Robbie Lane was a walking contradiction. The first time I saw him, he was standing outside the Decade bar in Williamsburg. First impressions? I believe they count. Of course they count. When you’re deliberately setting yourself up to see a person for the first time, there is an onus upon you to make sure you’re looking and behaving your best.
I’d been putting off meeting him for weeks. Through the New Year and most of January, I’d been preoccupied with wrangling my way to a promotion whilst trying to forget my fleetingly intense last relationship. It wasn’t easy. I was the one who’d ended things between Scott and myself and while we’d never been a couple as such, I still missed what could have been.
The date with Robbie had been postponed, deferred, rearranged, moved to numerous locations and almost cancelled outright before the night finally came around. Even then, I wasn’t sure I wanted to meet him. I’d looked him up online and found next to nothing. No social media profiles, which was damn well weird in the year 2017.
My shoes tapped along the sidewalk. I wasn’t looking forward to it. More than once, I considered turning back and going home. There was something awfully pressurising about first dates. I hated them. It was as though I had to try and sell myself. Look pretty, talk pretty, don’t act smart, don’t be judgemental, keep an open mind, laugh at bad jokes, don’t eat too fast, definitely don’t drink too much and astutely assess whether he’ll be offended if you reach for your purse. And then, after all that, learn to dodge fast so at the end of the charade, his mouth finds your cheek and not your lips.
Bizarrely, the one thing that had spurred me into action was Scott. The day before, he’d called me. I hadn’t answered, hadn’t even realised until I saw the missed call listing. It caught me off guard. For weeks I’d been carefully avoiding any thought of him. He was unsuitable, in the way that all addictive, hedonistic things are. And as far as I was aware, he’d moved on. In fact, I knew he had. So why was he calling me? I almost called him back. It took every last atom of my self-control to resist.
And now, Robbie. A shot in the dark. Something to fill up another empty evening. I guess I was curious more than anything. I’d put in an effort. Skinny jeans. Heels. Knit sweater and my favourite jacket. I didn’t want to look like I’d made a huge effort. I caught sight of my reflection in a shop window as I hurried along the sidewalk. Winter casual? Was that a thing? I looked like I was meeting a friend for coffee. A friend who I didn’t know very well. Jesus.
My phone buzzed and I checked it, still walking fast.
It was Robbie.
Have I been stood up?
I almost typed back ‘yes’. But that was mean. And I was only a block away.
No, I’m late. Two minutes. Sorry!
I walked faster. It wasn’t raining but the sidewalks were wet from an earlier storm. Light beamed out from car headlights and restaurants. By the time I closed in on the last ten metres, I was breathless.
“Hey,” He was standing outside the bar, under the canopy. “Ally, right?”
My heart sank a little, even though he crushed his cigarette rather surreptitiously. A smoker? Great.
“Right.”
He was wearing a t-shirt and jeans, both items new enough to pass for ‘casual’ rather than ‘scruffy’. The ink caught me by surprise. At first, I thought it was a trick of the glaring New York light. But once I got close enough, all I wanted to do was examine his tattoos. Both arms. Full sleeves. No spillage onto his hands. They ended in a neat line at each wrist. It looked like pure artistry. Words, pictures, symbols, letters. How much meaning could he have crammed onto his body? It was all I could look at.
“Hey, my face is up here you know,” he said, acting hurt. “Please don’t tell me you’re one of those girls who only wants me for my body.”
I tore my gaze away from his arms and smiled belatedly. He was chewing gum, to hide the smoke no doubt. I hadn’t even seen him put the stick into his mouth. He was quick. Smart. Also, he must’ve thought I was blind. His cigarette packet was sticking out of his jeans pocket.
I didn’t call him out on it. After all, we’d just met. Besides, his smile was warm and his face too distracting. A hard kind of handsome. Dark hair, dark stubble, dark eyelashes. Tall, dark and handsome as fuck. Maybe it wouldn’t be disastrous, after all.
“Sorry,” I said, “Hey, nice to meet you. Robbie, right?”
“Right. Or else you just checked out the wrong guy.”
He was laughing at me but not in a mean way. Our eyes met.
“Hey, let’s go inside,” he said. “It’s cold out here,”
We went into the crowded bar. It was late on a Friday night and as such, it seemed like every single person was out for a good time.
“I didn’t think you were gonna show up,” Robbie said over the music.
“Yeah, sorry. I got – late.”
“That’s okay. So how’d you know Amber?”
Amber was our mutual friend – the woman who’d given Robbie my number. She was also dating Scott. Surprisingly, I had no hard feelings towards her, but then, she was the kind of person who everybody immediately fell in love with.
“It’s a pretty complicated story,” I said. “I really wouldn’t want to scare you away on the first date.”
