The Field - Part 6
The candlelight still flickered from the far corner of Zin's high-rise living room. Drezz Drew played in the background again, barely audible—like the evening had hit repeat, only this time slower, softer. They were halfway into a second glass of wine—her curled up sideways in the giant beanbag, him propped beside her, one arm loose around her knees. The city blinked below the window like it had no idea they were up here, building something delicate.
The conversation had drifted in waves, touching everything and nothing. What it meant to be alone. What it meant to be chosen. What it meant to be seen.
Zin had told him about growing up without anchor points—not in the orphanage sense, but in the raised-by-chaos sense. Moved around, couch-surfed through high school, sometimes calling it nomadic, sometimes just unstable. But somehow, she'd built a self out of the space between homes.
"I think I became a personality before I became a person," she'd said. "You start figuring out what makes people keep you around."
Richard had nodded, then shared his own version of emptiness—parents who were present but distant, who loved him in that dutiful way, who made sure he had everything he needed except the feeling of being genuinely wanted. When they died, he'd handled it like a project. Funeral arrangements, obituaries, asset distribution. He'd cried a little, but mostly he'd just... cleared them out.
"That's brutal," Zin had said.
"It felt insufficient. Like the grief I should've had never showed up. I wanted to hurt more. I wanted to feel wrecked. But it was just logistics."
Now, as the wine settled between them and the city lights painted golden squares across her face, Zin ran her fingers along the rim of her glass.
"Do you ever think about... family?" she asked quietly. "Like, building one?"
Richard didn't answer right away. He looked down at her bare legs, smooth and flexed from Pilates or dancing or simply being alive more than he knew how to be. He fought against his mind wondering why she'd shaved after their first big date. Had he earned her effort?
She noticed his gaze—partially appreciating being desired, but wanting an answer. She asked again. She hadn't meant it romantically. Not yet. But it hit him like that anyway.
"I think about it more than I admit," he said finally. "But not in the happy way. More like—am I even built for it?"
Zin tilted her head. "What do you mean?"
"I don't want to be the kind of dad who just... manages things. Who handles school applications and lunchboxes and medical forms but doesn't know how to play. Doesn't know how to make a kid feel wanted, not just... maintained."
He stared into his wine glass like it might explain him better than words could.
"My parents did all the right things. Fed me, clothed me, made sure I didn't die. But I was a task. A spreadsheet row they kept updating. When they died, it hurt—but it felt more like closing out a file than losing a home. I don't want to do that to anyone."
Zin was quiet for a long time, her fingers still tracing the rim of her glass. Then she leaned into him, her cheek against his chest.
"Well," she said softly, "I'm great at all that."
He laughed, but it caught in his throat. "You are?"
"Yeah," she said. "I'm weirdly good at joy. At being silly. At making pancakes shaped like animals. At singing off-key and building forts and laughing when things go wrong."
Her hand found his, fingers intertwining. "And you're great at the hard stuff. Schedules. Security. Showing up. You think that's not love, but it is. It's just quiet. A lot of people would trade for it. Actually, most people are pretty bad at both. Maybe we'd make something better."
Richard felt something shift in his chest—not the electric shock of attraction, but something deeper. A recognition that felt like coming home to a place he'd never been.
"You're serious?" he asked.
Zin smiled against his shirt. "As your favorite spreadsheet in a thunderstorm."
He kissed her forehead and pulled her closer, breathing in the scent of her hair—something like cocoa butter and something indefinably her. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the city sprawled endlessly, full of people living their separate lives, unaware that up here, two strangers were quietly reimagining what forever might look like.
"I used to think I was broken," Richard said into the comfortable darkness. "Like I was missing some essential piece that makes people... I don't know. Loveable."
"And now?"
"Now I think... I believe that maybe I was just waiting for someone who spoke my language."
Zin lifted her head to look at him, and in the dim light, her eyes looked impossibly deep. "What language is that?"
"I don't know, but I think you're semi-fluent. The kind of love that shows up in spreadsheets and poems written at 2 AM about people you've never met but somehow know you're going to."
She kissed him then—not the desperate kiss from the field, but something gentler. A promise rather than a plea. When they broke apart, she stayed close enough that he could feel her breath against his lips.
"For what it's worth," she whispered, "I think you've been speaking it perfectly."
They settled back into the beanbag, her head on his shoulder, his arm around her waist. The wine was making everything soft around the edges, but not in a way that felt false. More like it was revealing something that had been true all along.
"So what do you do?" Richard asked, suddenly realizing he'd never gotten a straight answer. "For work, I mean."
Zin smiled. "I'm in sales. But not the kind you're thinking. I pull together teams—super teams, really—from people I know and convince companies that my team is the best team for whatever impossible project they need done."
"What kind of projects?"
"M&A integrations, mostly. When two companies merge and everything's on fire and no one knows how anything works anymore." She shifted to look at him. "I have two jobs, technically. I do placement work—traditional recruiting. But most of my money comes from assembling these specialized teams for crisis situations."
Richard glanced around the room—at the handcrafted pottery on floating shelves, the abstract painting that looked like it came from a gallery, the furniture that definitely hadn't seen the inside of an IKEA.
"You must be really good at it," he said.
Zin laughed. "I run an industry event too. Started it to make money, but it evolved into my platform. I get to stand on stage in front of all the people I want to place or put on projects. It's basically professional matchmaking."
"Do you love it?"
"I do. Except the paperwork. It's all about reading people, figuring out what they need, what they're good at, how they fit together. Kind of like what happened with us, actually." She paused, swirling her wine. "I think about retiring sometimes. But then someone I care about inevitably calls with an impossible problem, and I can't say no."
Richard felt a warmth spread through his chest that had nothing to do with the wine. "So you're basically a professional people reader who can afford to give away LSD in fields."
"When you put it like that, it sounds like I have my life together."
"Don't you?"
Zin was quiet for a moment. "I guess. It just doesn't always feel that way. Success is weird when you didn't have anyone to teach you what it was supposed to look like."
The silence that followed was full of breath and possibility. The city lights continued their patient blinking, and somewhere in the distance, the soft jazz played on, creating a soundtrack for whatever they were building together.
When Richard kissed her again, it wasn't electric or cinematic or even dramatic. It was gentle. Unforced. Like returning somewhere he'd always been meant to go.
And as he held her in the flickering candlelight, Richard realized he wasn't afraid of loving too little anymore. He was only afraid of missing the chance to start.
The field had opened something in both of them—not just the capacity to see differently, but the courage to imagine differently. To believe that two broken people could create something whole, something chosen, something beautiful.
To him, the future was spoken between them, and alive. It lived in every shared breath, every gentle touch, every moment they chose to stay. The version of Richard that never considered having children was fading away. He was certain, forcefully certain, that Zin was his person. His wife. His soulmate.
Outside, the city hummed its electric lullaby, and inside, two people who had spent their lives feeling like strangers in their own skin finally found a place where they fit.