“No friggin’ way.” I looked down the main drag and laughed.
Pen had found someone to work her magic on, even here in this suburban hellscape. The next booth had a makeshift wall composed of heavier furniture lining their allotted space. Pen propped one forearm against an entryway bench that looked like it had begun life as a heavy bookshelf and a church pew before being brought together. Pen’s body leaned toward a heavy-set woman with olive skin and rich, dark hair cascading to her waist.
I shook my head and looked on, wavering between impressed and annoyed. Lucketts was our thing. The place where Pen and I indulged our deepest décor desires. Now she was out here, trying to score with some random woman while I was being seduced by handmade pottery. Was she going to scuttle off to the parking lot with this woman? It’s not like the bed of her truck offered the necessary privacy, but I knew Pen would never abandon me here, even though the woman was admittedly gorgeous.
As I watched, Pen turned her head and spotted me. When she waved, the raven-haired woman followed her gaze and spoke, but they were too far away for me to hear. After a moment of conversation, the stranger reached up on tip-toe and kissed Pen’s cheek. As the woman walked away, heading in my direction, Pen shuffled her feet and I could’ve sworn I saw a blush dust her cheeks.
“Have fun,” the stranger said as she drew level with me. She jerked her head toward Pen and smiled. “I know you will.”
“Oh, no, I’m not…”
Before I could correct her misapprehension, the woman laughed. It was a sweet sound, with no hint at bitterness for my interruption. She put a hand on my forearm and leaned in to murmur, “Don’t worry. She’s sweet and amazing and has no expectations. You can change your mind and she won’t hold it against you, trust me.” Pen started in our direction and the woman shot her a wistful glance. “I’ll give you some advice. Just let yourself have a great time. You will not regret it.”
She gave me a wink and sauntered away just as Pen arrived at my side.
“Sorry to abandon you.” She looked after the woman disappearing into the crowd. “What’d she say to you?”
“That you’re sweet and amazing and I should let myself have fun with you.”
“Sorry about that.” She rubbed her neck and continued, “I tried to tell her it wasn’t like that with us.”
This close, I could see that she was definitely blushing. I decided to forgive her for abandoning me in favor of relentlessly teasing her. “Is this the unflappable Penelope Chase blushing?” She laughed, but still wouldn’t meet my eye. I put my hand on her arm and felt her tense beneath me. “It’s okay that your conquests think so much of you.”
“They aren’t conquests. They’re…”
“Friends for a night? I know. It’s okay, Pen. She obviously feels comfortable with your night together.”
Pen laughed and finally looked up. The sparkle in her eye was the one I was used to, and it made my heart soar. She shrugged and said, “She should. That one took a year off my life.”
“Okay, too much information!” I laughed, but there was a strange wriggle of discomfort in my belly at the thought of Pen’s enthusiastic partners.
“You started it,” she said, her arm relaxing beneath me. “Okay. Back to your pottery. Come on.”
By lunchtime we were exhausted and well over our individual budgets for the day. We took a break for food and strategizing. That led us to the gourmet grilled cheese food truck and a complete abandonment of thrift. The sourdough toast was as bad an influence as the pretty potter. We ended up slumped back in folding chairs, sweating and wishing we’d chosen something other than cheese for our midday meal.
“What if someone amazing messages you?” Pen asked out of the blue, hitting me with that interrogative stare I couldn’t ignore.
“Huh?”
“On the dating app you’ve abandoned for the moment,” she clarified. “What if the person of your dreams messages you while you’re on a break?”
“I won’t know about it.” I realized my mistake a moment too late and then had to confess, “I put my account on hold.”
“Kieran…”
“I know. I know, don’t lecture me. I need a little bit of time to forget everything before I give someone else a chance.”
Pen leaned forward, sliding her hand across mine. Again I was struck by the gentle strength of her long fingers. I was also struck by her new fragrance. The lavender and sandalwood oil she’d rubbed into her neck and wrists. It caught me right beneath the sunshine and happiness in my blood and stuck.
