Afterward, while people ordered another round, she sat beside me and asked why I'd been trying so hard not to have fun. I told her I wasn't against fun; I just preferred activities where the consequences could be predicted. "That's a very engineer answer," she said, amused rather than dismissive, and asked what I was working on. I explained the software projects at my company and expected her attention to wander, but instead she asked thoughtful questions about how people could trust products they didn't understand.
Emily had recently graduated with a marketing degree and was trying to get her foot in the door at an agency. She was ambitious and restless, drawn to people with big stories and places she hadn't seen, and she talked about building a career that would take her all over the world. I told her I wanted to help create technology people actually used, not spend my whole life chasing fashionable headlines. Somewhere between midnight and closing time, we started talking about our families, the neighborhoods where we'd grown up, and the versions of ourselves we were still trying to become.
I walked her to her ride because it had started raining again. She stood under the awning, looking at the reflection of traffic lights on the pavement, and told me she had expected the evening to be boring. I admitted the karaoke incident had given me grounds for a professional complaint. She laughed and kissed my cheek before climbing into the car, then texted me before she'd reached home to ask when I was going to challenge her to a rematch.
For the first few months, dating her felt like discovering a part of life I'd neglected. We tried restaurants neither of us could pronounce, took long walks after work, and sat in coffee shops making elaborate plans that didn't need to be realistic to be enjoyable. She brought warmth and spontaneity into my carefully scheduled life, and I gave her the kind of calm she said she'd always wanted. When she stayed over, she'd leave notes on my refrigerator in bright-colored ink, making jokes about my labeled spice jars and telling me that somebody had to rescue the place from excessive organization.
I learned her habits quickly. She called her mother every Sunday, drank her coffee much too sweet, and became silent when she was worried about disappointing somebody. She wanted to be successful, but she was terrified of being ordinary, a contradiction I understood only much later. At the beginning, that anxiety made me protective of her; I wanted to create a space where she could breathe without having to prove herself.
It was during one of those early conversations that she first told me about Jake. We had been dating about six weeks, and a photograph on her phone led to a story about a college road trip that had ended with their car stranded beside a highway. The man beside her in the picture was tall, grinning, and sunburned, his arm around her shoulders. She said, almost casually, "That's my ex, Jake," then waited for my reaction.
They had dated for two years in college, she explained, and the relationship had been intense in the way first serious relationships sometimes are. Jake could decide on a Thursday that he wanted to drive across three states before Monday, and he had an extraordinary talent for convincing people to follow him. He could also spend rent money on concert tickets, disappear when something became difficult, and call anyone who complained unimaginative. "It was exciting until I realized I never knew what tomorrow would look like," she said.