“One other time. To reward myself for striking out on my own.”
“So what are you celebrating tonight?”
“I have a contract for you. There’s a copy in my pocket. I’m not going to ruin the moment by whipping it out now, but it’s been vetted and approved by my lawyers, and all it needs is your signature. We’re celebrating the start of a very promising business career.”
Suddenly the soft surroundings took on a sharper tone. Lark almost jumped when a server silently appeared beside her and removed her plate.
“I haven’t even read it, Trip—and you want me to sign it tonight?”
To his credit, he looked surprised, too. “Tonight? Oh, god no. No, no, no. I’m not trying to rush you into anything.”
“Phew.” Lark relaxed and sipped the sake.
“Take it with you, take your time. Have someone check it out. This is not anything . . . weird.”
She chuckled. “Only weird if we make it weird, right?”
“Right,” he said, looking relieved. “You’ll keep intellectual property rights, you’ll own your trademarks, your ideas, your company. I’ll get a modest slice of any net profit once my original investment has been paid back. And I reserve the right to invest more money before anyone else can. I believe in the game you’ve created. I believe in you.”
“Before this conversation goes any further, I have one condition,” she told him coolly.
“Name it.”
“I need to know your last name.”
His face was like an open book as she read his response: surprise, again, at what she was asking; disbelief that he hadn’t already told her; and happiness that he could grant her request.
“Mitchell,” he said with what looked like relief.
“And Trip is a nickname, so what’s your real first name?”
“Jonathan, but I don’t think I’ve ever been called that by anyone but a teacher on the first day of school.”
“Trip Mitchell,” she repeated, weighing it, trying to decide if the first name–last name combination matched up with the man sitting across from her. It didn’t, exactly, but then how many people would have guessed her last name?
“Now yours,” he added, smiling.
“Robinson,” she told him.
“Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me,” he said with a chuckle. “Aren’t you?”
“What?” she asked, puzzled.
“Old movie reference. Sorry, moving along.”
He was clearly embarrassed, but she felt a little dumb for not getting the reference, too. She decided to google it later and watch the movie before he came to town again.
The chef offered the second dish, a tiny black dumpling decorated with gold leaf, of all things. People paid money to eat money here, apparently. Lark and Trip ate theirs simultaneously, mmm-ing in approval as they savored the salty, smoky taste of eel. The sudden silence was awkward and surprising and went on just a little too long. Then they both reached for a jellied seaweed salad at the same time and got their chopsticks tangled up. Lark laughed loud enough that all the diners and even the chef looked their way.
“Now this is weird,” she said, still giggling, once they no longer had everyone’s attention. “Nice, but weird.”
“How do you mean?”
She took a deep breath. “I mean, we’ve been naked together, and we’re going into business together, but we hardly know each other. I just learned your last name. I mean, it’s all really exciting, but I don’t know where it’s going, and I’m worried that we don’t even know how to talk to each other.”
“Then let’s talk about ourselves,” he said as one of the ever-attentive servers removed their plates and dabbed at a nonexistent spot on the gleaming, buffed wood countertop.
“So we just tell our whole life stories?”
“I’m in no rush.”
“It feels . . . forced.”
“Then tell me something big about yourself,” he said as the chef and his helpers began assembling what looked like lumps of crab in broth, cupped in actual crab shells perched atop tiny cylindrical hibachis. “Tell me what scares you most in the world.”
Lark didn’t know what to say. Well, sure, with Dylan she had been afraid of being tied to someone who wouldn’t grow up, and she was worried she’d never pay off her student loans, but neither of those seemed big enough to answer Trip’s question. Which was a good one: if you knew someone’s deepest, darkest fear, you’d know them more intimately than if they recited a list of biographical facts.
While they ate the next course and refilled their cups of sake, she stalled by telling him about her family and how she’d grown up in a loving household where she’d been encouraged to be independent even when she secretly wanted a little more parenting.
When he pressed her again, all she could come up with was a litany of everyone’s real-world fears: climate change, fascism, nuclear war. The fear that none of what she did mattered because the world was slowly playing itself out. But even though those fears were real, in a way they didn’t feel real, because she herself had never felt the direct impact of any of these global-size problems.
But Trip listened, nodded, cared. If she had only one sentence to describe what made him different from every other guy, it might have been: He never talks over me. It was almost spooky. As she heard herself go on, even though she had some doubts about what she was saying, she felt stronger because she was able to say it. And maybe there wasn’t anything wrong with struggling to articulate these problems, anyway: issues that big should be hard to articulate.
When she finished, he looked at her, then took a swallow of the sake he’d been ignoring. “I’m not convinced,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I hear genuine concern, but not fear. I don’t think you’re afraid of anything. I wish I were like you.”
“Good thing it’s your turn,” she told him.
He chuckled. “I should have had an answer ready before I asked such a big question.”
“Bad planning.”
He thought about it through
