Page 17 of The Dating Contract

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At 5 p.m.,Samuel dialed the number Leah had given him. He had no expectations and had spent the better part of the day trying to remind himself of that.

Except when Leah answered the call, she didn’t greet him with ‘hello’ or ‘how are you?’ What she did say was: “I need your help.”

Which was great. “I actually need your help as well,” he said, “but what do you need me for?”

“I need the presence of a boyfriend without actually having one. So I need to fake-date you.”

“So,” he ventured, once he tamped the fireworks of his emotions down. “You’re asking me because I pulled you into the wild situation at the expo?”

“Partially. This is a way to fix the mess we made with this whole thing in my family. But also I need to bring a significant other to a work function.”

“What kind of work function?”

“Are you familiar with Gabe Brucker’s annual cocktail party?”

She said it like he was supposed to know what it was. He didn’t. “No,” he said. “Sorry.”

“It’s a cocktail party, thrown by my boss and his wife at their townhouse. He’s been throwing it for years, and this is the first time he’s invited me.”

“Nice.” And then he paused, remembering something she’d said either at the expo or at the gallery on Sunday. “You’re a sports agent, right?”

She paused. “Yes,” she said. “I am. Hockey if you’re curious, men’s and women’s.”

“So you did what you meant to. Congratulations.”

“I’m not sure why you’re telling me this now,” she said after a while where he wondered whether she was going to respond at all, “but sure. We don’t need any emotional trips down memory lane. This whole thing is…professional. What did you need?”

“Significant other at a work function,” he said, speaking quickly so that he didn’t lose her, “maybe crowd control at comic con. But also…”

“We need to get this in writing,” she said, cutting him off at the pass. “Equal in terms of events. Code of conduct. Expectations.”

“How we deal with our families?”

“Yes,” she said, as if he’d somehow come up with something surprising. “Families. Professional obligations and contracts.”

“Speaking of contracts,” he said in an attempt to change the subject, “have you heard of the Unicorns? It’s a girls learn to play hockey program out of Westchester.”

There was a long pause and he wondered what was going on. “Leah?”

“I have,” she finally said. “What’s going on?”

“My mentor—he’s hired me to do letters for a logo for something to do with the program. And you work with women’s hockey, which means you probably know about girls’ programs, so I figured I’d ask.”

“Let’s talk about that more this week,” she said. “What do you need to put together a contract?”

He could say a lot, try to get all the information over the phone like what she seemed to be aiming for, but that wasn’t the point of this. At least for him. The point was to spend time with her, learn who she was now. And maybe try and get her forgiveness. “How about we hammer out the specifics of the contract in person?”

“Don’t you need private space to write?”

He laughed. Privacy was important, but she was actually asking him to make them something. It would be something that required her input and his in a way that would not only shape the document itself, but also the form it would take. Which meant nothing he would be doing could would be private. “We have to talk specifics, because this isn’t a ketubah.” He paused, giving himself a second to think. “Can you come to my apartment this week?”

“Don’t you have a space in the city you work at? I don’t want to have to trek all the way out to…”

“Queens. Where do you live?”

“Manhattan.”

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