A/N: I'm a few years late to this show, but I loved watching Betty and Daniel graduate from a slow friendship into a deep, impenetrable closeness. I especially liked seeing Daniel grow into a more compassionate and human character, and wanted to explore that further, from Daniel's perspective and with a romantic lean. This story comprises a series of vignettes tracing the development of Betty and Daniel's relationship over the course of the show, from a warming friendship to the tenuous edge of something so much more. Please enjoy.
Also, I've recently made a music video to "Be My Only" by FM Radio that I think complements this fic well. I don't post much on YouTube, but my friend AccidentaLeft was kind enough to post it under her username. Thanks for watching.
Wait For It
The first time, she's stuck waiting for the bus and he's just trying to get home. He comes through the main doors late, not for anything important but for something he thought he couldn't miss, and before he reaches the town car he spots her through the pockmarked Plexiglas of the bus shelter, the only burst of color in an evening going prematurely gray. It's early days and they're still new to each other, and he's not sure why he even notices her, except that she's kind of impossible to miss.
(His conviction on this will only grow, though he'll become less of an asshole about it.)
She's hunched into the worn plastic bench, her arms braced on her knees as if to keep her harvest-colored patchwork coat from touching the graffiti slur etched across the seatback. Wilhelmina's flying monkey has been calling her a scarecrow all day, and in the harsh fluorescent lights of the tube he couldn't really pretend otherwise, but that's not what she looks like anymore, out here—she looks like a ripple of sunlight up a steel skyscraper, a marigold growing on a median. She looks like someone who shouldn't have to wait for the bus. He pauses with his hand on the top of the town car.
"Betty?"
She whips her head around to lock eyes with him, pops up from the seat like she's been stung. "Daniel! I didn't know you were still here. Didn't you have a date?"
He raps his knuckles on the top of the town car, answer and dismissal in one. "What about you? I thought I let you go half an hour ago."
She wilts under her baggy coat, glances at the people crowded around the little bench, and then steps out of the bus shelter so they can talk away from the rest of the passengers.
(When he grows up a little, he'll be embarrassed how much he appreciated that.)
"There's some kind of a problem with the bus." She gestures down the road, where he notices for the first time a city bus idling with its hazard lights on, a group of men in uniforms gathered around the front end talking into radios. Daniel's not sure when buses became one of those things he doesn't see, like panhandlers and paparazzi. Betty folds her arms across her chest. "They sent another one, but it was packed before it even got here. So I'm just…stuck."
Daniel cranes his head toward the bus, the steady pulse of the lights reminding him of a ventilator or a busy signal, something unresponsive and indefinite. He leans back into the town car with a shrug. "We could get you a cab. I'll spot you." Then, when she shakes her head: "Or, uh…I could, you know, give you a ride."
(He doesn't know yet how she feels about handouts, that she won't his take charity if she thinks he's acting out of pity instead of kindness. He doesn't know yet what taking the bus means to her—or how elated he's going to be when she starts taking rides from him anyway, because she likes his company more than she likes feeling independent.)
Betty smiles down at the sidewalk, pitted with crushed glitter and dried gum. Her hands twist in her scarecrow jacket. "I think I'd better just wait for it. It's not the first time, you know." She's giving him that look, the one that's exasperated and playful and maybe a little fond, though he's not sure what he's done to make her fond of him yet. "Go already. You don't want to be late picking up Sicily."
It takes him a few seconds to remember that's his date's name.
Daniel rests his back against the cool metal of the car, twists his head to look at the bus, at her, at the bus again. The road is roiling over his shoulder, the churn and exhaust of rush hour and road rage, and if he delays two more minutes he's going to be stuck in traffic, just as stranded as she is. He can slide in and forget this whole encounter before his driver hits the light. He can't remember what made Sicily seem so special. Daniel slips his hands into his pockets.
"Come on. At least let me buy you dinner. It's got to be better than hanging out here, right?"
Betty bites her lip. He doesn't know her well enough yet to tell if that's a yes or a no. "What about Sicily? Aren't you having dinner together?" she presses, relentless.
Daniel honestly can't remember. He opts for a smile. "Apparently not," he says, and offers his elbow—the first time he's managed to lead her instead of the other way around.
They end up eating at a falafel cart down the street because Betty doesn't want to get out of sight of the bus. Daniel lets her order for both of them and tries to check his misgivings when she hands him a folded pita wrapped in waxy paper, drips of thick white sauce slicking up the rim. Mindlessly he wonders if this was fine dining for her before she came to Mode, and then instantly regrets it, ashamed by the thought he could imagine coming out of Wilhelmina's mouth. He puts all that shame into screwing up his courage and swallows a third of it in one go. He chokes, but it's not the falafel's fault—it's better than he expected, good enough that his second bite is smaller and he actually chews it before swallowing. Betty's looking at him like he has measured up exactly to her expectations, but beneath the Tahini sauce at the corner of her lips he can also see a hint of a smile, so maybe it's not so bad to be predictable sometimes.
He'll have to text Sicily and cancel the bar crawl for tonight, because alcohol is unpredictable and he doesn't want the falafel repeating on him later—but for now he just stretches his arm out along the top of the public bench that is theirs for just this moment and nudges her with his shoulder as he says, "Okay. You've convinced me. Maybe we'll add it to the lunch rotation."
Betty has a strand of lettuce caught in her braces, but even that doesn't detract from her smile.
(Nothing ever does.)
The thing about Betty is, no one has ever become irreplaceable to him so fast. He doesn't have to make a place for her in his life—it's more like the place has always been there, just waiting for her, and sometimes when he looks back he aches wondering how he lived so long without realizing he was unfinished, half man and half void. She's the first person in a long time who actually gets him. Before Betty, he's not sure anyone even tried.
(It takes him a while to realize that, before Betty, he wasn't worth the effort.)
There's a late night when he's bent over the conference table in his office, rearranging the order of ad spreads because Dior's contracts stipulates a three-page separation from either Gucci or D&G and there's a blank half page at the back that's driving him crazy. He'd drag the features writer in here and chew her out for dropping the ball on the Egyptian eyeliner piece, but since the featured brand just had its FDA approval revoked, he knows they've actually dodged a bullet on this one. Somehow nobody ever talks about how to patch the hole the bullet leaves when you dodge. Betty's always with him on the late nights, but in between rifling through the pages he's lost track of her. Then suddenly she's right there, a riot of color in what Marc calls her blueberry waffle dress, the couch bouncing a little as she flops down next to him with a large paper bag in her lap.
"Close your eyes."
Daniel looks at her, at the smile so wide he could probably count her teeth. It always lifts his mood a little, just getting a smile like that from her. He reaches for the bag. "What'd you bring me?"
"Hey!" Betty leans away, stuffs the bag behind her back. "It's a surprise, Daniel. Close your eyes first."
He retracts his hand, scrubs it down his face and through his disheveled hair. "Betty, if I close my eyes right now, I'm not going to open them again. The coffee stopped working forty-five minutes ago. Please tell me there's something stronger in that bag."
She wrinkles her nose. "I'm not sure I'd say stronger…"
He doesn't know, yet, to trust her implicitly. She reads his doubt on his face.
"Look—I know the photo editors' meeting got in the way of lunch, and that you didn't get any breakfast this morning because of a totally unforeseeable accident at the bagel cart—"
"You still have some cream cheese in your hair," he says, mildly because he's just trying to get a rise out of her. He loves the way she pouts when she shoves his shoulder.
"—and Wilhelmina's idea of a 'working dinner' is a glass of cucumber water and caviar on an oyster cracker," she finishes, undeterred, though one hand does stray up to rake through her bangs. "So I got you something special to keep you going, but I worked really hard to get it and I really want it to be a surprise. So please? Just for a second?" She squeezes her eyes shut and then opens one to peek up at him, and for all his reservations he knows this is one thing he's not going to be able to deny her.
(He's never learned to deny her anything.)
