by Claire Cain
Me: Sure, what’s up?
Luke: I have a few minutes and wanted to see if I could call you.
Just reading the message made my heart rate increase. My first thought was excitement, and then I felt scared, like he might need to call me and tell me bad news. I tried to lock down my imagination.
Me: Sure! I’m out with some friends but call me in like 3 minutes, I’ll run outside.
“Hey, I’ve gotta take a call—I’ll be outside for a sec, but I’ll be back. Don’t eat my nachos!” I said a little too loudly as the song that was playing ended.
I stepped out into the stuffy night air, still warm and stale and thick at the tail end of August, and answered my phone as it rang.
“I think that was exactly three minutes,” I said, feeling my smile grow as I heard him answer.
“It was. I was counting. How are you?” he asked in his smooth, deep voice. My heart’s race went full throttle.
Silly what a nice voice could do.
“I’m good. It’s nice to hear your voice,” I said, trying not to sound breathless the way I felt.
“Likewise.”
“How’s the training going?” I asked, feeling painfully aware of the fact that we’d never had a conversation on the phone before, at least not in the last decade.
“It’s good. I’m ready for it to be over with, but it’s been useful, I think,” he said. He sounded tired.
“You sound tired.” Ever the conversationalist, me.
“Yeah, I am. Long days here. I’m up at four and in bed midday because it’s so hot, and then we stay up late for more. I’ll be heading back out in a bit.”
“Are you kidding? It’s almost nine here which means it’s almost seven there, right? You need to stop talking to me and rest. I can’t believe you’re working that early and late,” I chided him, laughing, but also feeling a competing sense of concern for him and delight that he’d bother to call me when he was so clearly not overflowing with free time.
“I know, and I do need to, but—”
“Alex, get back in here! The guy Emily is obsessed with is coming up!” Rick yelled to me from the doorway, beckoning me in. I gave him a thumbs up so he’d know I’d heard him. He flashed me a wide, bright smile and lingered for a second before turning back inside.
“I’m sorry. I don’t want you to—” he started.
“It’s fine. They’re all just being obnoxious.”
“No, no. It’s fine. I need to get ready to head back out. We’re working through the day tomorrow so it’ll be a long one.”
“Ok. Yeah, I hope things go well tonight and that you get some sleep at some point.”
“Have fun tonight… be careful,” he said, but it sounded like maybe he wanted to say something else.
“Of course. Thanks for calling. I hope tomorrow goes well,” I said.
“Thanks. Talk to you soon.”
“Ok, bye,” I said and hung up.
I looked around at the Elvis statue and the glittering neon signs of Broadway and felt hollow. I felt so happy to hear his voice and to realize he’d taken the time to call me. Now I felt empty and sad and… yikes.
Danger.
I shook my head to shake off the disappointment and marched back into the bar to our table where my new friends stood. Rick nodded to my phone and nudged my shoulder lightly.
“Who was that?”
“My friend Luke.”
“Friend Luke?” he asked, eying me closely.
“Yes, old friend Luke. We grew up together, and he’s out here at Fort Campbell,” I explained. I studied Rick as he stood there, looking a little perturbed. He was in accounting at the firm and had that cute smart guy thing going on—good with numbers, I assumed. His light brown hair hung a little into his green eyes, a good nose and an angular face meant he was, by all rights and every woman who’d run into him so far tonight, very handsome. But… need I say it?
“What a small world.” He seemed genuinely surprised by the coincidence. His eyes swept over my face, stalled on my lips, and only left them when I grabbed my beer and took a drink.
Ok…
“Yeah, crazy.”
“Listen, would you—” Rick started, but Emily cut him off.
“Look! You guys! He is Adorable! Seriously!” Emily yelled as the band she loved, Lazy Echo, started to play. She talked endlessly about how much she loved this band. Her comment was well-timed, as was the start of the music, which was far too loud to talk over.
So far, Rick and I had only hung out a few times in a group setting. He was nice enough, charming enough, and I liked talking to him well enough. He tended to pay me a lot of attention, more so in the last few weeks. It had started to make me a little nervous now that I noticed it, and I thought maybe he was being more obvious so I would. But I knew there was nothing ahead for me and Rick, regardless of his attention.
I was more than half way to being in love with Luke after just a few interactions, and I felt stupid and embarrassed and hopeful. But I also felt determined not to build my life around this guy who didn’t seem to take me into account for much of his, even if he was a loyal texter.
I looked down at my light, tasteless beer and as the music crashed around me, I thought about what it’d be like if Rick asked me out. I felt like going out with someone else would be a kind of a betrayal. Not to Luke, who had zero claim on me, particularly after making absolutely no effort to acknowledge some state of relationship beyond friendship, but more so to myself and my own feelings.
My hopes, really.
Because yeah, I wanted to be with Luke. Absence was definitely making the heart grow fonder, whether or not that fondness was returned. It was also causing me to recognize my feelings for Luke were different from anyone I’d ever dated, even Marcus.
I’d never worried about Marcus or thought about him when I wasn’t with him. It was a placid, easy relationship. It was even-keeled. It didn’t knock me off-kilter and leave me wanting, longing, burning like whatever this was with Luke did.
