Rules To Love By by Nicola Dinan

Carty and Raka try to take things slow, but their feelings quickly get in the way.

“There’s something I want to talk to you about,” Carty says.

Raka imagines every possibility of what Carty might say, all of which end in Raka’s disappointment. Why else would Carty’s face be so solemn? This is only their second date, but Raka had been hopeful and excited. She isn’t sure if she’s looking for something serious, but if she were, then it would probably be with someone like Carty. March in New York is cold and gloomy, but her first date with Carty — and the second, until now — had felt like summer, that ineffable thrill that rises with the sun, like the world fits in your palms.

“What is it?” Raka asks.

“I —”

Raka’s Bed-Stuy apartment starts to shake. It’s right over the A/C line, and Carty’s words are stolen by the noise and rumble. Only moments ago, Raka had explained that there was nothing on the walls because the trains rattled them right off. Carty looks at the exposed brick behind the yellow sofa, at the red dust vibrating off the edges.

“I want to talk about something I think is important for you to know,” Carty says. She is aware that, in grasping for the confidence to ask for what she needs, she has adopted the tone and cadence of a funeral director. However, she doesn’t know how else to steel her nerves. Carty takes a breath. “I want to date with rules.”

“Rules?” Raka asks.

Raka longs for the time — perhaps only a minute ago — when she wasn’t so aware of her own heartbeat. She feels it in her throat, in her fingertips. She looks at Carty, in her uniform of black and stacks of silver rings, unsure of what rules could mean. Movies on Wednesdays and dinner on Fridays? No dairy after midnight?

“I mean, I want to date with intention,” Carty says.

Raka’s shoulders relax. Intention. That, she can do. In fact, after many dates with people who’ve dated unintentionally, she’d grown tired of being caught in the crossfire between unintentional people and their unintentional desires. But still, intention is vague: one may intentionally come, just as one may intentionally go.

“I like intention,” Raka says. “But — ”

“Yeah?”

“What’s intention to you?”

“I think it means taking it slow.” Carty says.

“Slow?”

Going slow is one of Carty’s rules. There was little to be celebrated about insomnia, except the long, lonely nights it left Carty to research dating. What would it mean if Carty moved slowly? If Carty didn’t extract herself from her own life to plant herself in another’s, losing herself entirely? The rules were Carty’s invention, her way of nurturing her own best instincts. She takes another breath, reminding herself that Raka seems curious, not skeptical, that all signs point to good.

“It’s a rule, I guess. I don’t want to see each other more than twice a week, for example,” Carty says. “And I don’t think I want to talk all the time. As in, like, texting. I mean, we can text if you want, but I think I prefer meeting in person. But only two times a week. And…”

“And?” Raka asks.

“I think we should hold off a bit before we meet each other’s friends — if it comes to that, I mean. I guess I’m just saying that I want to take things slow. Which I already said. Yeah.”

“Oh,” Raka says. “Sure.”

“Yeah?”

Raka pauses.

“I just want to know — ” Raka bites her lip, wondering how to ask do you like me, without having to ask if Carty likes her. Is there anything worse in the world than asking someone if they like you? No, probably not, and so Raka leads with what she feels, what she can say for certain. “I like you, Carty.”

“I really like you, too.”

Carty thinks of what else she can say, worried it doesn’t seem like she does, in fact, like Raka. She imagines the old cameras in her own living room, things that were built to last. Modern cameras aren’t better, even with technology, because the substitution of hands for machines has made them flimsy and cheap. Carty has always wanted to care for love, to build something that endures. Falling in love has always been easy for Carty, but finding doesn’t always mean keeping. She wants whatever she has with Raka to be different.

“Sorry,” Carty continues. “I think what I’m saying is that I’ve ruined things in the past by going too fast. It’s like I forget who I am, because all I want is to make the other person happy. And I felt from our first conversation that you’re the kind of person I’d like to spend a lot of time with. As in, I’d love to see you all the time. I would.” Carty is picking at her fingernails. “But I also don’t want to mess things up. I don’t know if I trust myself not to mess things up without the rules. So, I want to be, I don’t know.”

“Intentional,” Raka says.

“Yeah,” Carty says. “Intentional.”

“OK,” Raka says. “Let’s take it slow, then. You know, I’m relieved.”

“Really?”

“Come on,” Raka says. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

Carty buries her face in her hands.

“Sorry,” she says. “I just wanted to get it right. Was it that bad?”