He hears the crinkle of the paper bag, the hollow pop of plastic boxes coming open. He thinks maybe she just wants to lay it all out, make a presentation, until he hears the snap of separating chopsticks and feels the presence of something hovering just beyond his lips, her warm hand braced on his shoulder.
"Okay—open up!" she sings out, and reluctantly he does, though he feels like an idiot sitting there with his eyes closed and his mouth open. He forgets his idiocy when he's choking a second later—there's a chopstick jabbed into his gums, but what he's choking on is the cold, slimy lump of unidentified flesh suddenly filling his mouth. For a split second he swears it's a severed tongue. Then he opens his eyes and spots the rectangular box of sushi balanced on her knee, the telltale rows of gleaming sashimi, and slowly the flavors resolve into honmaguro tuna, the hint of soy sauce from the zuke preparation, the grains of rice disentangling on his tongue. She retracts the chopsticks. Daniel squints at the logo on the takeout box.
"You went all the way to Sakana for sushi?"
"For your favorite sushi," she corrects him, and it's sort of crazy and sort of awesome that she knows that. "But that's not all!" She brandishes two more boxes. "Ginger-coconut miang kum shrimp wraps from Narai Thai, without shredded cabbage—" The heady scent hits his nose on a wave of steam as she tears open the lid. "And—wait for it—garlic shiitake spring rolls from Flowering Garden, with extra chili sauce."
He doesn't even know how to thank her for this. To make one of these gestures is what he'd expect of a best friend. To make all three is, well…Betty's the only person who would ever go that far for him.
(It won't take him very much longer to realize that, if it's her, one person's enough.)
"Betty…I don't know what to say. I can't believe you trekked all over the city just to do this for me."
She's biting her lip again, and he knows her well enough now to know that could mean almost anything. "Before you get carried away, I didn't actually go anywhere. All of this came to you."
Daniel looks down at the boxes in her lap, looks up again with one eyebrow raised. "Flowering Garden doesn't deliver."
Betty's mouth twists to one side. "They do if they get a call from someone who might or might not have identified themselves as a very close friend of Daniel Meade's, who would consider the delivery a personal favor…" Daniel holds his peace, just waits for it, the other shoe, because he knows from experience that his name isn't enough to get this done. Betty twirls the chopsticks in her hands. "…and who would be more than happy to mention the restaurant in the upcoming issue."
"What?" Daniel's too stunned to be mad at her—no one's ever traded space in his magazine for culinary favors before. Betty shrinks down in her seat.
"Sorry! It's all I could come up with. But I took care of it. Here!" She has one more thing up her sleeve, apparently—a single printed sheet of paper, a little crumpled around the edges, with a careless smear of chili sauce through the last paragraph like a divine omission. He doesn't read any farther than her name in the byline. "'Late Night with the Editor-in-Chief,'" she recites, sounding a little prouder than he thinks she means to. "Just a snapshot of what keeps Daniel Meade going when he's burning the midnight oil. I did a profile on each dish with the restaurants' names in bold—and since I didn't have to go anywhere, I wrote the whole thing while I was waiting for the deliveryman. Oh! And it's exactly four hundred and thirty-six words, so it will fit perfectly right…there!"
She tugs the paper out of his hand and slaps it down on his empty half page, and suddenly the rest of the spreads don't look so bad, the balance of the ads restored by patching that one hole. Betty filling his voids again. For half a second Daniel almost lets himself consider it. He offers her a rueful smile as he slumps back into the couch.
"Betty, I appreciate this, I do. You have no idea. But I can't put this in Mode. Wilhelmina's going to freak. It's her policy never to promote food in the magazine—she says it gives people ideas."
But Betty isn't practical or defeatist—she doesn't back down in the face of a challenge, never has, and he should know her well enough by now to know that she doesn't jump at Wilhelmina's shadow. She isn't like him.
(Some days this is his single favorite thing about her.)
"Well, Wilhelmina isn't here! When she sticks around till eleven thirty for the second night in a row trying to bail this sinking boat, maybe she can have a say." She picks up one of the spring rolls and dunks it too hard in the chili sauce, scattering orange droplets like exclamation points across her navy tights. "Takeout is a battlefield, Daniel—you work with what you've got." She grips the roll between two fingers, holds it up in front of his face. "You with me or not?"
He balks. "Betty…" She wiggles the roll back and forth, just enough to send a rivulet of chili sauce snaking down the side. It'll be on his dry-clean-only slacks in a second. Daniel watches her for another moment and then makes the smart choice for once in his life—leans forward and jams the whole thing in his mouth and then just does what she says.
"You're right," he says, in case the spring roll wasn't enough of a white flag. "'Late Night.' It's perfect."
Betty gives him a grin, and as she picks up a shrimp wrap for herself he hooks his arm around her shoulder and pulls her close, rests his cheek against her hair. Almost brushes a kiss across her forehead before he realizes she probably doesn't want tuna and chili sauce smeared in her bangs, too.
"Thanks," he murmurs instead—and then, a little louder: "Just, maybe don't lead with the sushi next time."
(Sometimes he wonders if he lived his whole life just to learn how to make her laugh.)
Her melancholy takes her unexpected places. He doesn't understand how it is that she's always there when he needs her, but when the tables are turned, when she's the one who needs something, her instinct is to disappear, to tuck herself away in corners where he doesn't know to look for her. He wonders if she'll ever feel comfortable coming to him with her problems.
(She will, but never as often as he'd like.)
He's been looking for her since lunch, doesn't understand how, in the monochromatic halls of Mode, he can't find a girl in red and orange and white, the dress and pullover Amanda calls her piñata party but which reminds him more of confetti, something bright and sudden like her. He's checked with Christina in the Closet and Marian in the cafeteria and even stooped to checking the women's bathroom. The model washing her hands looked at him like he was crazy, but Daniel knows he's not crazy, not overreacting, because when he was on his way to the lunch meeting with Boucheron she wouldn't meet his eyes, and this always means she's been crying. If Wilhelmina didn't already have her claws in his shoulder, he wouldn't have gone at all.
(This is one of those things he'll be ashamed of later—that there was ever a time he could leave her in tears.)
It's the curtain that catches his attention. He barely uses the balcony off of his office, but somebody has been, because one of the sheer white curtains is stuck in the sliding-glass door, trembling in the air conditioning like a broken wing. He grips the handle for a moment before pulling it open, revealing her hunched against the stone wall with her arms around her knees, the afternoon shadows thrown across her, dulling all but the tips of her bright green sandals. The curtain whips between them and for one hazy second it's like she's vanished again. Daniel steps out and shuts the door behind him.
"Betty?"
Her breath rattles in her chest as she lifts her head, looks up at him with a grimace that's trying to be a smile. It doesn't reach her bloodshot eyes, which look even worse offset by the heavy black smudges along her cheekbones. Daniel didn't really know she wore mascara; just enough to run, apparently. She wipes at her eyes like it won't just make everything worse.
"Daniel. You're back already. Did you need something?"
He stands for a moment with his hands in his pockets, trying to read her face. He doesn't know how it's possible for them to be so close, to stand on the Brooklyn Bridge together in the middle of the night, watching the silent city like the only two people in the world, and yet she still doesn't trust him with her broken heart. Daniel's not sure he's ever been a rock, but he thinks he could probably be a shoulder. He moves forward slowly and then slides down the wall to sit right beside her, his shirt rucked up against the uneven stone.
"What are you doing out here?" he asks, softly because the last thing he wants is for her to think she's in trouble. Betty sighs and uncurls a little from her crouch.
"I can't go back inside," she says. She holds her arms out as far as she can with him right next to her, reveals a stain of brilliant red like a gaping wound across the middle of her body. "I was walking past Amanda when Marc told her how many grams of sugar were in her cherry Icee. I look like somebody shot me—repeatedly. And of course today's the day I left without my coat…"
"Oh. Well, I can fix that." It's hard to get his suit jacket off while he's sitting down, but it's worth it to see the way she sinks into the fabric when he drops it around her shoulders, how she wraps it around herself like a blanket or an embrace. He doesn't care even a little that her fists will leave wrinkles in the wool.
