“Yeah, that would be great!” I’ve basically cheered it, because now that the game is over, Reid and I seem to have slipped back into our familiar roles. I resist the urge to sigh. During our walk, Reid wasn’t exactly loose, but he was engaged, and interested, and determined. His version of excitement is basically—pointing, I guess, with the occasional attractive eyebrow raise, but still, there’s something about it. Something friendly, and comforting, and nice to be around.

“That was a really good . . . ideas idea,” I say.

“It helped?”

“It did.”

Reid nods once, that firm tip of his head, a piece of punctuation. An end to the sentence we’ve kept going between us for a while now.

We’ve moved back to the corner, where a crowd is waiting to cross Bowery. We could say our goodbyes here and I could turn, keep walking, see a few more signs on my own, walk through a neighborhood where the letters change, become characters for a language I don’t know. I could call for a Lyft when I get to the Manhattan Bridge. An indulgence, surge pricing for sure, but I feel I’ve earned it.

Except . . . I also want to stop for a few minutes. Take in the results of the game, look over the pictures and see what strikes me as interesting, as inspiration. There’s a coffee shop beside us—quite late for coffee—and I look toward it, see tables open. Even as I’m picturing it, as I’m thinking of me and my notebook and my Staedtler and these pictures, a familiar pressure builds. That twitching in my hands—what if I sit there, and it all comes to nothing? What if it’s another block, and I can’t—

“You should choose one of the letters,” Reid says, interrupting my thoughts. I blink away from the coffee shop and look up at him. “Choose one, and do one of our names, or—a month name, for your project. All from that one letter’s style. Another game.”

“Wow,” I say, chuckling at the way he seems to have read my mind. “Maybe you should be a business consultant.”

“Maybe,” he says, with a small, self-deprecating smile.

I stare down at my phone again, my grid of pictures. The nice thing about the game was the way we created it together, played it together, the way neither one of us was following or playing along. I wonder whether it feels as good to him as it does to me.

So before I can think about it too hard, I push my phone into his hands.

“Pick one,” I say. “Pick one, and follow me.”

Then I move past him into the coffee shop, not ready for the game to be over yet.

“You are not serious,” I say, looking down at Reid’s selection.