“What’s it like when you deliver bad news?” Raka asks.

Carty laughs.

“You don’t want to know.”

Raka takes Carty’s hand, bringing it to her side of the couch. She weaves her fingers through Carty’s, wondering if her heart had been beating as hard as her own, whether, if she placed her thumb on Carty’s wrist, she could feel the mark of her nerves. Touching her, it feels strange that this person who began in pixels is now sitting in front of her. Raka’s first introduction to Carty was on YouTube. She’d watched an online dating show in which Carty was a contestant. Carty hadn’t come across well, and the comments let her know it, but Raka smelled injustice. When they matched on Hinge, Raka broke her own rule — to never message first — by writing, hey, and then broke another rule — don’t double message — with, I saw you on YouTube and I think you got a bad edit. Raka knew from the moment she met Carty that it had, in fact, been a terrible edit.

Raka holds on to these chance encounters on separate corners of the internet. For Raka, love has always been entwined with kismet. When Raka’s mother was young, before she met Raka’s father, she had a recurring dream where she saved a drowning boy from a lake. Her father also had a recurring dream before he met Raka’s mother, in which he was drowning in a lake before being rescued by a girl. For Raka, love existed on the plane of cosmic interference, and she felt the same when she first met Carty. So, if a good love story meant some rules, then Raka could learn to follow them, especially if they were for the greater good. As far as Raka knows, nobody in “Romeo and Juliet” was texting. Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West weren’t always together, either — why else would they write all those letters?

“Maybe I can take you to Grand Central later?” Raka asks.

Carty lives on the outskirts of New York City, and so if Raka is under constraints, she will at least do what she can to make the date last longer. She joins Carty on the subway and up to the ticket barriers in Grand Central, all to have a little more time with her. She will continue doing this for the rest of the month, and the month after that, and the month after that.

Raka’s in the elevator, heading up to the top floor of a Bushwick loft. She’s going to what Carty calls Garyoke, named such because Carty’s friend Gary — described to her as a tall Bulgarian filmmaker with an impressive mullet — has a karaoke machine. Nervous, because it’s the first time Raka will meet Carty’s friends, after a few months of following rules and another few months of bending them.

As time slipped towards summer, the rules had melted with the call of the sun, bending in shape and demand. When Carty would come to see Raka at her new apartment in Astoria, no longer above the subway, she would often stay for two days. They’d become regulars at Pochana, where Carty would order in Thai. And at the Italian bakery, too, where Raka liked the jelly cookies. By the end of the second day, Carty would say she had to go, and Raka would plead for her to stay.

“Come on!” Raka would say. “One more night.”

“I want to,” Carty would reply. “But no.”

Carty always won, but it was never much of a fight. The rules had made for a happier and more confident Carty, a gentle reminder that she could be with Raka without the penalty of self-abandon. Still, for Carty, the right thing wasn’t always the easy thing. Carty wanted to stay longer — forever, even — but she knew that the rules were working, that whatever she had with Raka was flourishing. So, Carty drew a line: two days was a bend, but three would be a break. In any case, she was never gone for long.

Now it is August, and Raka still finds that there are ways in which she’s been more open: Carty has, in fact, met Raka’s sister and her friends, but Raka has yet to meet any of Carty’s. Raka tries not to see it as a personal defect, though she can’t help but sometimes wonder: Am I just really embarrassing? She loves Carty. She hasn’t said it yet, but she does, and with those feelings of love come feelings of fear — that Carty doesn’t feel the same, that there is something wrong with Raka. The asymmetry has haunted her, but Carty’s invitation to Garyoke, an attempt to correct the balance, is haunting Raka, too. She questions her yellow dress, her orange-shaped-and-colored-earrings. She thinks of Carty’s black wardrobe that, on adventurous days, will accommodate green, and wonders if she looks OK.

What Raka doesn’t know is that Carty, waiting for her in Gary’s loft, is anxious to the point of nausea. Not because Raka is embarrassing, but rather the opposite. Carty can’t bear to lose her. Part of being in love means the possibility of being hurt, and no rule can protect you from that. She keeps thinking, What if Raka meets my friends and decides I’m really embarrassing?

The elevator opens, and Raka sees Carty smiling, laughing, at the other end of the bustle. She looks at the spectrum of color — everything between her yellow and orange and Carty’s black and silver — and starts to feel OK.

“I’m so happy you’re here,” Carty says, finding her.