(It's the Icee on the silk lining that proves impossible to get out, but she's worth the imperfection.)
"So?" he says when she's tucked into his jacket, and Betty sighs, leans forward again to rest her chin on her knees.
"I had a huge fight with Hilda." Her gaze slips down to the gap between her sandals, so his does too, and for the first time he realizes she's been staring at her cell phone, the glass face ominously dark. "She screamed at me and hung up, and now she won't answer the phone no matter how many times I call back. There's just some stuff going on with my dad, and she wants me to be somewhere today, but I can't be there because I have to be here…"
Something she's said catches at her, and she cuts herself off, closes her stinging eyes. Daniel tilts over far enough to nudge her shoulder with his. "Betty, you know you can always come to me with things like this." He prays she does, anyway. He wants to at least be good enough to lean on. "If you need time off, you have it."
She laughs, kind of, a choked whisper of a sound that doesn't really make it out of her throat. "Actually, you're sort of what we were fighting about," she murmurs into her knees. Betty turns her head to rest her cheek against her leggings, brings their eyes back together. "Hilda was ranting about how I should be the one to go because I have this great job and this great boss who's always so nice and supportive and…"
"And that's a bad thing?" he hazards, because she looks like she might cry again.
Betty drops her gaze, spins the cell phone around with the tip of her finger. "No, Daniel. It's wonderful. You're wonderful. It's just—my whole life I dreamed of working at a magazine, and now that I finally am, it feels like everything's getting in the way. And I know you'd give me the time off, but sometimes I just want to be here, doing my job…" She slumps into herself, into him, and he braces one hand against the ground, careful not to rock because he doesn't want her to think there's any reason to pull away. "But Hilda decided I was saying my job's more important than hers, my life is more important—and now I feel terrible and I just wish she'd pick up so I could apologize."
Daniel wishes he knew what to say. He doesn't have a lot of practice having a sister, and honestly he kind of sucks at relationships in general. His bond with her is the only bridge he hasn't torched at least once.
(Even when he does, she's always there to help him put out the flames.)
"Anything I can do?" he asks uselessly, already knowing the answer before she shakes her head.
"No." She takes a deep breath, sits up enough to look out at the wall of windows on the skyscraper across the street, the sheer cascade of silver scales. "Eventually she'll get tired of ignoring me and then she'll call back and chew me out, and I'll say sorry like a thousand times, and we'll make up. Nothing to do but wait for it."
Daniel watches her for a long moment, weighing her silence and the brush of her body against his. Then he lifts his arm and puts it around her, pulls her in; it feels strange to run his hand down a suit jacket instead of satin or bare skin, but he forgets it under the feeling of her head falling onto his shoulder, her face pressed into his collar. He wonders if he'll have mascara smears to contend with, too.
(He will, but he won't care.)
"I'll wait with you," he says under his breath—and then, when the silence feels too heavy: "Did you tell her what a pain in the ass I can be?"
Betty laughs into his shoulder. "I don't think anyone would believe me. You don't exactly come off as demanding."
"I'll have to work on that," he says. Then an idea hits him, something he's sure will make her smile, and he gently disentangles from her, pushes himself to his unsteady feet. "And as your exceptionally demanding boss, I insist that you come with me right now to get Icees from the movie theater down the street. Non-negotiable," he adds as he reaches down and takes her hands, just in case he didn't sound enough like a hardass.
He gets the smile he wanted, though she raises an eyebrow too. "Did you forget why I'm stranded out here on your balcony?" As he pulls her to her feet, his jacket swings back, revealing the brilliant stain again. Daniel smoothes the suit down against her shoulders.
"Betty, seriously—don't worry about it. I guarantee you are the best-dressed person on the Mode floor right now. You have no idea how much this suit cost."
She looks guilty and elated at the same time—an expression he's not sure he's ever seen on anyone before, but it works for her. She lets him keep one of her hands as they make their escape. Amanda gives her a horrified look as they jog past the reception desk—but Daniel stands by what he said, is positive he's never seen a better combination than confetti print and hand-tailored Armani, and if watching her laughing as they duck into the elevators gives him an idea for the next issue's cover, a woman in startling red and a borrowed suit jacket—well, that's just one more way she inspires him to be better than he is.
(He doesn't want to know anymore who he might have been without her.)
And then sometimes she comes on him all of a sudden, an eruption of color in a moment that's otherwise lost his interest. A room full of suits and gowns, a party Alexis is hosting that's more like a ball, ostensibly because their honored guests from Swarovski were very specific, but Daniel suspects Alexis just wants to show him up as much as a hostess as she always did as a host. He's walking absently around the edge of the dance floor, drinking less than he wants to because alcoholism runs in his family, watching ad execs and their featured models try to two-step—and all at once there she is at his side, in a lavender dress with too many ruffles that he recognizes as a Christina McKinney original, the bateau neckline of which she has for some reason disguised under a purple vest embroidered with dandelion clocks. He likes the way she looks in purple.
"Having a good time?" he asks, and when she nods instead of answering he brushes her arm with his elbow, just enough to pull her eyes away from the dancers. "I kind of thought you'd be out there by now," he says—though he didn't, not until this moment, watching the way she's watching them spin.
Betty just shrugs. "Nobody's asked. Not that I was waiting for it," she adds, a little too fast. Daniel runs through the last few weeks of conversations in his mind, tries to remember if she has a crush on anyone right now. Probably not the kind of person who would be here, at Alexis's overblown gala. Betty always seems to look for love down, not up.
(He hasn't realized yet that there is no up from her. Neither has she.)
Daniel shifts his weight to the other foot, shrugs in return. "I could, I mean…we could give it a whirl." She can't suppress a grimace at his bad pun.
"I don't know." She's biting her lip again; he can't tell if she doesn't want to or if she wants him to talk her into it. "This is all kind of too reminiscent of junior high for me. All these amazingly beautiful people and then…well…me."
"You're beautiful, too," he tells her, not for the first time, and wonders as she rolls her eyes if she'll ever believe him.
(He's still working on this.)
"Besides, I haven't really danced since my quinceañera," she adds. He's not sure if that's supposed to be a point for her side or for his. "And since I couldn't find anybody to escort me, I had to take Justin as my date."
Daniel's mouth twists into a smile. "How old was he then?"
"About four." Betty's smiling too. Daniel lifts her left hand and places it on his arm, feels her fingers tense in the fabric of his jacket.
"Well, in that case, you have to give me a chance. If I can't be a better partner than your last one, I'll take you out for ice cream when this is all over."
(He'll take her out for ice cream anyway. He knows this going in.)
"I don't know," she teases. "Justin was kind of a prodigy. Who do you think taught me?"
He likes that he's gotten her to laugh, the way she tips her head back to look up at him as he leads her onto the floor. Even in high heels, she's not much taller than his shoulder. He always forgets how short she is—her presence is so much greater than her five feet three inches (in two-inch heels). The shoes look nice but it's obvious she doesn't know how to wield them; she smashes his toe on the first step and he tries to keep the wince off his face.
For the first minute or two, he wars with the sinking feeling that they aren't meant for this. They have a hard time finding or keeping a rhythm, and a couple times he steps in too close and almost knocks her over as she scrambles to get away. At last he gives up on the anonymous shuffle everyone else is performing and just pulls her into the only dance he knows he can do, the shallow waltz his mom taught him in the living room the summer before sixth grade, pivoting on his heel as he turns Betty around and around in tiny circles. They're the only ones waltzing, the only ones really dancing at all, and he can see Alexis watching him from the edge of the floor, shaking her head at what a fool he's making of himself. But he doesn't look at her very long—he's busy trying to keep track of his feet, trying to keep Betty laughing as he does his best to spin her without bumping into the marketing rep from Italy, and admiring the crown of butterfly bobby pins holding her bangs out of her face—Hilda's handiwork, he's sure. He realizes if he dances with her for two more songs, it'll be the longest he's ever spent dancing with any one woman. This seems like a good enough reason to keep going.
