The Taste of Leaving

I watched Andre laugh at something the waitress said and I tried to remember the last time that laugh had actually done anything to me. It used to drop straight through my stomach, back when we were twenty-seven and twenty-nine and everything between us was new, and now it was just a sound I knew the way I knew the hum of our refrigerator. That thought sat wrong with me all through the appetizer, and I picked at my cornbread and told myself it was the heat making me sour.

The AC at Mann's Supper & Soul had died sometime that afternoon, apparently, because the whole dining room felt like the inside of a mouth. July in Durham is no joke anyway, but this was something else, this wet heavy air that made my dress stick to the backs of my knees every time I shifted on the booth. The windows had fogged up so you couldn't even see the parking lot, and the clatter of dishes from the kitchen sounded twice as loud as it should have, as if the room itself was cranky about the temperature.

"You okay over there?" Andre asked me. He was thirty-one now, three days from thirty-two actually, and he still had that way of looking at me sideways as if to check whether I was having a good time before he let himself have one.

"I'm melting, but I'm fine," I said. "This dress is gonna be permanently attached to my body by the time we leave."

"That's a look I could get behind."

"Smooth talker." I smiled at him though, because even dulled-down love still has its reflexes, and he grinned back and reached across the table and squeezed my hand real quick before letting go.

He was looking good tonight, I'll give him that. He'd worn the blue shirt I bought him for his birthday, and he'd done the thing with his hair where it looked like he hadn't done anything to it. Some freelance designer thing, probably, the art of looking effortless. I remembered the first time I saw him, at that horrible faculty mixer two years ago where I'd been cornered by the department chair's wife and her stories about her cats, and Andre had walked over and rescued me with zero warning, just inserted himself into the conversation and steered it toward graphic design disasters until the cat lady gave up and wandered off. I'd thought, that man is going to be trouble, and I was right, just not the kind the cat lady's raised eyebrows were hoping for, a Black man crossing a faculty mixer to stand beside a white woman. The trouble turned out to be Tuesdays and grocery lists and him falling asleep during movies I picked.

Timothy showed up around eight, loud as ever. He owned the place, which I kept forgetting until he did things like wave off our check before it even came, and he came around the table and bear-hugged Andre nearly out of his seat.

"There he is, there's the famous Andre," Timothy boomed. He was thirty-eight and built like a retired linebacker who'd kept eating like one. "Yvette, honey, you look like you're surviving. Barely."

"It's a jungle in here, Timothy."

"Yeah, yeah, the compressor went out at four and the repair person says Thursday. Thursday! In July!" He shook his head like the universe had personally wronged him. "Sit, sit, I'm sitting with you, Angela's coming, she was doing the books in the back. Andre, you look too skinny. You eating? She feeding you?"

"He cooks better than I do," I said.

"That's a low bar, I've seen your kitchen," Timothy said, and Andre laughed, that same laugh, and Angela appeared from the back with a harried smile and a glass of iced tea she'd clearly confiscated for herself.

Angela was thirty-three and had the tired-but-holding-it-together look of a woman who'd married a man who owned a restaurant, and she and I did the thing where you compliment each other's dresses and mean it about forty percent. She slid into the booth next to Timothy and fanned herself with a menu.

"Timothy, I swear, if you make me sit through another round of the compressor story I'm walking home."

"It's a good story, the ending changes every time."

"Does it end with free whiskey?" Andre said, and Timothy pointed at him like he'd won a prize.

"Now that's a friend. Angela, baby, tell Rob four whiskeys and whatever these two are eating, on the house, and I don't want to hear about it."

"Rob already told me to tell you the AC guy says Thursday," Angela said, deadpan, and I liked her a little more for it.

The whiskeys came in short glasses sweating just as hard as everything else in that room, and I don't even like whiskey that much but I drank mine anyway, and it lit a little trail of warmth down my throat that was somehow both terrible and exactly right for the night. Andre had ordered for the whole table without asking, which used to annoy me and now just felt like him, and Timothy launched into some story about a health inspector, and the table got loud in the way tables do when old friends find their rhythm again.

I half listened and half watched Andre. He had his arm along the back of the booth, not around me, just along the top, and he was doing the thing with his hands when he talked where he shaped the air like he was laying out a design. I used to watch those hands across a table and feel something flip over in my chest. I tried to find the flip tonight and mostly I found fondness, which is a fine thing but it is not a fire, if that makes sense, and I was two whiskeys in before I admitted to myself that I'd been doing this a lot lately, auditing my own feelings like a woman grading a paper she didn't want to grade.

Then Andre did something he does, which is turn a story around on me without warning.

"Tell them about our first date," he said, pointing his glass at me. "No wait, let me tell it, because I come off worse and she deserves to hear it."

"Oh God," I said.

"So first date," Andre said, leaning in like Timothy and Angela were being told state secrets. "I pick her up, right, and I've planned this whole thing. Dinner at this little place, then walking around the campus lake because somebody told me it was romantic. I had a whole speech planned. I'd rehearsed the speech."

"He had not mentioned the speech before," I said.

"Because it's embarrassing! So I get to her door and she opens it and she's in this green dress, and my brain just, it left. Empty. Everything I rehearsed, gone, like somebody wiped the board. And she says hi and I say, and I quote, you look like weather."

"I'm sorry, he said what?" Angela put her glass down.

"Like weather. I meant like the sky before a storm, all dramatic and gorgeous, but what came out was four words and a nervous breakdown. And she looked at me and she laughed, thank God, she laughed and said well you're stuck with me now, get in the car. I drove the whole way to the restaurant with my heart somewhere in my ears."

