Chapter 34: Right Place, Right Time
The studio was clearing out — students rolling up mats, trading the usual end-of-class small talk — when Jade caught Andrew's eye from across the room.
"You made a real adjustment in that last sequence," she said, coming over. "I noticed it. What were you thinking about?"
"Just trying to let the movement lead instead of forcing it." He picked up his water bottle. "Something you said in the second class, actually."
Jade smiled — the genuine kind, the one that showed up when someone who cared about their work saw it land. She loved yoga the way some people loved music, not as a career so much as a vocation she'd organized her life around. She'd left a corporate job two years ago to teach, taken the evening slot because that was what was available to newer instructors, and built her twenty-three-person class from scratch.
Eleven tonight, because of the punch-card system and a rainy Thursday, but she'd taught the eleven like they were a full room.
The woman on the far mat coughed meaningfully. She was waiting for her post-class correction. Jade glanced over and held up one finger — a minute — then turned back to Andrew.
"You're moving like someone who's been practicing for years," she said. "Not three weeks."
"I pick things up quickly when I'm interested."
By the time the studio was empty and they'd both changed, the conversation had migrated naturally into the hallway, and from the hallway toward the exit, and by the time they were outside on the sidewalk the question of dinner had emerged the way it does between two people who've been circling a subject without naming it.
"I haven't eaten yet," Jade said, in a tone that wasn't quite a question.
"Me neither." This was not true, but Andrew delivered it without noticeable guilt. "I was going to cook when I got home."
"You cook?"
"Seriously, yeah. Come over — it's easier than finding somewhere open at this hour."
Jade considered this for a moment with the expression of someone doing a quick internal calculation. Andrew was easy to talk to, interesting, and had the kind of face that made the calculation fairly straightforward. A weeknight dinner that turned into whatever it turned into was a completely reasonable outcome to an evening.
"Okay," she said. "Let's go."
Andrew cooked seriously — not as a performance, just because cooking halfway wasn't interesting to him.
He put together a proper meal, the kind that took time and attention and filled the apartment with the smell of something real. They talked while he cooked, about yoga and music and what New York looked like if you'd moved there from somewhere smaller, and by nine-thirty when they sat down to eat, the conversation had the comfortable momentum of something that had been going for a while.
Jade ate with the focused appreciation of someone who was genuinely hungry and genuinely impressed and was making only token efforts to appear casual about either.
"This is incredible," she said, after about five minutes of concentrated eating. "I mean it. Where did you learn?"
"Practice, mostly. And paying attention to what I eat."
"Can you make this again sometime?" She said it lightly, but it landed with the specific weight of I would like there to be a sometime.
Andrew smiled and steered the conversation back to yoga, which was the sensible thing to do.
After dinner he brought out the desserts he'd made that afternoon — a small plate of the cream puffs, some shortbread, a few pieces of the tiramisu he'd been refining.
He set them on the coffee table and they moved to the couch, and the conversation got slower and easier the way it does late in an evening when no one is in a hurry to be anywhere.
"I'm going to have to run an extra mile tomorrow," Jade said, eating her second cream puff with the expression of someone who had decided the consequences were acceptable. "These are too good."
"You teach yoga every day. I think you're fine."
"You're just saying that."
"I'm really not."
He had, at some point, shifted closer on the couch. Jade had, at some point, shifted closer back. These things happened incrementally enough that neither of them had technically made a decision.
By midnight the TV had been on for two hours without either of them watching it. Jade looked up at the clock and made a small sound.
"It's late," she said. "I didn't realize—"
"You're welcome to stay," Andrew said. He said it easily, like an offer being made rather than a point being pressed.
Jade looked at him for a moment.
"Do you have a spare toothbrush?" she asked.
He was up early. By the time he'd made coffee and started on a simple breakfast, the apartment was quiet and the morning light was coming in at its usual angle, and he felt the specific calm of someone who'd slept well and had a clear day in front of them.
Jade was still asleep when he finished breakfast. He let her be and started on the apartment — laundry in, floors swept, the second bedroom aired out and assessed with fresh eyes.
He'd been thinking about renting it out.
The math was fairly clean: monthly income from the fund, bar gig earnings, whatever he made busking, plus a roommate contributing to rent — three months, maybe slightly less, and the food truck was fundable. Not borrowed, not leveraged. Actually his.
He'd looked up the health permit requirements and the food handler certification process. Neither was complicated; they just required doing. He added them to the updated plan he wrote out while the laundry ran — a new version, because the old one had been built around a financial situation that no longer existed. Better to start from where things actually were.
Around noon, Jade appeared in the kitchen doorway in one of his flannels, looking relaxed and slightly amused by herself.
"You've been up for hours," she said. "I can tell."
"I'm an early riser."
"Annoying." She sat at the kitchen table. "Is there coffee?"
He made her breakfast — simple, because Americans did lunch and dinner as their main investments and morning was usually practical. They ate and talked easily, the slightly different register of a morning-after conversation that was going fine.
Afterward they ended up back on the couch, and the afternoon went the direction the morning had pointed toward, and around three o'clock Jade collected herself, found her things, and wrote her number on the back of a receipt from her bag.
"In case," she said, setting it on the counter.
"In case," Andrew agreed.
She left with the easy energy of someone who'd had a good time and wasn't making it complicated.
Andrew picked up the note and set it in the small dish by the door where he kept miscellaneous papers. Miranda's number was already in there.
He looked at both of them for a moment.
He was genuinely busy. The plan was written, the timeline was set, and there were things that needed doing. Whether either of those numbers got called depended on what the next few months looked like.
He put his jacket on and went to the library to look up food truck permit requirements.
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