(This is another thing that won't make sense to him later: that he ever needed a reason.)
It takes him longer than it should to realize he's lost her attention, her neck craned to peer over his shoulder.
"Justin's winning, huh?" he asks, and she blinks, her gaze resettling on his face. Daniel raises an eyebrow. "I'm boring you?"
"Oh! No, no, no." She falters, relents, squeezes his hand. "I'm sorry, Daniel. It's just…that's the editor-in-chief of the New York Review." He glances back, barely recognizes the woman in blue sheer. Misses a step as Betty tugs him in the direction of another couple. "And those are two of the features editors from Atlantic Monthly. Everyone at this party is either a gorgeous model or some amazing editor, like exactly who I want to be, and...I just feel so invisible next to them."
"Come on. You're not invisible." The look she gives him says she's learned exactly what he sounds like when he's lying. He's not sure what this means for the future of their working relationship. "Okay. Maybe you are a little…transparent right now. But you have to know that's not going to last. You're too good to be invisible for long."
This is the part that makes her blush. He's not sure if it's because she appreciates being told she's talented more than she appreciates being told she's beautiful, or if she just believes him that little on the second count. She is, though—talented, irrefutably, but beautiful too, at least he thinks so, her eyes bright with the Venice lights, her lilac skirt swirling around her knees like it belongs to the music instead of her body. Daniel tips his head, tugs her back toward him, takes the lead again. Uncoils his arm and opens up to let her spin.
"By the time you're thirty," he adds, "you'll probably be running half these magazines. Trust me—pretty soon, they're going to be the ones watching you dance."
Betty ducks her head, wobbles on an unsteady heel. "Some of them already are," she admits, then amends: "Sort of. They're watching you."
"And I'm watching you," Daniel persists, and spins her twice this time because he shouldn't be the only one. "So there you go. Visible by proxy." As they circle back toward the edge of the floor, moving at last to the same beat, he finally thinks to tell her: "You look great tonight, by the way."
She looks up at him with an expression he can't read and promptly steps out of her shoe, stumbles over the lost heel and careens backward into Amanda, camped out on the sidelines with an entire plate of mini quiche. Daniel loses his grip on Betty's hand as the two women topple over each other and take down Marc in the process. He spends the next five minutes trying to unhook Amanda's hair from Betty's bobby pins and simultaneously dislodge the cocktail shrimp caught in Marc's throat. He swears he can hear Alexis laughing at him from across the room. He worries they're going to have to go out for ice cream as a unit, like a demented paper chain.
(They shake Marc and Amanda at the Walgreens. Apparently drugstores also sell shoes. They find an ice cream parlor eight blocks away, and it's eight blocks too soon to be done walking with her, the city snowfall quiet all around them and her heels swinging in her left hand, his knuckles stumbling across the ones on the right.)
The chaos of the party is on page six the next morning—not the kind of publicity Alexis was hoping for, probably. His name is the only one the caption gets right. He wonders if this disaster is going to be the only thing Betty remembers about that night, and then prays it's not—because up until the moment he let go of her hand, it was maybe the most fun he's ever had at one of these things, and he's kind of hoping she'll dance with him again at the next one.
(She will.)
The thing about Betty is, he doesn't even notice she's gotten under his skin until she's all the way under, deeper in him than anyone's ever been. He's never had many friends who weren't more like cardinal sins in the flesh, always been a little wary of people getting a good look at him without booze and dim lights to smooth the rough edges—but with Betty, he's the one leaning in, trying to give her a reason to look a little harder, to maybe stick around. He wants to be what she needs, whatever that is, and that's a surprisingly unfamiliar feeling. Before Betty, he doesn't remember wanting to do much for anyone.
(This is embarrassingly easy to confirm, since he's always been kind of a jackass to other people.)
It starts with a misunderstanding. It's his fault—Daniel knows that. He's been sort of on edge for weeks, ever since he helped Ignacio lug a dusty bargain couch up five flights of stairs to Betty's new apartment in Manhattan and then spent the fifteen minutes waiting for no-name delivery pizza trying to guess exactly how many coats of cheery yellow paint it would take Hilda and Justin to hide the water stains blooming like mushroom clouds on the walls. He'd offered to pay off the rest of her lease, get her into another apartment, maybe one slightly less likely to be condemned—he would have bought the whole damn building if that's what it took to get her out of her contract. But it's like the bus all over again, and Betty doesn't want a knight in shining armor, at least not most of the time, so he can't do anything except take her out to dinner a little more often, walk her all the way to the door of her apartment and then lean back against the wall in the hallway and wait for the click of the lock before he feels safe leaving her. And if he spends a little more time staring out his window at night, wondering which one of the thousands of pinpricks of light is hers and what she's doing out there in the dark, that's between him and the cool pane of glass he rests his head against.
But then she calls one afternoon, through the rain, through tears or something close, to tell him her ceiling's sprung a leak again and beg a place to stay, and his imagination runs away with him.
(Later, when she's tucked away in his shower and he's listening to the beat of the water on the tiles, a different kind of rain, the murmur of her off-key humming just coming through over the rattle of the pipes, he'll realize his imagination got here a long time ago. This is just the world catching up.)
He knows he shouldn't laugh when he opens the apartment door to find her dripping in his hallway, but he can't help it. Every inch of her is soaked to the bone, from the ratty bunches of her dark hair to her cork-bottomed sandals to her crumpled yellow dress, the one bursting with tangled sunflowers, the one Marc says makes her look like a deranged kindergarten teacher, the one she wore two days ago when he took her out for saag paneer. He wonders if it was in a heap on the floor when she suddenly needed a change of clothes. He wonders if she's going to hit him if he doesn't wipe the smile off his face.
He likes the way she looks in yellow.
"Betty. Wow. You look…miserable," he says as he pulls her inside, winces as she shakes herself out over the tumble of shoes in his entryway. Betty gives him one of those looks, blows her wet bangs out of her eyes.
"Well, that's still nicer than what the cab driver said about me." She kicks her shoes off with a kind of righteous fury, doesn't seem to notice the spatter print one leaves against his wall. "You should see my place, Daniel. Everything is drenched. It's like a water main ruptured in the top of my closet."
"Worse than last time?" he asks, because she needs to talk and he wants to be the one she talks to. He takes hold of her soggy blue coat and peels it from the cold skin of her shoulders, feels goosebumps wake under his fingertips.
"Last time was a trickle. This is a monsoon! The super says it was rats, but there's no way rats could—it must have been like six raccoons working in concert—" She blinks up at him, her forehead furrowed like she's trying to figure out how she got here, what happened to her between her waterlogged hole-in-the-wall and the relative haven of his cluttered front room. Or maybe it's his hands that have her confused, running softly up and down the slope of her bare arms—but he can't help that. He can't just stand there and watch her shiver.
She remembers herself all at once, pulling in a sudden gasp of breath and folding her arms across to grab his hands.
"Oh, God. Daniel, thank you so much for letting me stay here. The apartment is such a mess, but I just couldn't go home again already and have everybody tell me…"
"Hey." He shakes her once, just enough to bring their eyes together. "It's no problem, Betty. You're always welcome here. Seriously. Stay as long as you need to." It's not until he says this that he notices the absence of a suitcase, a duffel bag, even an overstuffed purse. A damp backpack sags from the crook of one elbow, but it's so flat he'd be surprised if it's holding more than her bus pass. "Where's, uh…where's all your stuff?"
She pats her dress down against her thighs, like her overnight bag might be in her pockets. "What stuff?"
He should know better than to say the next thing he says, but it slips out anyway. "I thought you were staying with me until your roof was fixed."
"I was. I mean, I am." She takes her glasses off, searches for a dry patch of her hem to wipe the lenses. "The super promised it'd be patched in the morning."
