The DJ and the Foodie

Two years. That's how long it had been since I'd had anyone in my bed who I actually wanted there.

Let me be straight about that, because the dry spell thing gets misunderstood. It wasn't that nobody was interested. It wasn't that I couldn't get a date. I went on dates. I had a few hookups, all of them more than a year old, all of them forgettable in the way a soggy crouton is forgettable.

The problem was I'd forgotten how to want someone the right way. How to show up somewhere with my stomach doing flips. How to spend three days constructing a text message and then delete it and send something honest instead.

You can fake wanting someone for a night. You can fake it for a month, maybe. But you can't fake it back into existence once it's gone. Or at least I couldn't. I'd stopped believing the flips were even possible.

So when Sophia Nichols suggested we meet at The Crab & Whiskey on a Friday night, I said yes before I even checked my gig schedule. Cancel a wedding reception? Fine. Cancel this? No.

* * *

The Crab & Whiskey is in the industrial district, wedged between a machine shop and a place that repairs forklifts. Neon crab in the window, one leg missing. Rain streaking the glass. Inside it smells like fried fish and spilled beer, tables packed shoulder to shoulder, every one of them taken.

I stood by the door for a second, scanning. Bar, bar, bar. Nothing.

Then I spotted her. Back to me, at the bar, black jacket, dark hair pulled up off her neck. Thirty-three years old and somehow the only person in the room I could see.

And I did the thing you're not supposed to do. I panicked. Fully panicked. Stood there in my wet jacket thinking she's leaving, she's already leaving, she got my texts wrong somehow and she's walking out.

I actually took a step toward the door. To leave first. Classic move. Quit before you're cut, that's been my whole career.

She turned around. She saw me. She waved. Big, unembarrassed wave, the kind you wave at someone across an airport.

Okay. Fine. I could walk fifteen feet.

"Hey!" she said, when I got close. "You're taller than your pictures. That's annoying, I had a whole bit planned."

"What's the bit?"

"About you being short. It's dead now. You killed it."

"Sorry."

"Don't be. Gives me time to think of new material." She looked me over once, quick, not hiding it. "Dan Ames. Hi."

"Sophia Nichols. Hi."

We went for the hug at the same moment and it went badly, elegantly badly, her arm one way, mine the other, a brief collision of elbows and jacket. Second attempt worked. And there it was. The flips. Two years of nothing and one awkward hug and my whole chest lit up like a bad wedding.

She smelled like rain and something warm underneath. She held on maybe a second longer than strangers do. I did too.

* * *

The noise in there was unreal. It was Friday, the whole late-shift chef crowd off duty and drinking hard, plus a birthday party of about nine people near the kitchen door.

"SO HOW WAS YOUR WEEK?" I shouted.

"WHAT?"

"WEEK! HOW WAS YOUR WEEK!"

"I CAN'T HEAR YOU AND I'M NOT GOING TO KEEP DOING THIS," she yelled back, laughing.

I looked around. There was a booth in the far corner, crammed against the forklift-shop wall, a two-top that somebody had just vacated. I pointed at it. She nodded so hard the little twist of hair at the back of her neck bounced.

We slid onto the same bench, because the other side faced the wall and the room was too loud for across-the-table shouting anyway. Which meant thigh against thigh. She didn't move over. I didn't either. She was wearing jeans, soft ones, and the warmth of her leg came right through the denim like she'd been sitting in front of a fire.

"Okay," she said, closer now, almost normal volume. "This works."

"This works."

A server with forearms like a stevedore took our order. Two beers, whatever was on tap. When she left, Sophia turned sideways on the bench to face me, one knee up on the seat, and it was suddenly a very small bench.

"So. DJ."

"DJ."

"I read your stuff. Your mixes. That Halloween one, the two-hour thing."

"You listened to two hours?"

"I listened to it twice." She took a drink. "There's a track in the second half, about an hour forty in. Starts with just a voice and a bass note. I've had it on repeat for a week. I don't even know what it's called."

"It's called 'Low Ceilings.' Nobody knows it. It's from an EP that sold maybe forty copies."

"Well, forty-one now!"

I don't know what to tell you about that moment. It shouldn't have mattered. Somebody liking a song is not a personality. But I'd spent two years feeling like nothing I put out there landed anywhere, and here was this person, this actual person sitting with her knee on a bench two inches from my leg, telling me she'd found the thing I buried deepest and liked it best.

My armor had a crack in it. I could hear it.

"You're staring," she said.

"Sorry. Nobody's said that to me before. About that track."

"Well, they're all wrong and you should be mad at them." She nudged my knee with hers. "Tell me about the EP."

So I told her. About the guy in Berlin who pressed it, about the forty copies, about my friend Marco who bought six and still has five. She laughed at the right parts. Her hand ended up on the bench between us, close to mine, not touching, just close, as if the air itself had paused.

The beers came. We clinked. She drank half hers immediately, which I liked. People who nurse a drink all night at a first date are performing patience. Sophia had turned her phone face-down on the table and was clearly not going anywhere.

"Okay, confession," she said, after the second round landed.

"Go."

"You first."

"No, you said confession, it's your confession."

"Fine." She leaned in. All the way in, close enough