“Kieran, you always find the person you’re meant to be with when you stop looking.”
The way she stared at me, I almost believed she meant it. I could’ve gotten lost in those eyes. Could’ve slipped into her embrace and let the world fly past. This must be what the women she seduced felt like. She was really, really good.
“Then it’s a good thing I’ve stopped looking.”
Pen scoffed, her throat flexing with her laughter. “Stop looking, sure, but you’ll stop seeing if you put your account on hold. Turn it back on and wait for them to come to you.”
Sure, it made sense, but then so had the pair of mismatched dining chairs painted a dreamy sage green that had torpedoed my budget. Things were weird that day. It seemed best to hedge my bets.
“Maybe.”
“You are the most stubborn woman I’ve ever met.”
“I’d have to be to spurn your advances.”
She shook her head and looked away, a smile curving her thin lips. “I’ve never once hit on you.”
“I won’t hold that against you,” I replied, standing up and holding out a hand to her. “Come on, we haven’t even been to half the vendors.”
Pen stood grudgingly. She clearly wasn’t ready to give up the argument, but she was a sucker for distressed furniture. I had to keep her distracted so I could stay happily on the sidelines of the dating scene for a few more weeks.
Chapter Nineteen
On Sunday morning I woke up without an alarm, an extravagance in which I rarely indulged. I’d changed my sheets Saturday as was my habit and now luxuriated in the feel of fresh, crisp linens across my skin. I slipped out of my pajamas so I could feel the uninterrupted caress of fresh cotton from the tips of my toes all the way up to my bare shoulders. I even rolled around a little before finally dragging myself into the shower.
Sundays usually meant spending the whole day in the house resting, and this Sunday would be no different. I’d actually never given myself a day off like this until I met Pen and she told me about her built-in days of rest. I had been the epitome of the weekend warrior, piling up activities and chores until I was so exhausted that going back to work Monday was a relief. I’d tried giving myself an actual day of rest and found that, while the need wasn’t physical as it was for Pen, it was mentally necessary. If I didn’t take time off, my anxiety always got the better of me.
After drying my hair enough to put it up in a messy bun, I dressed in clean pajamas and made a lavish breakfast. Sunday mornings were made for pancakes and no one could convince me otherwise. While I ate, I scrolled through the audiobook offerings from my local library, finally settling on an historical fiction novel set in early twentieth century Morocco and on a second helping of pancakes.
My earbuds in place and the story unfolding through the narrator’s rich, throaty voice, I began to clean. For me, cleaning is never the frantic chore it seemed to others. My job rarely had visual progress markers, so I loved seeing the fruits of my labor while I cleaned my house. Watching the sink empty of dishes or the vacuum lines appear in my living room rug were fulfilling for me in a way that few other things in my life were.
None of my partners had ever liked cleaning as much as I did. My former mother-in-law was as meticulous as I, so Nick took neatness for granted. He never so much as picked up a sock in the ten years we were married. I hadn’t minded until the relationship started to fall apart, but by then I resented everything about h
im. Alex was much the same, but their messiness was less indifference and more a product of the chaos of their mind. I’d been attracted to that chaos when we’d first met, especially after my neat, ordered married life. I craved chaos as much as I craved everything else about Alex.
We’d met in a bar six weeks after I’d kicked Nick out. I had been drinking heavily at the time, using alcohol to try to glue the pieces of my life together. I had the same success as everyone else who had tried it, which is to say none. Alex found me drunkenly crying on the dance floor with someone whose roaming hands were becoming annoying. They stepped in, sent the handsy person packing, and got me home safely. I begged them to stay and we talked all night, but never touched. I was floored to discover there was a human out there who wanted to get to know me when it would have been so easy to just take me to bed.