He's got her glasses in his hand before this registers. He pauses for a moment with his fingers around the plastic red frames, stares down at his filmy reflection in the smudged glass, not really sure why this is such a surprise. Not sure, anymore, what he was expecting. He wipes the lenses carefully between the soft folds of his t-shirt and then hands them back.
"Oh," he says.
Betty frowns. "Oh? What's 'oh'?" Then the glasses settle into place and she looks up at him, and Daniel isn't sure what she sees on his face but it's enough to pull her bottom lip between her teeth. "Oh—oh, you thought—"
"No," he cuts in, though they both know the answer's yes. "No, no. It's fine. I just assumed it might take them a few days to, uh…" He doesn't know where he's going with this, doesn't like the expression on her face, growing guiltier with every word. He doesn't want to be the reason she looks like that. "But that's good, right?" he tries, shoving his hands down into his pockets because he's starting to fidget and she knows him far too well not to notice. "I mean…the sooner the better?"
Betty jerks her head up, surprised—and God, he's really no good at this, can't even talk to his best friend without shoving his size-eleven foot in his mouth. From the moment he picked up the phone, listened to her stumbling down her stairs and hailing a cab and breathing carefully in and out, almost undone by his voice on the line, all he's wanted is to make her smile again, to be the sun through the storm the way she always is for him. But somehow she's the one reaching out for his hand, gripping it between her cold palms like she has something to make up for. Like he's not the one who screwed this up.
(He always is.)
"I could probably hang out another night," she offers, but Daniel shakes his head, turns his hand over so he can rub some warmth into her stiff fingers.
"Betty, it's fine. I get it. You want your own space." He tips his head back to take in his apartment, wonders what she sees in the sprawl of bachelor gray walls, the mural that's recently lost its charm. He lifts his second hand so he can massage hers between them. "That's why you moved out of your house in the first place, isn't it?"
Betty wrinkles her nose. "Can I be honest about something? So far, having my own space kind of sucks."
There's a second where he thinks about saying something really stupid—about asking her to stay here with him, not just for one night or a handful but for the rest of the month, or the year maybe, to turn his space into their space, to fill that void in him once and for all. Maybe what he really needs is a friend curled up next to him on the couch on rainy days like this, someone to prod him with her determined little toes when he talks over the bad TV movie. Maybe he's kind of sick of having his own space too.
(Someday she'll tell him about this fantasy she has, being in love in the city, and when she does he'll think of this moment, the reckless part of him that almost asked her to stay. Even after that, though, it'll be a long time before he wonders if they could be part of the same fantasy.)
That's what he almost says. But it's too late for him to be that guy—he's learned too much from her to be that thoughtless anymore. He squeezes her hands again and then lowers them gently to her side, crooks an arm around her damp shoulder. The smell of the rain in her hair gets caught in his chest.
"Well, I'm sure it'll get better from here," he says, giving her an encouraging shake. "Come on. You look like you could use a shower, and then I can at least take you out for lunch. There's a new Ethiopian restaurant a few blocks down."
"What's the point of taking a shower if we're just going back outside?" she asks, but she goes anyway, lets him lead her though she's been here too many times to need directions.
There's this moment where she hesitates on the threshold of the bathroom, looking back at him over her shoulder with one hand just skimming the frame, and he has the fleeting thought that they're both disappointed she's not staying longer, but neither of them can figure out how to get back from where they are. Then she ducks inside and closes the door and the water comes on and he realizes how full the room feels just with the memory of her. He shakes himself out of it and goes in search of an umbrella.
He's not an idiot. He knows he needs to take a big step back from whatever's going on in his head, not least because it is all in his head. Whatever some part of him thinks is happening here, it's not happening for her. It isn't even a feeling—more like the fleeting impression of a feeling, a sweet little might-have-been that slips away again before the shower stops running. Daniel's never really been a guy who chases after might-have-beens.
(She does.)
The only problem with the umbrella is, it's not all that sturdy. Daniel doesn't go out in the rain much, at least not much longer than it takes to walk from the door to the town car. The small folding umbrella he finds in the back of the coat closet gets them to the restaurant, basically dry except along their outer edges. But by the time she's finished telling him about her reading list and her new neighbors and the cute guitarist across the hall, the rain has picked up, thundering down over the awning where they stand shoulder to shoulder, Betty shivering in his borrowed greatcoat. He knows instinctively that this is more than the umbrella can take. He cranes his neck, tries for a glimpse of the sky—black from the peak of one skyscraper to another. No sign of a break in the storm.
"Uh…okay. Starting to see your point about the shower."
She tries to glare at him but can't quite sell it, her expression softened by the tiny smear of ayibe on her cheek, by the memory of her laughing in the fragrant heat of the restaurant at their backs. In the rain all the light has gone gray, and the street with it, but somehow it suits her—the dull backdrop just makes her seem brighter, clarifies the sunflowers peeking resolutely out from under his heavy coat. He's starting to think all his coats look better on her.
(It's not just his coats.)
The street is full of cars rushing on with their heads down, the crisscross of tires and rainwater spray. Daniel looks up the street, down, and as he turns his eyes catch on her dress again, the only flash of yellow in the storm. He barely recognizes New York when it's not choked with cabs.
"There's a taxi stand two blocks down…" he starts, but Betty rolls her eyes, prods him with her elbow.
"Daniel. We're not walking two blocks the wrong way when it's just six blocks back to your apartment in the first place. Come on—we're so close. We made it here. We can make it back."
He doesn't say it's a long six blocks. He doesn't say he doesn't have a coat anymore, or that he's more than a little worried about her shoes, the cheap cork sandals that seem likely to slither right off her feet. He doesn't say they should have gotten takeout. He hunches his shoulders against the cold sting of castoff in the wind, looks down at her with one eyebrow raised.
"Shouldn't we at least wait for it to die down?"
Betty's mouth twists up into a smile. "I've never been very good at waiting," she tells him. Then she reaches out and grips his hand, palm to palm, and the next moment they're in the rain, their footsteps clattering on the wet cement as she hauls him out into the storm.
The umbrella gives out at a block and a half. By the time it goes, it's dented inward like a bucket—Betty screams as half a gallon of icy rainwater comes down on their heads, and the collapsing heap of nylon and metal ribs catches the wind and whips toward the street, almost dragging Daniel with it. He can only keep hold of one of them, the umbrella or her hand. They hit the street corner at the exact moment a blue Chevy lurches through a puddle and throws up a splash of water that soaks her to the knees. He can't decide if she's shrieking or just gasping for breath from running so hard.
She's sliding around in those awful shoes as they race through the last crosswalk, clinging to his arm just to keep herself upright, and Daniel sees it before she does, the moment when her sandal catches in the sewer grate. There's a Mazda coming at them and she's going down, headed for the gutter, and without thinking Daniel does something he didn't know he could do—he twists and scoops her up and just keeps running, her body bouncing against his as he jumps the curb. He couldn't do it if she wasn't so short. He couldn't do it if he wasn't laughing so hard. Betty kicks her legs and her second shoe takes flight, nearly takes his head off as it hurtles over his shoulder. Then they're at the door, so wet they're practically one person, Betty's bare feet swinging in the rain and her arms wrapped tight around his neck as they wait for the doorman to buzz them in. The man gives him a look, but Daniel's sure it's far from the weirdest way he's ever arrived on this doorstep. He carries her all the way to the elevator because it makes her laugh.
(He can't stop laughing either. He never laughs with anyone the way he laughs with her.)
She borrows his shampoo and a pair of his sweats and sleeps on his couch, and so does he, because in the end the TV movie can't keep either of them awake. And when her super calls in the morning to say her ceiling's still in shambles (will be for seven more days, though they don't know that yet), he takes her by her apartment to rescue a few changes of clothes, and doesn't mention the little smile that tells him she was about as ready to leave him as he was to let her go.
(He'll probably never be ready for that.)
It's not the right time. That's what he decides, the week after the week she spends camped out on his couch, sending him off to bed every night with a restless heart. He can't even wrap his head around what it's not the right time for, exactly—he just has this sense, watching her through the window of his office as she flits in and out, chewing absently on the eraser of her pencil, that this isn't something he should push. It's not the right time to push this.
