake, and keep Brooklyn Jewels running. It’s like what people used to say about college: when it comes to good grades, sleep, and a social life, you can pick two. Max. You have to prioritize. You can’t have it all.

  The thing is, I know exactly what I need and want now. Over the past month, Brooklyn Jewels has managed to pull in 25 percent more sales than we expected. When I mapped out our sales per day, that became clear: there was a significant spike within the first three days of my engagement announcement, and then that success petered out over time, with smaller spikes after the Elle story, Haley Cardozo’s Head Bitch in Charge radio show, and every time I posted something personal on Instagram. Considering that the rent hike will be 20 percent, that means a 25 percent jump in one month doesn’t necessarily help, unless I can guarantee that we’re able to keep our sales at that rate indefinitely. There need to be more spikes—bigger spikes.

  What I need is a wedding.

  With the numbers in harsh black and white in front of me, I see the big picture more clearly than ever before. A wedding is not guaranteed to save us, but it could offer us the best possible chance of success. The buzz around my engagement would turn into an even bigger buzz around the wedding. And with so much hanging in the balance—not just the shop, or my relationship with Sophie, but also our parents’ stake in the company amid their own business’s faltering year—I feel undeniably committed to seeing my plan through. Just to be safe, I recalculate my projections for how the wedding could buoy Brooklyn Jewels. It’s tight, but it works. Just barely, but still. Pursuing Blake isn’t just a harebrained scheme—it’s also my most solid hope. That is, as long as he wants me. If he wants me in that way.

  If I want to really profit off the wedding, I can’t completely leave it up to chance. I can’t just zip up my wedding dress, walk down the aisle, and expect to rake in sales from followers. I put on my Kris Jenner hat to mastermind what comes next. For the next hour, I dive into a Google hole, taking precise notes and bookmarking relevant pages. I learn that the clearest way to accomplish what I want isn’t just to get a free wedding—I have to profit off my wedding.

  I try a little bit of everything, like throwing spaghetti at the wall without fully knowing what will stick. I ask if Brides will purchase exclusive rights to my wedding photos for $10,000, angling myself to them as the hottest engagement ring designer in the industry; I pitch myself as a cover star for The Knot; I ask TLC to cast me in a variety of wedding-themed reality shows; I write to the editor of the New York Times’s Vows section and request coverage of my wedding; I invite a scarily popular YouTuber to the nuptials and ask her to film a wedding-themed vlog; I email Haley Cardozo to tell her how much I loved doing the podcast and to ask if she’ll do a special episode on my wedding day. I briefly consider inviting her to be one of my bridesmaids, just for the sake of press, and stop myself when I re
alize that would be at least one step too far.

  I close my laptop and stand up to stretch. When I enter the front room of the shop, Sophie looks like she’s sketching out a design with a customer. Jess is straightening up a velvet tray. Outside, on Bedford Avenue, a group of women walk by, and one slows to examine our wares in the window before catching up to her friends. I take a seat behind the counter and spot a smudged fingerprint marring the glass. Reflexively, I grab the Windex and a roll of paper towels we keep lodged underfoot. I spray the chemicals and rub out the spot until the glass gleams. I feel at home here. I’m not ready to give this up.

  Here is a partial list of things I did during that yearning, four-year stretch of singlehood: I read Susan Miller’s horoscopes every month, breathlessly skimming them until I got to my luckiest days of the month for romance—then I’d swipe through Tinder and schedule dates for all of them. I shaved my bikini line before every date, regardless of how I felt about the guy, even though it irritated my skin, because I was too embarrassed to pay for waxing (how mortifying would it be if I forked over all that money and then nobody ever even saw it?). I read the New York Times wedding announcements and calculated how old each bride was when the couple met, just to see if I was falling behind. I dropped hundreds of dollars on brightly swirled bath bombs and pretty candles so I could sit in a glowing tub, skin prickling lobster red under the hot water, and feel desperately alone. I held my phone precariously over the bathtub to snap photos for Instagram, lauding those nights as “self-care,” but that wasn’t true. I only took baths when Sophie and sometimes Carmen and all my other college friends were doing date night or eating takeout in front of Netflix with their significant others. I used to lie submerged in the tub, wondering if there was a magic trick to finding a relationship, and if so, how everyone knew what it was but me.

  And then everything changed.

  I catch myself laughing out loud, actually laughing, as I walk down a tree-lined block on the Upper East Side to meet Blake. It was so easy to find him. I needed a guy. I spent maybe an hour and a half looking for a guy. And I picked one, it worked out, and here we are—supposedly in love. Has finding a boyfriend been this easy the whole time? Was I simply not trying hard enough all those years? Or was it that I was trying too hard, pouring my entire heart into it, when I only needed to use my brain?