Come As You Are

Carefree. Happy. Easy.

As if I’m simply enjoying getting to know someone I like.

Someone I like a lot.

I can’t have that someone, though, and that’s why I need these moments. These reminders of who we are when she clicks on her recording app. But maybe these not-dates, these work-slash-fun slivers of time, are what I need more than falling for someone. Maybe I need to have fun with a woman and not worry about what she’s after.

With Sabrina, I haven’t felt that worry since the night at The Dollhouse. I didn’t experience it on the subway, and I don’t feel it tonight either. The time with her is like a rejuvenation. It’s refreshing, as if her curious spirit and inquisitive mind are restoring my faith in humanity.

She pokes the pineapple and looks at me expectantly, waiting for my explanation.

I turn the pineapple around, showing her the spirals that comprise its hard, rough skin. “See? They fall in patterns.”

“They do?”

Enthusiasm courses through me, and my geekery emerges in full force. This shit is awesome. “Mother Nature is amazing. Mother Nature loves math. Plants love sequences. The Fibonacci sequence is one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, and so on. Basically, you add up the prior two numbers to get to the next one. And what you have here is the Fibonacci sequence. Pineapple spirals only appear in one of the numbers in this sequence.”

I take her hand and bring her index finger to one of the spirals, dragging it down the scales. Silently, her lips move, counting. A row of five. A row of eight. A row of thirteen.

Slowly, she raises her face, her eyes sparkling with astonishment, as if she’s found buried treasure. “Mind. Blown.”

“Nature is actually completely dependent on math. You see these beautiful patterns all across the world. The same is true for the cauliflower spirals,” I say, running her fingers across the florets in the vegetable. “And the artichoke too. Sunflowers follow the same pattern. Math is literally all around us.”

She shakes her head in amazement. “I had no idea.”

“It’s cool, isn’t it? Math doesn’t dwell in a quiet little separate space, but it can intersect with nature and ideas.”

“Evidently.” Her eyes drift down to my hand still on hers, and maybe because I’m amped up on the Fibonacci sequence, I don’t analyze what I do next.

I do it.

I thread our fingers together, and a spark of pleasure rips through me. From that. From that bit of contact. From the thrill of holding her hand.

A quiet gasp escapes her lips, and then she tightens her fingers around mine, grasping. She nibbles on the corner of her lips, something she did the night we spent together, and it shoots me back in time to those seconds before we kissed in the library.

I swallow. My throat is dry. Somehow, I manage to keep talking. “Math is the foundation of my business, in a lot of ways. Numbers serve as the core, and I build ideas on that. I’ve always taken that approach. That’s what excites me in business—taking patterns and numbers and then marrying them with what people might want next.”

“I know what I want next,” she whispers.

Her sultry tone is like a dart of lust straight to my chest. It stokes the fire in me. “You do?”

“I can’t have it, but I want it.”

She laces her fingers tighter, running her thumb along my skin, triggering a fresh wave of sparks within me.

From her thumb stroking my flesh.

One simple touch and I don’t know if we’re talking about the interview, or business, or math, or what we like. But I don’t care, because talking to her is what I like.

“You,” she whispers, her honeyed voice like a caress. “I probably shouldn’t say this, but it turns me on to no end that you’re this math god and that’s your foundation, and then you layer T.S. Eliot on top of it, or you put Gatsby on top of it, and you think about whether random things are art or ethics.”

I lean closer. “If it’s any consolation, you’re not the only one turned on.”

She draws a breath, then lets it out in a sexy, needy moan.

“Sabrina,” I warn. “This is dangerous.”

She squeezes my hand. “So dangerous,” she says, lowering her face, averting her gaze. “I’m trying not to launch myself at you right now.”

“I suppose I ought to be a gentleman and say I’d resist you . . . but I wouldn’t.”

She looks up and lets go of my hand. “Okay, you’re too tempting. You practically seduced me with a pineapple and the Fibonacci sequence.”

I pump a fist. “Nerds for the win.”

She laughs and turns off the recorder. “Okay, hot nerd. Let’s get out of here before you seduce me with a cauliflower next.”

“Don’t forget the artichoke. It’s willing to offer services for seduction.”

“And the artichoke would probably render me helpless to resist too. Ergo,” she says, pausing to press her hands against the table as she rises, breaking the moment for good, “we should go. I have one more favorite place for us today.”

I don’t say no. I want this next non-date, artichoke or not. “Take me where you want to go.”

“I’m going to take you to the locksmith in the Village.”

It sounds quaint and provincial, but when we arrive I see it’s more than that. The front of the shop in the Village is covered in a replica of Van Gogh’s Starry Night made entirely of keys, forming swirls and spirals like the famous painting.

“The guy who owns this shop recreated Starry Night with twenty thousand keys that he kept over the years,” she explains as I step toward the wall, raising my hand.

I run my finger over the bumpy metallic surface. “It’s like he wanted to leave his mark on the neighborhood.”

“Yes,” Sabrina says. “That’s what I think too. The Village has become home to condos and fancy restaurants, but this is a sort of homage to days gone by, when this place was an artist’s enclave. And this craftsman, whose business could have been kicked out or shut down, has turned his storefront into a sculpture.”

“Found art, like found math in nature,” I say, musing on the possibilities.

“Or maybe a reminder of change? The artists who used to live in the Village can’t afford it anymore. Hardly anyone can afford to live in Manhattan.”

Her observation raises another question—how can she afford it?

I don’t even have to ask. The question must be in my eyes, because she jumps in. “If you’re wondering, I can only afford to live in Manhattan because I’m staying in my cousin’s apartment. She’s gallivanting around Europe, and she lets me stay there for basically a nickel, and God knows I need her generosity.”

The money talk again. I tense, a bolt of worry slamming down my spine as she mentions the very thing that often separates people. Money is a dividing line. Is she trying to figure out how it divides us? How money changes what people want from you?

Once again, I’m left wondering if it plays a part in her wants. That warning voice speaks louder, a reminder that trust must be earned.

Fully.

“I love that you’re kind of obsessed with what New York was. Its past,” I say, so I can dodge the thorny subject of incomes, and how I can afford to live in New York twenty times over and how she’s living off her cousin’s kindness.