(He's not sure if it will ever be the right time for the two of them.)
He spends three days slightly paranoid every time he finds himself reaching for her shoulder, every time she slips her arm through his or tips her head back to give him a smile—then he decides if he was out of line she would have said something by now, and all he's accomplishing with this bout of self-torture is throwing them even more off kilter. He's got himself all turned around, can't quite remember what normal looks like on them, but he can head in that general direction. He stops dodging their working lunches, takes her out for gourmet Italian and lets her catch him up about Marc and Amanda, the belligerent bus driver who picks her up every morning and the Mode gnomes she theorizes must be stealing her paper clips. The warm food and the familiar sound of her voice rising and falling, ever the storyteller, make him feel lethargic, lazily content, so that by the end of the meal he's safely back where he should be, best friend and confidant, laughing easily as he wipes a little tomato sauce from the tip of her nose. He barely notices the way their hands brush as they play-fight over the check.
It's just on the late nights when his thoughts sometimes get away from him, his tired gaze resting a little too long on the woman sitting next to him: the scattered pages of his magazine gathered like flowers in her lap, her eyes softly lidded and her chin cupped in the hollow of her hand. It's just on the nights when he's watching dawn break through the curtain of silver skyscrapers, her exhausted head heavy on his shoulder, that the lines get a little blurred.
It's one of those nights when time has gotten away from him. He promised her they'd be done by two, in time for her to catch the last train back to Queens, but it's two hours past that and somehow Daniel doesn't feel like they're any closer to pulling the fall issue out of cascade failure. Ever since Wilhelmina got into it with the featured writer and she decided to take her piece on the resurgence of flapper frocks elsewhere, it's been one disaster after another; Daniel hasn't changed his shirt in two days, and if it weren't for all-night takeout he's pretty sure he and Betty would have starved by now. He's canceled three dates for this—or, for something. He's canceled three dates, anyway.
He can't remember when they moved to the floor, both of them leaning heavily back against his desk, but he doesn't have the energy to get up, resigned to sit there beside her with the eviscerated pages of his shipwrecked magazine strewn around them. He told her to leave him hours ago, but she never does. The fact that he still can't wrap his head around this just proves how incredible he still finds her, even after all this time.
(Time isn't a factor. He knows he'll always be in awe of her.)
He's fallen into one of those moments where he's just looking at her, not really thinking anything, just taking it all in: the silence of the deserted office and the dark circles around her eyes, her feet crossed at the ankles in striped red-and-purple socks, the way her shoulder shifts against him as she breathes. The world outside the windows is black except for the lit contour of the skyline and the occasional slow blink of passing airplanes, cutting across the sky like drowsy shooting stars. He makes a wish just in case she asks later. She's still in the vivid green dress and vest combination she wore to work, the one Amanda tried to convince him was in honor of avocadoes, since they're, like, her national fruit. He's not sure about the outfit the way she came in with it, with a sheer yellow scarf knotted around her neck and clunky brown clogs, but he's starting to see the appeal now, the scarf thrown over the bend in the couch, her shoes kicked off under his coffee table. He likes the way casual looks on her. He ditched his jacket and tie over his chair back hours ago; he wonders if from a distance they look like they'd fit together.
(Sometimes, where she's concerned, he can't decide if he's denying something or just leading himself on.)
They've been on the phone all night with designers in other time zones, and for the last fifteen minutes she's had her Blackberry in her hands, texting too fast for him to read over her shoulder. But he must be thinking too loud or something, because all of a sudden she pauses and looks up at him, catches him staring. "What?" she asks.
Daniel drops his head back against the desk, shrugs off the question. "Remind me again why we're sitting on the floor?"
Betty sighs—one of those deep sighs that tells him she hasn't found the humor in this yet. "Because, Daniel, we've reached that stage of hopelessness and exhaustion where it's the only reasonable course of action. To sit anywhere else would be ridiculous."
"Aha," he says mildly, though he can't help the way his lips twitch up into a smile. Even exhausted and hopeless, she never fails to drag it out of him.
Betty leans over, bumps him with an exasperated shoulder—but then she just stays there, resting against him, and in the weight of her body against his Daniel can feel the fatigue that's been building in both of them over the last four days, the constant struggle to convince themselves that this is worth it, this is possible. He can tell it's his turn to cheer her up. She's done it for him a thousand times over.
(This is a gross underestimation.)
Betty always knows what to say to light a fire in him. Daniel's not really that good—all he ever has to spark a smile from her is himself. He picks up one of the cover shots, studies again the gaunt model looking unhinged and unimpressed on a pastel blue backdrop. There seems to be a bull's-eye around her face, but it's probably just a coffee ring. Daniel hefts the proof in his hand.
"You know how you're always saying the models look like skeletons?" He gets her to raise her head at least, and her eyebrow isn't far behind. He's not sure if the look is skepticism about where this is going or surprise that he listens when she rants about this. "Well, it's the fall issue, right? So what if we run with that? We could put all the models in skull masks and big eye makeup, like a Dia de los Muertos thing." He doesn't realize he's used the Spanish word until she draws back a little, looks up at him with a tiny smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
"Are you trying to be culturally inclusive, or are you really just that out of ideas?" she asks.
Daniel shrugs. "Does it have to be one or the other?" At this point, he's not sure he's awake enough to distinguish his own motives. He's just glad he's gotten her to smile.
If there's one thing Betty will never let him get away with, it's despair. She digs an elbow into his ribs as she leans forward, snatches up another page from the cover shoot and flutters it in his face. "Come on, Daniel. We're not in that bad shape. The photo department is downstairs right now putting together a spread with the overexposed photos from the last couple shoots—" She sees his look, answers his question before he can even open his mouth. "—and yes, I know it was supposed to be black and white, but my brain is fried so I accidentally said 'white light' over the phone and there was massive confusion and…just trust me, it's easier this way."
"Okay," he says, not because he believes her but because he does trust her, implicitly. "What about the designer spotlight?"
"Christina and Amanda are on it," she promises, and her hand on his arm is reassuring even if that statement inherently isn't. "They're down in the Closet right now, tearing up last season's Zac Posen dresses—"
"Tell me that's a figure of speech," Daniel breaks in, something like horror fluttering in his chest. Betty blinks at him like this shouldn't be news.
"No. Remember? We're doing a Project Runway thing—Mode's in-house seamstress makes three outfits in six hours. Nothing's open right now; they needed the fabric." She's got that look again, the one she always wears when they're at odds over something that she feels should be obvious. "We're in crisis mode, Daniel—this isn't the time to get squirrelly over a few dresses."
He opens his mouth, closes it again without telling her it's the thousands of dollars in company merchandise that are making his guts twist. Ultimately he decides there's no point—the last thing he needs is to get into it with her at the eleventh hour, especially when it's probably way too late to rescue the line. Amanda's always been scary quick with her scissors.
Luckily, he's too tired to care about this for long. He scrubs a hand across his forehead and banishes his reservations with his worry lines.
"We still need a feature story," he says.
This time her smile stretches all the way across her face. He's more than a little charmed by the flush that grazes her cheeks as she digs another sheet of paper out of the mayhem, hands it over with a flourish. "Right. Um—about that. While you were on the phone with Cannes, I just thought I'd try something…one thousand words on the neo-neo-Impressionist 'Unusual Beauty' exhibit at the Guggenheim, courtesy of your lovely and talented assistant." She's biting her lip again, but he knows she knows she's not in trouble, so he's not sure what to make of it. "I know Wilhelmina said my pitch was so bad she'd rather feature the Grand Ole Opry, but…what do you think?"
