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“Any more, and I won’t be able to see one without thinking of you,” I say before I can think better of it.
Something flits across Sebastian’s face at my words, but Omer waves me over to get the food before I can identify it.
Central Park is open until midnight, but the nights are slowly growing chillier, so there are fewer people here after dark than in the peak of summer. We find a bench and sit. I’m too hungry to make decent small talk, and the first bite has my eyes rolling back in my head.
“Good, right?” I say, mouth full as I look at Sebastian, who’s already devoured three bites.
He nods slowly and wipes his mouth with a thin paper napkin. He brings the gyro to his mouth as though to take another bite, then frowns at it. “So why didn’t you?”
“Why didn’t I what?”
“Become an artist.” He takes another bite.
I shrug. “Probably the same reason most midwestern eighteen-year-olds who move to Hollywood don’t ever get to go to the Oscars. Some things are simply meant to be dreams.”
“What kind of artist are you?”
“I dabble,” I say vaguely, not in the mood to revisit the cutesy Tinker Bell comment when things are so amiable between us.
“Did you ever try? To go professional?”
“Did you ever try?”
“To become a horse jockey?”
I smile. “No. To be anything other than—what’s your title again? Vice president of city domination?”
He winces. “Development. Vice president of development.”
“Same thing,” I mutter, wiping some hot sauce from the back of my hand. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a frustrated look cross his face, and he exhales before taking another bite.
We chew in silence for several moments. Not quite tense, not quite comfortable. As though we both know we’re constantly straddling a line between tentative truce and opposing goals.
When he speaks again, he’s apparently chosen to lean into the truce, because he looks and sounds more relaxed than usual. “I haven’t done this in a long time.”
“The food? The park? The bench?” I ask curiously.
“All of it. The spontaneity, mostly.”
“You do seem to be rather… structured.”
“Wouldn’t you be?” he says, mostly to himself. “If you’d grown up hearing, even jokingly, that you were betrothed from the cradle? If there was a Princeton sweatshirt under the tree every Christmas, long before you’d even thought about college? If it was a foregone conclusion that you’d take over the family business?”
“So where did you go to college?”
“Princeton.”
I think about this as I finish my gyro. I crumple up the foil as I chew the last bite, knowing I did Omer proud with my eating, even if I disgraced Keva with my cooking.
“I know I only met them once,” I say cautiously. “But your parents seem pretty cool. Reasonable. You can’t undo the Princeton thing, but you could marry this other girl—the complicated one. Become a horse trainer because, sorry, you’ve got to give up the jockey thing. You’re way too big.”
He crumples up his own foil and then twists it idly in his fingers, lost in thought. “Perhaps.”
“You want to know what I think?” I turn toward him and pull my leg up beneath me, prop my elbow up on the back of the bench so I can look at this complicated man.
“Oddly, yes.”
I don’t mind the oddly part. I know what he means. We’re not friends. On a professional front, we’re downright adversaries. But we’re connected somehow, and that sense that I knew him even before I met him seems to grow stronger the more I’m with him. Might as well put my inexplicable connection to this man to good use.
“I think it’s easier to go along with what your parents want. Easy, in a comfortable sort of way. If you’re chasing what they want, and it doesn’t quite work out, the loss would be tempered somewhat. You won’t fight for it as hard, true, but it also won’t sting as much because you’ve got no skin in the game.”
He crumples the ball in his left fist, then leans back on the bench, his right elbow brushing mine lightly as he stretches out his legs. “No, I don’t believe that’s true.”
“You don’t?” I’m surprised. I’d sort of impressed myself with my insight.
He shakes his head and looks over at me. “No. If we were less motivated by other people’s plans for us, by other people’s dreams, you wouldn’t be fighting so hard to keep Bubbles & More open.”
My head snaps back, a little stung that he’d upset our truce by going there. “It’s not the same.”
“No?” He pivots toward me, leaning his head against his fist, mirroring my posture. “So, if Bubbles hadn’t been a family run store, you’d still refuse to even hear my offer? Still refuse to consider something that might be better for your employees. And for you?”
