Page 44 of Best Served Hot

I was supposed to have dinner with Bennett at West tonight. It had been so hard to get a reservation, and I wanted to eat there so badly, and we had to talk about what happened between us in the copy room, and my followers would love it, and . . .

And I didn’t care. Today, my best friend was all that mattered. Oh, and Kelsey, who I’d almost forgotten was here, probably because she’d drifted off to the side and stuck her nose in a copy of Mr. Decker’s memoir. Alice cared about her, so I cared about her, too. And she seemed cool. Even if she looked genuinely absorbed by Mr. Decker’s detailed account of his extremely standard upper-middle-class upbringing.

“Let me just email Bennett—you know, the Scroll critic who I’ve been collaborating with—and let him know I have to cancel dinner tonight,” I said. Emerson Leigh looked up at me from her phone, those green eyes keen.

“Oh, I didn’t know—” Alice started, clearly about to demur and tell me to go on without her, but I waved her off.

“It’s really okay. It’s fine. I want to hang out with you guys tonight. I just have to let him know.”

Emerson Leigh’s mouth dropped open with what looked like dismay. “You can’t abandon Bennett! Not after your—” Her mouth snapped shut. Our kiss. She was referring to our kiss. Which had been today. God, it felt like it had been ages already, like I’d always kissed Bennett. And she was right, partially—I did want to talk to him about that kiss. About how maybe it could be something more.

But my best friend was more important right now. No matter how magical that kiss had been, it could wait another day.

“I have to. Maybe you can take my place at West tonight.” The idea gave my stomach an uneasy jolt. I didn’t like the idea of Emerson Leigh and Bennett sitting on either side of a cozy table, laughing with their perfect white teeth on display as they shared tuna tartare off a single spoon. (I don’t know why the restaurant only had one spoon, okay? Maybe the dishwasher broke.)

Emerson Leigh’s forehead crinkled with a frown. “I can’t, Julie. I’m still eating only white food. Remember?” How could I forget? “You’ll talk to him soon, though, right? He’s just . . .” She sighed.

“Yes.” I could promise that much at least. “I will.”

She nodded at me, then popped to her feet, flipping her blond ponytail over her shoulder. “Good. Anyway, I should probably head out. I have so much work to do today. You guys are actually kind of lucky that you just get to chill for a bit!”

If it were anybody but Emerson Leigh, I’d think they were being mean, but she actually meant it. Still, Alice’s nostrils flared. “Good seeing you, Emerson Leigh!” I as good as ushered her out with a hand on her lower back. As soon as the door clicked shut behind her, I hightailed it back to my desk to fake sick for Mr. Decker, grab my bag, and hustle out. “Have you ever had City Bakery hot chocolate?” I asked them as the door closed behind us. Hopefully, Emerson Leigh hadn’t dawdled in the elevator or lobby; it would be awkward if we caught up to her.

Alice snorted. “I’m your best friend. Of course I’ve had City Bakery hot chocolate.”

“I’ve never had it!” Kelsey said. I wrapped my arm around her shoulders as we walked. Her hair smelled a little like dried apricots.

“Kelsey Unknown Middle Name Courtney,” I said solemnly. “I am about to rock your world.”

• • •

Several hours later, I had both rocked her world and discovered her middle name was Eloise. “I can’t believe that hot chocolate was a drink and not a drug,” she said. “Something that good can’t be legal.”

The one sore spot of the evening was that I’d reached into my bag for my phone after the hot chocolate so we could figure out the best way to get to the K-Town restaurant I’d chosen for dinner and realized that my phone was not there. “Crap,” I said. I could visualize it sitting on my desk, next to the work phone and the stack of expense reports I was supposed to file. Lot of good it was doing me there.

“What?”

“Left my phone at the office,” I said. Thank goodness I hadn’t left my keys behind, too. “But it’s fine. You’ll just have to look up directions.”

My phone could wait until tomorrow morning. Still, even though I knew humans had survived without smartphones for thousands upon thousands of years, I felt unmoored without mine, like one of my hands had been bound up in an immovable cast. I kept reaching for it to check the time, if it was supposed to rain, what my latest comments said. This is probably good for you, I told myself. You can prove you’re not addicted.

It felt weird, too, not taking pictures of my food. Critics of food influencers always said that food tasted better when you didn’t focus on taking pictures of it. But as I ate the crackling hot bibimbap bowl piled with tender shreds of spicy beef and all sorts of vegetables, all brought together by the oozy fried egg on top, I didn’t feel that way. Maybe it made me a stupid millennial, but I liked having pictures of my food. When I scrolled back through my photos, it meant that I got to relive this day, to think about how delicious each element had been instead of forgetting about it. The pictures made it easier for me to remember each experience than any number of words describing them could.

I raised my glass. The soju cocktail was sweet and spicy and almost gone. “To the crusty old men who give me side-eye every time I take pictures of my food!” I sipped before Alice and Kelsey could toast me, because this toast wasn’t really for them. “Fuck you!”

This may have been my third soju cocktail.

Our last stop of the night was in Times Square, a place I usually did absolutely everything in my power to avoid. It was always loud and flashy, crammed with obnoxious tourists, full of places that insulted the New York food scene with their very existence in the city, like Applebee’s and Olive Garden (even if I did have a soft spot for their breadsticks).

But it became a different place late at night. All the families had scurried back to their hotels to put their kids to bed. The big stores were closed, but the lights all still flashed overhead, blue and red and green and yellow, screaming neon into the night sky. There were still plenty of people milling about—it would get empty after midnight, but we were almost thirty, and I had work tomorrow—but there was enough room for us to stake out a clear spot in the middle of it all.

“Ready?” I asked them, tilting my head back so that the world spun crazily around me, flashing lights blurring and advertisements of beautiful women and men with guns in TV shows and skyscrapers rising impossibly high until they disappeared into the clouds.

“Ready.”

We opened our throats and screamed all our frustrations into that sky. If it could handle all these lights every hour of the day, it could handle our screams, too, for a little while.

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