He thinks Wilhelmina might actually turn them all into toads this time. He thinks, having walked through the exhibit with her two weeks ago, that the neo-neo-Impressionist showcase probably doesn't deserve a thousand words in a fashion magazine. He thinks lovely is a great word for her, her dark eyes sparkling with the reflection of the breaking skyline, the windows in other skyscrapers just starting to ignite, people in other places stepping into the city that's been theirs all night. He wonders in how many of those lit windows someone is admiring someone else's smile.
"You know what?" he starts, and then pauses a beat just to watch her eyes widen. "I think it's perfect. Contact the art department, tell them to get permission to use some of the paintings in the magazine. That is, as long as nobody's slipped them any Grand Ole Opry spreads while I wasn't looking."
Betty doesn't exactly scream, but it's close. "Oh my God, are you serious? My story's going to be the feature?" This time when he nods, he gets that shriek of excitement right in his ear as Betty throws her arms around his neck, pulls him into a hug as best she can when they're sitting shoulder to shoulder. "I've never had more than a tiny filler piece before! Thank you, Daniel—thank you, thank you, thank you—" She's still talking but he's laughing too hard to take it in, distracted by the crush of her body against his, her glasses digging into his cheek, the flute of her breath against the shell of his ear as she laughs along with him.
"I don't know about my magazine, but all these crisis issues are turning out to be really good for your publishing cred," he says into her hair. He's not sure why that makes her laugh even harder, but it's infectious, and in a second they're both losing it, struggling to breathe.
He's not sure what the hug's about, and he doubts she is either. Maybe they're just that exhausted. Maybe they've finally slipped into that bizarre giddiness that comes on the other side of serious sleep deprivation, a feeling he mostly remembers from college and always assumed had a lot to do with alcohol. Maybe it's the MSG from all the takeout, who knows. He's just realizing the byline of her story reads "Bebby Suarez." He's just realizing he made a wish on an airplane. He has a feeling neither of them is really working on all thrusters tonight. But he doesn't mind—could never mind being this close to her. And when she pulls back with a sheepish smile, her hands lingering on his shoulders, Daniel allows himself to imagine, just for a second, that maybe she needs this just as much as he does sometimes.
(Sometimes he wishes she'd hang on a little longer.)
Their phones ring, in unison, before he finds anything to say. The moment vanishes into Betty's painstaking negotiations with the rep from Givenchy, a tinny voice from Uniqlo asking him questions he can't answer. He has to hand her the phone, takes hers in return so the rep can deliver her demands to someone higher up the chain. He's not really listening, distracted by the seamless way Betty handles the nuts and bolts of running a magazine, setting up shoots, taking notes on times and venues on the side of a disposable coffee cup. All these years in, with her as his right hand, and he's still not that good. She could probably replace him with a voice changer and a suit in a dry-cleaning bag. He decides to be impressed instead of disheartened by that.
The screech in his ear is getting louder, something about black lights and flat club soda. "I'm sure we can accommodate that," he says, though he's sure they can't. Betty makes a face at him and he makes one back, and then he's smothering a chuckle, listening to her try to explain to the Uniqlo guy what about his passion for ponte borders made her laugh. Daniel has the sudden epiphany that he could spend every night like this, dodging a halfhearted swat as she wrestles down a smile. Given the way production's been going at this magazine lately, that's probably a good thing.
(He's just wiped enough to pretend that's what he meant.)
Deals wrapped, phones down, he finds he's looking at her again, only this time she's looking back, a thoughtful expression on her face. There's something sort of tenuous in the silence that he's not sure how to breach. "So, where does that leave us?" he asks at last. He's not totally sure he means the issue—but Betty seems to be sure enough for both of them, bending forward to scoop up a handful of papers and flicking through them with her thumb.
"Well, we still need five hundred words go opposite the Louboutin ad. We can do 'Late Night' again, but you'll just have to make something up, because with all this running around I haven't had time to arrange any snacks."
"Ah, that's okay. Snacks are on me tonight." He keeps his voice mild, squashes the urge to smile as the curiosity overtakes her face, the forgotten pages drifting into her lap.
"What? What are you talking about?"
He shrugs, barely—can't help drawing it out a little, because she always plays along so well. "Nothing. Just—when I realized we were probably going to be here all night, I might have made a call to this little ice cream shop over by Lincoln Square, asked them to stop by about five."
He thoroughly enjoys the minute it takes her to piece this together. "Lincoln Square. Wait, you mean You Got Cream'd? The ice cream shop we found that night after Alexis's party?" He loves that this is how she remembers it, too. Then Betty gasps, her hands and the papers in them crunching against her chest as her eyes go wide. "The place with that amazing chocolate chip gelato?" She holds his gaze for a moment before her expression falters, her lips pressed anxiously together. "Wait, Daniel, don't tease me—ice cream shops don't stay open this late, and they definitely don't deliver."
He should probably know better than to lean in, but it doesn't stop him; he presses one hand to the floor beside her knee and bends forward, can't help smiling when she leans in too. "They don't—unless they get a call from someone who identifies themselves as a very close friend of Betty Suarez's, who would consider it a personal favor…"
They both know it's his name that's done this, not hers. He's willing to pretend if she is.
For a long moment she just looks at him, doesn't say anything at all. He's starting to get worried before her mouth finally cracks into a smile, a wide, genuine one that doesn't hide her braces. "Shut up. Are you serious? You did this for me?"
He's not sure how she still doesn't understand what he wouldn't do for her. "It's not like I didn't owe you one or two."
She ducks her head, shoves his shoulder with the heel of her hand—he barely rocks back on his splayed fingers before he's coming back in, drifting toward her again. This pull between them, it's like gravity, and he's not sure how he'd fight it even if he wanted to. Her hand is still on his arm, and he covers it with his own, catches her eyes as his smile grows a little more serious.
"I remember you telling me how on the nights you couldn't sleep, you and your mom would stay up eating ice cream until you forgot about your nightmares…" The look on her face kind of takes his breath away; it's all he can do to keep going. "I know it's just a stupid fashion magazine, but…I guess I just wanted to say thanks, for, you know…all the nights when you've faced mine with me."
Betty bites her lip, and for the first time he knows exactly what it means: she's trying not to cry. He spends about three seconds cursing himself for not thinking this through. That's how long it takes him to realize that she's reaching out for him, much more softly than before, folding her arms around him and leaning into his chest with her cheek tucked against his collarbone. He doesn't always return her embraces, but he does now, presses his lips to her hair and rocks her gently back and forth, as slowly as he knows how. He can't tell if she's ecstatic or devastated. He decides four thirty in the morning might not be the best time for big gestures. But she looks okay when she draws back—eyes a little wet, hand a little shaky as it settles on the line of his jaw, but she's definitely smiling.
"Thank you, Daniel," she says, and just that, those three words, are like a bonfire in his heart. Then she edges up onto her knees and leans forward again, tilts his chin up—and he knows these motions, knows where this ends, but even though there's a timpani pounding in his ears he must be wrong because this can't—she can't be—
At the last moment she turns his head, presses her lips against his cheek, and even though it's so much less than he expected something detonates in his chest cavity, dynamite or a newborn star, and if it doesn't break all his ribs then he doesn't know what it breaks. Something in him is left gaping open and raw. Betty leans back on her heels and lifts a hand to swipe at her eyes, smiles that same smile at him, like the world hasn't just turned inside out. Maybe it hasn't for her.
"You're the most amazing friend I've ever had," she tells him, back at arm's length. Then her phone starts to riot on the floor beside them, and Betty scoops it up, rockets to her feet. "Ooh! Christina and Amanda have something to show me. I'll be back in…" A quick glance at her watch. "Twenty-five minutes. Don't eat the gelato without me, okay? Promise?" Then she's gone, skidding out of his office in her socks, the flotsam of scattered pages rippling in her wake.
And Daniel—
Daniel doesn't move for a while. When he does, it's just one hand rising to touch his face, baffled fingers settling over the spot that's still warm with her memory. He doesn't think he can stand up. He doesn't know what he's going to say to her in twenty-five minutes. But more than anything, he can't help thinking that ready or not, he's in this now. If Betty is gravity then her lips on his skin are the Big Bang, and he's not sure there's any going back from here.