Alex had been my hero that night and they pulled me out of my darkness before my drinking could become a problem. They were so much kinder and gentler than Nick and I became lost in them almost immediately. They moved in two months later and saved me again, this time from an avalanche of bills and my crushing loneliness. In retrospect, I’d leaned too heavily on them and created a dynamic of my own helplessness that we could never shake. When things went bad, we had no foundation to fall back on, just codependence and unhealthy emotional habits. Still, I would always remember those early days fondly. The only other time I’d formed an attachment so quickly was with Pen. The difference was Pen didn’t need me to be helpless to care.
The kitchen was the one place that was constantly dirty, so I started my cleaning there. As I polished my stainless-steel fridge, the female character in my audiobook ran into a former acquaintance, a handsome young officer. I should’ve picked another book, but I was invested now and let the story play. As I assumed, sparks flew the moment they spoke. My skin started to tingle, hearing how their eyes met. I visualized the scene, the images fed by countless romantic films and my overactive imagination. He stood tall in his uniform and she was demure in her Red Cross apron. I was swept into the story as I grabbed the vacuum cleaner from my closet, but there was a tinge of sadness to their charming reunion.
Things like that never happened in real life. Sparks didn’t fly when gazes met. Eyes never lingered in that certain way. Hearts never beat together. No one walked into a room and saw someone they already knew and realized with a single look that their feelings had been love all along. It was a dream, distilled and distributed by Hollywood to hold people at the perfect mix of happy and sad so they’d keep buying tickets. Movies were nothing more than legal heroin and we were all junkies, desperate for another fix.
Rationalizing the ridiculousness of a meet-cute scene sustained me through vacuuming the floor and polishing the new dining chairs I’d bought at Lucketts the previous week. When the couple went through their first tribulation, his unit being relocated closer to the fighting and away from the woman he loved, I found myself lying on the couch. I lounged through the increasingly passionate letters back and forth between the lovers.
After a major battle that sent the main character into a torrent of anxiety, I found myself looking at my phone, my finger hovering over the Swingle app. There had been no little red hearts since I suspended my profile and that was fine. I was fine. It was okay that Juliana was alone and missing her love and I was alone wondering if I would ever find mine. My slipper chose that moment to slip off its precarious position dangling from my big toe. That dropped slipper saved me. The noise made me jump and I dragged my thumb away from my phone screen. I chastised myself as I sat up. I needed to stick to my decision to take some time away from Swingle.
I attacked the bathrooms next, scouring grout lines and even lying on my back to wipe away the accumulated dust behind the toilet tank. I was diluting bleach for the sinks and countertop when Rodrigo returned to Melilla and to Juliana. My phone chirped a low battery warning. I grabbed the glass cleaner while I plugged in my phone and retrieved my wireless earbuds. They had about three hours of battery life, so they could carry me through the guest bathroom and primary bedroom at least.
Losing myself in someone else’s love story and the mindless joy of cleaning made me happier than I had been in weeks. It reminded me that I didn’t need to find someone to love. The life I had built for myself was perfectly fulfilling. I didn’t need to make room for someone new. I didn’t need a passionate affair to ruin the perfect balance I had finally achieved. I already had everything I needed in life to be happy.
Then they kissed.
I’ve read a lot of sappy, heartwarming romances. There have been a lot of kisses that have made me gasp. There have been a few that have made me bite my bottom lip. This one made me cry on the bathroom floor.
Juliana professed her love, Rodrigo pulled her into his arms, and I sat down on the cold tile and howled as my tears fell. Then I howled even louder because I’d tried to wipe away the tears with my cloth soaked in ten percent bleach solution. Still, most of my tears were because of the kiss.
A perfect kiss. That moment of two hearts merging at the intersection of lips and then bodies and then souls. Wasn’t that what living was all about? To find that moment in our own lives. To find that person who would hold us until we felt whole. The moment was beautiful and perfect in a way it had never been for me, and yet in that moment I truly believed that one day I would find it. I would move beyond a cheating husband, a codependent ex, and a series of pathetic first dates and I would find real happiness.