“I’m so happy to be here.”

The I love you is on Raka’s lips. Both of their lips, in fact, though neither says it. Raka feels a hand on her arm.

“I’ve been dying to meet you, Raka,” a woman says, and from her bright, expressive voice, her short hair, Raka knows that it’s Carty’s friend, Yuka, an actress and singer who goes to clown classes.

She whisks Raka away from Carty, neither Carty nor Raka happy nor ready to part, their eyes never quite losing contact, even from across the room. Soon, Raka is confronted with people who tell her things about herself, what they’ve heard of her. How she studied civil engineering before becoming an actor, and her childhood in California. None of this, Raka realizes, is a sign that Carty finds her embarrassing. In fact, when facts of her biography are repeated back to her, they are told with a sense of residual pride, which Raka knows began with Carty.

Soon, Raka is next to Gary, whose mullet is indeed impressive.

“Do you want to sing something?” he asks.

“Yeah, why not!” Raka says. “What should I sing?”

“We’ve got ‘Love on Top’ queued,” Gary says. “Do you want to do that?”

It seems too big a play for Raka at a party where she’s a plus-one. Still, she can’t help but say to herself, fuck it.

“Let’s do it. But let me find Carty.” Raka spots her in a corner and takes her by the hand. “We’re singing.”

“Are you sure?”

“Come on,” Raka says. “Let’s do it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah!”

The familiar pa-pa-pa-da plays, and Carty takes the mic, unsure of herself. She sings into it, holding it between herself and Raka — a whole foot separating them in height — moving in a clumsy two-step that is ill-suited to the greatest songstress of the 21st century. Then, the discomfort stops. It has to, because they have reached the chorus, which demands their full attention, singing the words they cannot say. You’re the one I love, you’re the one I need. They are safe in the insincerity of song, the pretense of lyrics, though every word is meant, and every word is their own.

Carty supposes that, for those of us who are brave enough to say what we want to say, there’s plain talking, and for those of us who aren’t, there’s Beyoncé. They draw the crowd in, and it seems like everyone at Garyoke sings the final chorus with them, a sigh of blissful relief when it ends. The doors to the loft open, and people trickle up to the rooftop, golden hour over Bushwick. Carty and Raka lie on their backs, over the dusty concrete.

“I know I’ve already said it,” Carty says, holding Raka’s hand, what’s left of the sun on their faces. “But I’m so happy you’re here.”

“I’m happy, too.”

“You got whisked away by Yuka.”

“I did,” she says. “It was like speed dating your friends with a very assertive chaperone. She was so great. I barely said three words before she turned to me and said” — Raka’s face goes stern — “I’ve decided I like you.” Raka laughs, so does Carty.

“You’re so Shakespearean.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a compliment. I just mean the way you tell stories,” Carty says. “It’s so theatrical. I love it. And you’re so good with new people. You make everyone seem interesting. Sunshine Raka.”

Carty places a thumb on Raka’s cheek, lost in her eyes. Those large, hypnotic almonds.

“Most people already knew about me,” Raka says.

Raka smiles, so does Carty.

“Who else did you meet?” Carty asks.

“Everyone,” Raka says. “Angela?”

“Amanda?” Carty asks.

“No, Angela.”

“Angela?”

“You don’t know her?” Raka asks.

Carty shakes her head.

“You’re kidding me,” Raka says. “I was speaking to her for ages. I lied and said I’d heard so much about her. She must be so confused.”

They laugh, so much that they start to cry. Each of them imagines that one day they’ll be friends with Angela, that they’ll look back on this and laugh even more. It makes both Carty and Raka happy, thinking about their future. Raka opens her eyes and looks at Carty. She wants to say it, she is about to say it, but then Carty opens her mouth.

“There’s something I want to tell you,” Carty says, again, so serious.

“Oh, God,” Raka says. “What is it?”

“I love you.”

Raka feels herself go breathless, and then she smiles so wide it hurts.

“I love you, too.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really,” Raka says. “I mean it.”

They smile, then kiss, and as they separate Carty notices how the light catches Raka’s eye. She thinks of her old cameras again, wishing she had one here. She’d like nothing more than to take Raka’s picture.

Nicola Dinan grew up in Hong Kong and Malaysia and now lives in London. “Bellies,” her debut, was nominated for six literary prizes and won the Polari First Book Prize. “Disappoint Me,” her second novel, won the New Adult Book Prize.