(How do you go back from the beginning?)
He's in love with her. But that's not when he realizes it. It takes him a while to put the words to it, this dazzling ache she awoke in him with one kiss on the cheek.
(He's just glad it doesn't take all the way until he's sitting across from his mother in a French restaurant and she puts down her spoonful of matelote to tell him, "Daniel, you're in love with her." He has no idea how to respond to that, but at least it's not news to him.)
He's been in love before, but it's never felt quite the way this does. Maybe it was dynamite after all, that thing she ignited inside of him—it's like she's carved out a new space in his center, a hollow where only she fits. Betty filling his voids again. He realizes now, belatedly, that she's the only one who ever could.
And she—
Well, it's not the same for her. He has no expectation it ever will be. But he can deal with that.
What he can't do is stay away from her.
He can't bring himself to turn her down for dinner at their favorite Thai place, even though the blue tinge of the low lights makes her seem to shimmer across the table. Over spicy khao soi he lets her catch him up about Marc and Amanda, the devoted cult of followers cropping up around her blog and the next-door neighbor wars going on in Queens, and between the warm food and the sound of her excited voice rising and falling, ever the storyteller, he finds himself relaxing back into his side of the booth, amazed at how comfortable this all is, how she can be beautifully strange and perfectly familiar at the exact same time. Love that feels like friendship—that's a new one for him. (He has such a good time he can't stop himself from taking her out again as often as she'll let him: for tapas, for chocolate éclairs, for a whole day of miniature golf just because it's something neither of them have ever done. They're horrible and she laughs the whole time, and he does too, even if it's mostly at himself.)
He can't find a reason to get back in the town car when he shows up for dinner at the Suarez house and finds them rushing to a last-minute reception for a neighbor's daughter's shotgun wedding. (He wonders if this is what the neighbor wars were about.) It might be the way she bites her lip when she invites him to come along, but then again, he's out of the habit of saying no to her—it might not be anything more than the fact that she asked. (He wants to dance with her, but he doesn't get the chance before a woman with a loud voice and louder leopard-print pantsuit puts a three-year-old boy into his arms, shoots down his protest about not being family with a nasal So, what? You can't watch him for two seconds? Betty finds him on the lawn outside the community center with grubby handprints all over his shirt and his two-hundred-dollar tie transformed into a ninja headband; and if the closest he gets to dancing with her is the three of them playing Ring Around the Rosie in the growing twilight, his tie flapping drunkenly from the little boy's head, well, at least he can savor the look she gives him as he finally climbs into a cab, a combination of gratitude and guilt and something else he can't place at all—but whatever it is, he really likes the way it looks on her.)
He can't help smiling at her puzzled frown when she opens their invitations to Elle's post-Fashion Week blitz party only to find she hasn't been invited at all: the invitations are made out to Daniel Meade and Betty Meade, and he has to laugh at that, even though some poor assistant at Elle is probably going to get chewed out for the clerical mistake.
("I don't know—I think there's kind of a ring to it," he says, leaning over her desk. "Betty Meade. She sounds like she could be a writer."
Betty wrinkles her nose. "For Home and Garden, maybe, or Better Housekeeping." She pushes the invitations into his chest as she says—without thinking, he's sure—"Betty Suarez-Meade. She could be a real journalist." And then she kind of freezes, and he does too, because there's something about that that's a little too real, a little too right, at least to his ears.
"Well," he says, as he gets up slowly from the edge of her desk. "I think Betty Suarez has a pretty good shot, too." And then can't decide, watching her through the glass as he makes the call to get this fixed, if she looks thrilled or disappointed.)
He can't stop himself, the night another boy who doesn't deserve her lets her down, from following her out into the shadows of the balcony off his office, standing silently beside her while she leans into the railing and stares down at the lights of passing cars, the carnival of the city that doesn't sleep. When she finally turns to face him, her cheeks wet, he doesn't even think before pulling her in, holding her so close she practically disappears into the folds of his coat. The way he held her when Henry left, again. The way he always holds her when it's over. He sways from foot to foot and whispers into her hair until he's made her laugh, and hopes this is what she needs, though he knows it's not enough for her. (God, does he want it to be.) She holds his hand the whole way home.
He can't stop giving her rides. He can't stop trying to make her smile. He can't stop himself from reserving the top of the Empire State Building for her birthday, just the two of them and her family and some homemade tamales, because he needs her to understand she's not invisible to him. He can't come up with a halfway convincing reason not to take her with him to the fashion show in Milan. (He doesn't do it for the jumping and screaming and the way his heart stutters when she throws her arms around his neck, but he can't deny it's a perk.) He can't come up with anything to say to his mother, sitting in that French restaurant with his soupe à l'oignon congealing in front of him, except, "Forget it, Mom. Betty would never take a chance on someone like me. She knows better."
(His mother just gives him one of her flat looks, retrieves her spoon as she says, "I'm not sure the heart knows anything, Daniel. Except what it wants.")
And when he finds himself in the middle of another late night, sitting right beside her on the table in the break room watching a coffee cup spin around and around in the microwave, he can't help leaning over to bump their shoulders together, drawing her bright eyes up to his.
"You didn't have to stay," he says, and Betty waves him off, kicks her feet in her heavy black pumps. "You're not my assistant anymore," Daniel reminds her, and this time she gives him a look, leans back on one hand and uses the other to smooth the skirt of her red polka-dot dress down against her lap. He likes the way she looks in red.
"You know, 'Daniel' is just 'denial' with a couple letters mixed up," she tells him, and he has to laugh at that, falling back onto his elbows so he can look up at her for once.
"Okay. And what am I supposedly in denial about?"
"Me," she says, and gives him a smile that shows off her bright white teeth. "How much you need me."
Daniel can only shake his head. "I would never deny that."
They're quiet for a while, their gazes fixed on the microwave where Betty's mysterious brownie-in-a-mug is supposedly transforming from lumpy brown powder and non-fat, non-dairy creamer stolen from the legal department's lounge into something edible. Daniel's skeptical, but he's not complaining. He's got an issue to pull together, a hundred phone calls to make, but that's going to take the rest of the night anyway. Stealing a few moments like this, just the two of them and the darkened world out the window, her feet brushing his in the middle of their swing—that's only going to make a difference to him. And maybe to her, someday.
"I like nights like this," Betty says out of nowhere, glancing down at him with just the edge of her lip caught between her teeth. Daniel offers an easy smile.
"Yeah. Me too."
The microwave beeps; Daniel rolls up until he's sitting on the edge of the table again, just close enough to pull the cup out with the tips of his fingers. The mush in the mug looks like mud or worse. Betty catches his hand around the plastic spoon.
"Daniel. You have to wait for it to cool." She fiddles with the spoon through the gaps in his fingers. "You could get burned."
He wonders if she's trying to tell him something else. The last couple days, there have been moments where he's uncertain whether something's changing between them—moments when she's paused in the doorway to his office, her hand braced on the frame, and looked back at him with something he can't read in her eyes, just like that day so long ago when she came to him through the rain. He doesn't know what she's thinking, doesn't know how to respond to something he doesn't understand. He draws his hand back to let her have the spoon but squeezes her arm in passing.
"You're right. As usual." Betty's lips twist to the side in a hint of a smile. As she digs the spoon into the heart of the brownie and scoops out a molten heap, steam swirling away from her hand like vapor corkscrews, he adds, "And thanks. For sticking around."
She doesn't say anything, but her feet stop swinging and she leans forward to mirror him, and this time it's her shoulder that bumps into his. Betty blows across the wedge of brownie once, twice, watching him through the flickers of steam; then she extends her arm and holds the spoon up to his mouth, and his ribs kind of crumple when she smiles.
"Well? How is it?"
He grips her wrist to guide the bite into his mouth. He doesn't let go, but she doesn't seem to mind. He knows his answer before he even tastes it.
"Worth the wait."
(So is she.)
Thanks for reading. Reviews always welcome.