Robbie smiled, like he might already know the story. I looked away, a little embarrassed, pretending to be interested in a game of pool further down the bar. I felt his eyes dragging over my body, slowly, lazily, like he didn’t want to rush it. I tried not to move. When I turned back, his eyes flicked away.
“So, I heard you’re a chef,” I said and now that I’d seen him, I imagined him in the kitchens of a fancy hotel, the ex-skater genius behind a menu the Upper West Side raved about.
“Yeah. I work at the Sky Hotel near Central Park,” he shrugged. “It pays the bills, you know?”
I frowned. “You don’t enjoy it?”
“Oh, sure I enjoy it,” he said, ruefully. “But you can’t pick your boss. And mine is an asshole.”
“So did you go to like, culinary school, or something?”
He laughed. “No! I got a job washing dishes at a bakery. Then I literally worked my way up.”
“What do you cook?”
“Well, I’m a pastry chef so it’s not all that much cooking.” He shrugged again. “More baking. And presentation.”
I stared at him.
“A pastry chef?”
The corner of his mouth lifted.
“What? I don’t look the part?”
“No.” I said blatantly. “No! I mean, like a patisserie guy? You should be French. Or gay. Or both.”
He laughed. “That’s a bit of a stereotype.”
I looked at him, his t-shirt, his tattoos, the packet of Newports sticking out of his jeans pocket.
“So you make like little eclairs and things?”
“Yes.” He dug in his back pocket and brought out his phone. “Look.” He swiped through pictures of various exquisite desserts. “This was me. This. That was someone else. This was me. That was all me.” He frowned as a picture of a kid on a rollercoaster appeared. “And that’s my nephew.”
I shook my head. “I just can’t imagine it.”
“You should come by the hotel sometime.”
We drank. He asked me about work, family. We talked about books, movies, music, cities, places we wanted to go. He was smart. Interesting. And yet, I couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying. It was the first official date I’d been on in years and I could not think past the physical. His teeth. The silver chain around his neck. The way he held his glass. His hands. The way his t-shirt looked when he stretched. I wanted to put my hand under it, feel his warm skin, see what his body felt like.
As a first date, it went remarkably well. There were no awkward moments of total disagreement, and the conversation was easy. He didn’t have any apparent bad habits (minus the smoking), he didn’t try too hard and I didn’t have to fake-laugh at his jokes. He was funny. It felt as though we knew each other already, knew how to make the other person laugh and feel at ease.
He walked me home afterwards, hands dug into the pockets of his jeans, shoulders hunched up against the cold.
“You didn’t bring a jacket?” I asked.
“I did. Someone took it when I went outside to meet you.”
I frowned. “You never said.”
“It didn’t seem important. Still doesn’t.” He smiled at me. “You want me to walk you up to your apartment?”
There was nothing suggestive in the way he said it. It was almost brotherly. His hands were still jammed into his pockets.
“No. Thank you. I’m good.”
“Well.” He smiled again. “I’ll call you.”
“Okay.”
We didn’t kiss. We didn’t even hug.
***
I thought about him a lot. The area Scott had occupied in my head was now totally replaced by Robbie and he spilled out of the allotted space, constantly lurking in the back of my mind. I liked him. I really liked him. We saw each other with increasing frequency; once a week at first and by the time a month had passed, almost every day.
Our relationship seemed to be more of a friendship. He laughed a lot. I loved to make him laugh, only because it sounded so good. The end of each date was always awkward, like we were forcibly re-establishing the fact that it was more than just friendship. We kissed outside my door. Politely. Gently. Closed mouths. And then I’d shut the door and fight the urge to scream.
It had been a month. A month of watching him finish up at work, a month of meeting up for early morning runs in Central Park, of drinking and laughing and fear. Fear. Fear of disappointment.
I wanted more. I’d wanted more since the day I’d seen him. And I knew I only had to let him step into my apartment to make it happen. I knew the way he looked at me. I knew the darkness in his eyes, the way the conversation faded into a wide, gaping abyss that seemed to get bigger every night. He wanted me. He wanted to fill that void with sex. But I couldn’t. I was too scared that he wouldn’t be what I wanted him to be.
It wasn’t that I wanted another version of Scott. No. But I didn’t want vanilla sex. I didn’t want Robbie to be patient and gentle and sweet. But then, I kind of did. I wanted more than Scott had given me. I wanted him to love me, hard and soft, nasty and nice. And to do it when I wanted it, for us to be that crazily attuned. How self-centred could I be?
