“Nice to meet you, Marlowe. And if I may say – you’re doing an extraordinary job of making Caelum look like a man who doesn’t deserve you.”
“She doesn’t need encouragement in that department,” Caelum said drily.
Lysander released my hand and turned back to Caelum with the wounded gravity of a Shakespearean actor. “You got married. Without telling me. Me, your oldest friend. The man who held your head over a toilet when you were seventeen and drank an entire bottle of your father’s scotch. The man who-“
“Lysander.”
“I am deeply, profoundly hurt.”
“We’ll talk later.”
“We absolutely will, and you’ll be paying for dinner for the next six months.” The theatrics evaporated into a grin that was pure, uncomplicated warmth. “Come on. Your table is ready. I outdid myself – you’ll see.”
He led us deeper into the restaurant, and with every step, my breath moved a little higher in my chest.
Lysander’s was, to put it mildly, not the kind of place I’d ever imagined setting foot in. The interior existed in the overlap between restaurant and dream – soft amber lighting that made everything glow as though lit from within. The ceiling was high and dark, studded with tiny recessed lights that mimicked a night sky. The walls were a deep, velvety blue – not navy, not midnight, but the exact blue of the sky twenty minutes after sunset, when the last light is leaving and everything looks like a painting of itself.
Tables were scattered across the space with the careful asymmetry of intention, each one dressed in white linen and anchored by fresh flowers and flickering candles. Crystal caught the light and multiplied it. Silver reflected faces. The piano – a baby grand, tucked in a corner where a man with gray temples played something that sounded like a conversation between sadness and joy – stitched the room together with melody.
And the people. The people looked like they’d been cast. Women in dresses that moved like water. Men who sat with the upright ease of confidence. Jewelry that whispered old money. Laughter that sounded expensive.
I thought of the diner near campus where Priya and I used to split a grilled cheese and argue about which K-drama lead was the most emotionally unavailable, and the distance between that world and this one felt less like miles and more like dimensions. I was Alice, and the rabbit hole had marble floors.
“This is your table,” Lysander announced, and the way he said it – with the pride of a man presenting a painting he’d spent weeks on – made me turn.
The table was tucked into a corner, half-concealed by a curtain of cascading green vines that separated it from the rest of the room like a whispered secret. White linen. A single rose – red, velvety, standing in a slim crystal vase like a small, beautiful act of defiance. Two candles, their flames steady and warm, reflecting in the wine glasses with a soft, golden pulse. Beyond the vines, the city lights were visible through a window, glittering like scattered code.
It was intimate. It was beautiful. It was the kind of table that made you believe, for the duration of a meal, that the world was smaller and kinder than it actually was.
“Thank you,” I said, and was surprised by how much I meant it. Not just for the table – for the care behind it. The thought. The deliberate construction of a space where two people might, if they were brave enough, become something to each other.
Lysander grinned. “Enjoy your night. Both of you.” He glanced at Caelum with an expression that said, in the unspoken language of men who’ve known each other since boyhood: don’t mess this up. Then he was gone, absorbed back into the golden machinery of his restaurant.
Caelum pulled out my chair. I sat. He sat across from me. And for a moment, neither of us spoke. We just – looked. At each other, at the candles, at the impossible loveliness of this small, vine-curtained world.
“What do you think?” he asked. His voice was quiet, and there was something in it I was learning to recognize: vulnerability masquerading as casual inquiry.
“I think,” I said, “that you’re either very romantic or very strategic, and I haven’t decided which is more dangerous.”
He laughed. The candlelight caught his eyes and turned them warm.
“It’s beautiful, Caelum. Genuinely. I’ve never been anywhere like this.”
“Then I’m glad it’s with me.”
The waiter arrived – silent, professional, appearing at our table the way a good waiter does, as though materialized by the intensity of our need for a menu. Caelum ordered without looking at the card: a bottle of their finest red, two appetizers, dealer’s choice. The waiter nodded with the gravity of a man entrusted with a sacred mission and disappeared.
We were alone again. The piano shifted keys, drifting into something slower, something that moved like water finding its level. I leaned back in my chair and let the moment settle over me – the candlelight, the music, the man across the table who was looking at me with an expression that was equal parts hope and terror, and I thought:
This is a first time. For both of us. And first times are worth being present for.
“So,” I said. “Let’s begin.”
“I want to play a game,” I said.
Caelum’s eyebrows rose. “That’s a sentence that could go in a lot of directions.”
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.