He shrugs, lifts his cup, and takes a sip of the herbal tea he ordered. Across the small, round table, his posture is nearly as impeccable as it had been the first time we sat together in a place like this.

But it’s not like that time. For one thing, I have also ordered an herbal tea, and even though I think it tastes like licking the bottom of a flowerpot, at least I know I won’t wake up tomorrow with a caffeine hangover.

For another, Reid and I are playing.

“This is extremely unexpected,” I say, tapping my pencil against my open notebook.

His mouth curves fleetingly as he sets down his cup. “If you’ll recall, unexpected was the point.”

The lowercase a that’s pictured on my phone is strange, misshapen. It’s a double-storey, the kind of a with a hook-and-eye look to it that’s common in roman fonts but uncommon in handwriting. But where most double-storey a’s have a circular counter, this one’s counter is triangular, made that way by the odd proportions elsewhere in the letter. Flat along the bottom, thick and blocky outlines, not at all consistent or familiar.

I’m surprised he picked it—orderly, well-shaped Reid—but I’m not displeased. In fact, as I still my pencil and flip it easily to rest in my usual drawing grip, a smile tugs at my mouth, because I already know what I’ll do with it. A month name, the first I’ve attempted outside of client jobs for weeks.

Within two minutes I’ve copied the a—I’m quicker, usually, but it takes me a couple of tries to get the proportions right, and by the time I’ve got a version I’m satisfied with, I’m working on the lower quarter of the page. I can feel Reid’s eyes on my hands, and while it sometimes makes me self-conscious to have people watch me work, I find I don’t mind. He’s so quiet that it’s not all that different from when I set my phone up on its tiny stand and take a video of myself sketching.

The hard part—the game, really—is not the copying, but the mimicking, the way I’m supposed to take this one letter and use it as inspiration for something new. That takes me longer—more experimentation, more mistakes as I struggle to get those over-broad shoulders on the top edges of the letters right, as I play with options to give them more dimension, more texture. I feel my mind going blank, my hand working more smoothly, confidently.