I was going to lose him. I knew he was going to get tired of waiting. Soon enough the anticipation would morph into impatience and he’d find someone else, someone prettier and easier. Jesus. I couldn’t let him go. He was too good. He was like no other man I’d ever met. No ego to hide behind. Enough self-deprecation to make me want to love him harder. And that face. That goddamn body.
I didn’t know how much longer I could wait. Would the risk pay off? How could I tell him the kind of sex I was into? I couldn’t speak about things like that. We talked about running for god’s sake! Running and pretty French desserts and art. Not sex. Easy conversations covering up clenched fists. Something hard underneath. Steel. Like powdered sugar on a gun. The pretence of sweetness. Beneath the surface, there was too much going on and sooner or later, something had to give.
***
It was warm for March; calm and pretty. People walked a little slower than usual, enjoying the weather before disappearing into buildings. The calm before a storm. Is that really a thing? It was a Friday. We’d known each other for more than a month. Thirty five days, though who was counting? Five weeks. It wasn’t a huge amount of time. I wondered if there were protocols for how long you should date someone before you’re obliged to have sex with them.
Protocols. Rules. Man-made conventions. I walked out of my office building after work and checked my phone. Robbie had texted me.
Come by my place. Something I want to show you.
It wasn’t out of the ordinary. He lived on the edge of Brooklyn and I’d been by his apartment before. It was already six so I didn’t bother stopping off at home. Instead, I took the subway to the station two blocks away from his place. He lived on the fourth floor of a converted mill, in a one-bed apartment. There was an elevator but it looked like it might break if you even pushed a button so I took the stairs.
He’d told me the door was open when I’d hit the buzzer downstairs and I slipped inside, closing it behind me. His apartment was small, and made to feel smaller by the presence of an imposing home gym in the living room. He didn’t even have a couch. I found him in the tiny kitchen. There was a door opening out onto a balcony and it was wide open, the cool evening air breezing in.
“Hey,” he said. “Thanks for coming. I had tickets to this indie band but then I got a call about a job and - well, money, right?”
He was wearing a t-shirt and jeans. The shirt hung off his broad shoulders. There was a bottle of scotch on the counter and an accompanying glass. Out on the balcony, there were chairs and a small table on which I could see an ashtray. He still tried to hide his smoking habit from me. It seemed petty to call him out on it, especially when he put in such an effort.
“Whatcha doing?” I asked.
The kitchen was clean and tidy, but then, it always was. Due to the nature of his work, he was a stickler for hygiene which I found hugely satisfying.
“Cake,” he said, “A friend has a friend who has a birthday who’s paying me five hundred bucks for some German cake.”
“Five hundred?” I was impressed.
He laughed. “I know, right? He hasn’t seen me which I guess is a good thing. But then I’ve never made anything like this before. And he’s got a whole load of modifications from the traditional recipe. And it’s short notice.”
I watched as he took what seemed to be a baked cake out of the open oven. It was about twelve by twelve inches and as I watched, he smoothed a thin layer of cake mix on top from a large bowl. Then he put it back in the oven, leaving the door ajar.
“You kinda grill it,” he explained. “When it’s cooked, put on another layer, alternating between lightly golden and darker golden. Then when it’s all done, you cut it open and you can see all the layers.”
It seemed like an awful lot of effort.
“How many layers have you done?” I asked.
“About forty so far.” He blew out a breath. “The guy’s turning fifty five. He wants fifty five fucking layers. Don’t even ask. People are crazy. I mean, is he actually gonna count? Besides, all these layers won’t affect the taste, right? The original is twenty layers. So this is like three times the work.”
He had pictures scattered across the counter of what the finished product should look like.
“So you’re gonna glaze it?”
“Uh-huh. And then write happy birthday. In German. You know what that is?” He was peering into the oven sceptically.
“Uh, no. I don’t even know French.”
“Guess.” He glanced at me playfully.
“Uh… guten birthday-en?”
He laughed, a warm, beautiful laugh. He took the cake and smoothed on another layer. He put it back in the oven. I loved to watch him at work. He looked so at ease and comfortable. He leaned against the fridge opposite me and eyed me deliberatively.
“You want a drink?” he asked suddenly. “Sorry. I’m so preoccupied. You must’ve come from work. How’ve you been?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Really.”
He went into over-helpful mode, raiding the fridge and cupboards and bombarding me with questions while simultaneously checking on the cake. I ate two tangerines, toast and honey, a small freckled banana and was then guilt-tripped into testing his homemade lemonade.
“Be honest,” he said, as I sipped it carefully.
“It’s a little flat,” I admitted. “But it’s good. Not too sweet.”
He was back at the oven.
“Flat? Yeah, I think I knocked out the bubbles. I was trying to get the sugar to dissolve.”
The cake tin was almost full. He spread on the mix like a pro.
“What layer are you on?”