"That's not what you said," I said, and I was laughing, because he always gets it slightly wrong, "you said I looked like weather about to happen, which is honestly worse."

"It's worse, thank you, that's worse," Andre agreed, raising his glass, and Timothy was pounding the table and Angela was wiping her eyes.

But somewhere in the middle of the laughing I went quiet, because I remembered that night for real, and the remembering hurt a little in a way I hadn't expected. I remembered sitting in his car while he white-knuckled the steering wheel, and how the nerves coming off him were so strong I could practically taste them, and how that had done something to me, how knowing this grown man, this confident-seeming man, was terrified of me, had made me feel like the most important person in a dark room. I remembered wanting to be close to him so bad it was almost physical, and the walk around the lake where our hands kept bumping until neither of us pretended it was an accident anymore.

And now here we were, two years later, in a sauna pretending to be a restaurant, and he knew my coffee order and I knew his deadlines and neither one of us was terrified of anything.

"Hey," Timothy said, and I realized he'd asked me something. "You still with us, professor?"

"Sorry, the heat. What?"

"I said how'd a guy like this end up with a woman like you? Must've been the weather line."

"Devastating opening move," I said. "Couldn't resist."

Andre looked at me when he laughed, really looked, and for a second there was something in it, some flicker of the man from the car with his heart in his ears, and I thought, I want that back, and the thought arrived so loud I nearly said it out loud into the whiskey glass.

* * *

By dessert Angela had fled back to the books with genuine relief and Timothy had told the compressor story twice with two different endings, and the restaurant had gotten no cooler but I'd gotten warmer in a different way, flushed and restless in my seat. Andre noticed, because he always notices, he's not oblivious, that's never been our problem.

"You good?" he asked, quiet, under Timothy's laughter.

"Yeah," I said, and then I put my hand on his knee under the table, which I hadn't done in a while, just flat out done in a while, and I watched that land on his face. "Actually, I'm thinking we skip the rest of dessert."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. I'm thinking you drive me back to the hotel and I tell you what you looked like tonight in that blue shirt."

He blinked at me, and then he grinned, the old grin, the one from before, and started waving down Timothy for the check even though there wasn't one, because that's what you do, you say your goodbyes even when the owner's your friend. And all the way out the door, through that wet heavy heat, Andre kept sneaking glances at me like I'd turned back into the woman in the green dress, and I walked a little ahead of him on purpose so he'd keep doing it.

In the car he didn't start the engine right away, just sat there with his hands at ten and two on the wheel like we were waiting for a light that wasn't there, and the heat had followed us out of the restaurant and settled into the upholstery so the whole car smelled like hot vinyl and the two whiskeys I'd had, and finally he said, "Okay, I give up, what is happening with you tonight, because you've been somewhere else since the cornbread."

"I don't know," I said, which was a lie, I knew exactly, I just didn't have the sentence built yet. "I kept thinking about the car. That first night. You were so scared of me you couldn't even do the speech."

"I was not scared of you."

"Andre. You drove us to dinner like the wheel owed you money."

He laughed, but quietly, as if to check whether he was in trouble. "Okay, I was a little scared. You were a professor and I was a guy with a laptop full of unfinished logos."

"You were a guy who said I looked like weather."

"Which worked, apparently, so let's not overthink the method." He turned the engine on and the AC wheezed out air that was barely not-warm, and we pulled out onto the road with the windows down anyway, Durham in July doing its thing, moths and fryer grease and somebody's music three streets over, and for a while neither of us said anything and it was a good kind of nothing, the kind we used to have all the time before we learned to fill silence with grocery lists. "Timothy likes you," he said eventually. "He doesn't like everybody."

"He's loud enough to like everybody."

"He is," Andre agreed, and I could not name the thing in his voice, some small ache, and I realized he'd been a little distracted all night too, at dinner his hand kept drifting toward his pocket, and I remembered catching him scrolling under the table twice while Angela was asking me about the department. I'd been telling her about the faculty meeting that week, the one where we argued for ninety minutes about whether the seminar schedule should change by one hour, and she'd kept nodding and confiscating things, and Andre had been there in the blue shirt I bought him and also not there at all. I hadn't been mad about it. That was the sad part, I hadn't even been mad, I'd just noted it and moved on, like checking that the milk had gone bad and putting it back anyway.

"Hey," I said, "at dinner. The phone thing. What was so interesting?"

"Timothy's invoices. He showed me his books problem, he's paying for a scheduling app and a bookkeeper and a guy named Rob who I think does everything else, and I started redesigning his menu in my head and couldn't stop." He glanced over. "That's it, that's the crime."

"You redesign menus in your head at my table now?"

"It's a sickness, Yvette. The doctor said so."

I laughed and put my hand on his thigh, high, and his leg went stiff under my palm the way it used to, that little intake, and he looked at me fast and then back at the road, and I thought, there it is, there's the guy with his heart in his ears. "Careful," he said, and his voice had dropped into a different register, one I hadn't heard in months.

"Why careful?"

"Because we're four blocks from the hotel and I would like to arrive alive."

"Then drive faster."

He drove faster.

* * *

The hotel had that cheap-chain smell of carpet cleaner and someone else's vacation, and the hallway ice machine rattled like it was offended by something, and I got us into the room while he was still fumbling the key card, and then I stood there in the middle of the ugly beige carpet in a dress that had been stuck to my knees since we sat down in that booth and I realized I had no plan, that wanting something back and knowing how to reach for it were two different skills.

"So," Andre said, dropping the key card on the dresser, "you were going to tell me what I looked like in the blue