We grab lunch at the very first diner we come across off campus; we’re too cold to be picky, and the smell of fresh coffee draws us in off the street. Margo’s is packed to the rafters, filled with college students who’ve had the same idea as us, and a small, bird-like woman is pin-balling from table to table refreshing people’s coffee mugs. The windows run with condensation, and every time the door jangles open and a new customer enters the people inside groan and holler for them to close the door.
Noah and I find a vacant booth and I order a coffee and some pumpkin soup straight off the bat. Noah orders a burger and an espresso, and when the waitress leaves he leans across the table and smiles at me. I was wrong before: he does have freckles, they are just so faint they’re barely visible, scattered lightly across the bridge of his nose. He stares at me without a scrap of shame.
“What?” I ask, laughing, slightly nervous under his intense scrutiny.
“Oh, nothing. I was just wondering what you were doing for Christmas break?”
I remember Brandon’s promise to come back to the city and I make a mental note to contact the owner of the apartment to see if it will be free. “Not much. Just hanging out with my uncle again. What about you?”
“I’m going to be on placement.”
“Over the break?” Our coffee arrives and I free-pour an unhealthy amount of sugar into the bitter black liquid. Noah raises an eyebrow but doesn’t say anything about my sweet tooth.
“Yeah, my Uni back in London would only let me stay two semesters if I completed my placement alongside my time here. Means I have to sacrifice baby Jesus’ birthday party, but that’s okay. I’ve never been one for Christmas.”
“Huh. You’ve clearly never done Christmas in New York.” I stir my coffee until I’m sure I’m not going to get a mouthful of un-dissolved sugar, and then take a deep draught. “So where are you completing your placement?”
Noah opens his mouth and lets out a laugh that sounds a little nervous. “Uh…Africa.”
“What? I thought you were interning at a paper or something! Africa? Why?”
“I figured before I came here that since I was gaining an international education I might as well make it really interesting. I organized to go and work for a not for profit agency in Sierra Leone reporting on the conflict.”
“But…” that’s dangerous, I want to say. Then again, from what he said about his childhood, Noah’s used to finding himself in dangerous places. I raise my eyebrows and hold my coffee mug out to him. He chinks it with his own. “Kudos to you for doing something important instead of signing up to sling caffeine at the New York Times.”
He laughs. “They wouldn’t have me. Heard I made bad coffee.”
Our food arrives and we make small talk, Noah occasionally tapping me with his foot under the table, trying to keep his face straight while he pretends he hasn’t done anything. I somehow manage to adlib my responses to the questions he asks me about my family, sticking to the truth as much as I can: my mother lives in New York too, but we don’t get on; my uncle raised me the past four years; my passion for journalism comes from hard lessons learned in the past; my father is dead.
He tells me about his family back in Ireland, about being an only child, the pressure he was under to join the family business before he had a massive blow up with his dad and left home for a while. Our stories couldn’t be more different. It seems his parents are overly involved in every aspect of his life, or at least they try to be, and my own mother doesn’t want anything to do with me anymore.
The cold is somehow worse when we leave Margo’s, maybe because the soup has warmed me and loosened the tension in my bones. Noah chuckles when I shiver, wrapping my arms around my body and stamping my feet in the snow.
“Here,” he says, pulling me closer. He rubs his hands up and down my arms furiously, and I laugh as he jostles my body. When he considers me thoroughly warmed, he stops and looks down at me, his eyes searching my face. For a moment I think he’s going to lean down and kiss me, and from the wry look on his face Noah knows it. His eyes sparkle when he says, “Not yet, Avery,” and pulls me back toward campus.