“I just have to move to Morocco to find it,” I spluttered through my tears.
Once I could force myself to stand, I marched back into the kitchen and banged the pause button. I tossed the earbuds beside my phone and headed back to the bathroom, leaving a trail of discarded clothing across the newly vacuumed floor. A very long, very hot shower cleared both the ache from my heart and the lingering bleach from around my eyes. Since my cleaning pajamas were covered in sweat and snot, I traded them for yet another pair. Fortunately, my passion for sleepwear meant my closet did not disappoint. I picked a button-up cotton pajama set covered in little smiling Christmas trees. Pen and I had bought a matching pair for last year’s annual viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life, my favorite Christmas movie. We also owned a matching pink set with handguns for Pen’s favorite Christmas movie, Die Hard, but she always refused to wear hers.
It was after two when I finished my second shower, which was eight o’clock in my sister’s time zone and that gave me permission to have my first drink of the day. As long as it was a reasonable hour to drink for someone I knew, I was allowed to indulge. I hadn’t expected to be emotionally attacked by an audiobook, so I hadn’t had time to chill any wine. I dropped an ice cube in a Chardonnay I’d been saving for just such an emergency and settled back onto the couch.
I noticed in passing that my phone was charged but ignored it in favor of scouring my streaming services for a film that did not involve any romance. It was a tough call since I don’t like horror films unless there are vampires and I detest sports films, but pretty much every other genre wove in a romantic storyline somewhere along the way. That left my options severely limited. I couldn’t say when I picked up my phone and opened the Swingle app, but it was somewhere between switching from Netflix to Hulu and daydreaming about warm sunsets in Morocco. I noticed the open app and my empty glass at the same moment. It seemed more important to refill the glass than to stop the inevitable slide back into the dating world. Before I knew it, I was tipsy and checking out the profile of a new addition.
Skye was ridiculously cute, nonbinary, and had soulful eyes to match their perfect half-smile. Their profile was definitely new since my last log in. Had they been around before I would have taken notice, no doubt about it. While I spent my time digesting all the little, perfect details Skye’s profile had to offer, several new messages appeared in my inbox. I discarded them each as they came, always returning to Skye. They had an originality and a wit that was completely absent in everyone else.
Honestly, how hard was it to come up with a subtle, polite opening line? Something that didn’t involve a crude sexual innuendo or faux disinterest? Apparently no one on Swingle could find that balance.
Honestly, though, I would totally have accepted any of those stupid pickup lines from Skye. Why hadn’t they messaged me? They were perfect with skin tanned like desert rock with creamy undertones. Their robin’s egg blue hair sat in a messy stack on top with the sides shaved down to the skin and there was not a single picture where they wore a full smile. They held back that last few inches of joy from their expression and it was so alluring. My heart beat faster thinking about what I had to do to earn a full, open smile, maybe even a laugh. I was smitten. They, clearly, were not since they hadn’t messaged me.
I’d started a Marvel Universe movie but hadn’t watched a single frame. Music swelled onscreen and so did my anxiety. It was one thing to suggest that first date with Chloe when I hadn’t ever been the one to ask someone out before. It was another thing entirely to send out a message to someone who hadn’t shown any interest in me. I suddenly felt cruel and judgmental for scoffing at others’ pickup lines. What was I going to say if I ever got the nerve to message? I sighed, defeated, and typed out a quick text to Pen.
I need your help but you aren’t allowed to judge me or say anything.
I promise nothing.
There’s someone I think is really cute but I’ve never been the first one to send a message.
Can a femme even do that?
First—yes, a femme can make first contact. In fact it’s hot when they do.
Second- I thought you were taking a break from Swingle?
I chose to ignore the second part. No need for Pen to know I’m too much of a sap to give up on love. The first part was both exciting and terrifying. Okay, I’m allowed to make contact, but how was I supposed to do that.
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