In a New York Minute(3)
“Sorry!” I stepped forward to recalibrate and squashed someone’s foot underneath mine.
“Excuse me,” hissed a woman in fancy athleisure wear as she recoiled.
“Sorry!” I squeaked again. God, my arms ached. I shifted the box onto my left side and shimmied as far as I could against the door, hoping I could buy myself some time before the next stop. But as I grabbed the material by my butt and held it shut, the dress started to slip off my shoulders.
Is it possible to laugh and cry at the exact same time? Because just as tears pricked along the edge of my eyes, hot and huge, I let out a guffaw. This day.
“You okay?” the pregnant woman asked, a look of genuine concern on her face.
“My dress.” I gestured toward my back. As I did, the right shoulder strap slipped off my body completely.
“Oh no,” she said, horrified.
“I know,” I replied, the panic evident in the high octave of my voice. “I’m having a massively shitty day, and in a few minutes I’m going to be mooning the station when the doors open.” All it took was one blink before the tears began dripping down my face. Everything awful that had just happened to me was spilling out, in the most public place possible.
Before I could stop her, the pregnant woman shouted into the crowd of commuters, “Does anyone have any safety pins?” Her voice was loud enough to startle almost every person nearby. “Safety pins? Anyone?”
A few people looked up and then looked back down at their phones. A girl in an NYU hoodie, her hair in a giant topknot on her head, glanced over and offered me a sympathetic smile. The older woman began to dig into her massive purse.
“It’s fine. I’m fine,” I tried to assure her, even though I was obviously not. I pressed myself against the door as we chugged toward the next station.
“Here, honey!” The older woman waved, and the pregnant woman reached out her hand. “It’s not a safety pin, but it might help.”
When the pregnant woman stepped back toward me, she opened her palm and revealed a small hair clip.
“Do you want me to try to close it up with this?” she asked me, a skeptical look on her face. But before I could tell her no, a deep, calm voice shot through the din of the subway.
“Here.”
It was the giant suit standing next to me, except now he was just crisp white shirt and soft blue tie, his shoulders hitting right at my eyeline. His navy jacket was dangling neatly from his hand. “Here,” he said again, clearly perplexed by my inability to understand exactly what he wanted me to do with his coat.
I looked up to meet his eyes.
Even in my Holy shit, my dress has ripped open straight down the back, and I’m in the one thong I own and never wear, because thongs are miserably uncomfortable, but I bailed on doing laundry last night, so here I am, and to top it all off, I just got let go from my job and I still have at least five more years of student loans to pay state, I could register that he was handsome. The kind of good-looking stranger that causes you to think Whoa when you pass them on the street.
I knew just by the confident, assured way he held himself—shoulders back, chin just slightly tilted to the sky—and by the cut slopes of his jaw and his thick brown hair, that this was a man who had never known an awkward phase. While the rest of us were running around seventh grade with oozing zits and blinding metal braces (I had to sleep in headgear, for god’s sake), he breezed through with ease, all long muscles and creamy, clear skin and enviable cheekbones and dark lashes, from the day he was born.
And then there were his eyes, stern and serious but also big and beautiful. At first glance, they looked brown, but with a second look I realized they were so inky and dark that they came closer to matching the navy of his suit. He had the body of a runner or a cyclist or—it clicked then—a triathlete. I could see him in one of those skimpy running suits now, muscle pulsing against spandex, not caring that everyone in the world could see every angle and curve of his perfectly sculpted body.
“Please.” His voice was caught between concerned and annoyed, and the slight wrinkle between his brow underscored his tone. “Take it.” He even had good eyebrows, the kind that somehow looked well-groomed even though he was surely too cool to wax them.
“What?” I said, my voice shaky. “You want me to take your jacket?”
He nodded and offered a small smile. “Yes.”
And then he blinked, holding his eyes closed an extra beat, showing off those lashes, the kind women revered with both jealousy and awe.
“I have five more of these at home.” He said this firmly, like it should be obvious. “It would be of much more help to you.”
Five more? If I wasn’t half-naked on the subway living through my worst nightmare, I’d make some crack about selling his fancy suits to pay my rent. But instead, I pursed my lips together, which I’d painted in my bright-red all-day lip stain just hours earlier. It was an attempt to push down the tightness in my throat, but it was no use. The misery of this morning was rushing out of me in heavy sobs.
“That’s really nice of you. Thank you.” I sniffed, my nose stuffy now. Good lord, why does snot need to be a part of crying? I already looked like a newborn sloth when I cried, and the dripping nose only made things worse. “But I can’t take it. Your suit jacket. How would I even. Get it back to you?” My breathing was choppy, and the words came out in gasps.