But Rick was cute. He had a job. He was apparently available and clearly interested. For now, I was thankful for too-loud amps and over-enthusiastic fans to buy me some more time to think about it.
That Tuesday at work, Rick cornered me by the community Keurig.
Ok, not actually cornered me, but I was alone in the little galley kitchen break room, and he came in and just stood there watching me insert my little pod of Peet’s coffee for my afternoon caffeineation—if I didn’t get it in soon, I’d miss my three pm cut-off, so I was all business. My team had just nailed a bid for a January event that I’d pushed them on, and I was taking a celebratory break in the wake of the signed contract arriving in my email. The account was a long shot and the agency had submitted bids to them for the last three years and had never won—until this year. I was bouncing around on my toes, charged with adrenaline and satisfaction.
I planned to pair my coffee with a maple pecan granola bar I’d made over the weekend, and I was on a mission. My celebratory caffeine-and-snack break had been motivating me to finish all of the items on my morning to do list. Wrapping that up by reviewing the signed contract for a much-desired account that happened to be my second big win of the month just sweetened the deal.
As I’d pressed the sticky mix of granola, toasted pecans, maple syrup, and a few other things into my quarter sheet pan with my bright red spatula two days before, I envisioned myself in this moment, relishing the afternoon pick-me-up. I’d been waiting all day for the sweetness paired with the biting warmth of the coffee.
“So…” He crossed his arms and leaned against the cherry wood cabinets. He looked nice with a white button-up shirt under a light gray suit. He had an olive and black striped tie that brought out the green of his eyes. Yes, Rick was cute, there was no point in pretending he wasn’t.
“So?” I emptied the pod and moved to get a small plate from my shelf inside one of the cabinets.
“I want you to go out with me this weeken
d.” He didn’t move, didn’t ask. He just tossed it out there, like he was giving me his Christmas wish list.
“Oh?” I wasn’t sure what else to say. I still didn’t know how I felt about going out with someone. I tried not to add the else as in go out with someone else, but that was how it felt. Someone other than Luke.
“Yes. And I think you might want to go out with me, so I think we should.” This was fast becoming one of the weirder lead-ins to a date I’d ever had, but ok. He wasn’t entirely wrong in that I thought he was acceptably cute and we hung out in groups together and got along, even if he was a whole lotta presumptuous.
I was having a good day, and I was riding the wave of success. I didn’t want to deal with rejecting him, and after all, I was single.
I turned to him and gave him a hesitant smile.
“What did you have in mind?”
The hostess showed me to the table, and I took in the atmosphere of the hip little place as I slid into my seat across from Rick. Butcher block community tables stretched in rows across the surprisingly small interior of the room. Mason jars filled with silverware were grouped in threes every four or five feet. Wild flowers were spilling out of tin watering cans, and overall the place looked down home chic. I’d read their décor was simple, but their food was fastidiously made, everything hand-pickled and baked and seasoned and smoked to perfection.
“You look great,” he said from his seat as his eyes swept over me in a more than obvious appraisal of my outfit.
I was wearing dark jeans and a t-shirt with a long gray short-sleeved cardigan over it. In other words—I had not dressed up. My enthusiasm for the date as it got closer was nil. I hadn’t heard from Luke in four days, so I’d started to worry about him. I decided he had been injured, was in the hospital unconscious, and I wouldn’t hear about it for weeks until he was ok and got home.
Clearly, I was totally rational when it came to Luke.
Only about twenty minutes before I was due to meet Rick, I dragged myself off the couch, swapped my sweat pants for jeans, combed my hair, and put on mascara and lip gloss. With a kiss to Lemon and one last regretful glance at my couch, I left.
And there I was, meeting Rick and his open perusal of my body for dinner. And there he was, sitting at the end of one of the long tables with a nicely fitting short-sleeved polo and jeans that suited him—he looked good. He did.
By the time Saturday morning rolled around, I was sure I shouldn’t be going out with him and would have canceled if he hadn’t mentioned he was going to take me to Robbie’s Kitchen. I liked Rick as a friend, and yes he was cute, but I knew it wouldn’t go anywhere. At the same time, I felt much worse bailing on him now. Plus, the new hipster barbeque place had been on my list of must-eats since I’d read about it a few weeks ago, and so there I was.
But as soon as I sat down, I felt instantly annoyed to be there with him, which was not fair to him. I was annoyed with his shaggy light brown hair and his green eyes. He needed a haircut and an iris transplant, stat.
Or, he needed to be someone else. But whatever, let’s move on.
“I wanted to surprise you, so I already ordered for us. I was just picking out some wine.” He gestured to the wine list in his hand, his nicely shaped arm reaching out to point to a name on the list.
I stared at him, unable to speak, dumbfounded by the sheer wrongness of everything he just said.
First, who drank wine with barbeque? I was all for wine, truly. But with barbeque? I wanted a coke, or a beer, or water, or all three. But ok, that was fine and easily remedied.
The far greater sin was his ordering for me.
It wasn’t so much that I was so modern or independent that a man couldn’t order for me. I could see how maybe, in some cases and with the right person, that could be nice or even charming. After all, one might say the way to Alex’s heart was through her stomach.
But this dude didn’t even know me. We’d become friendly at work over not quite two months of my working at B&W. I had to bite my tongue not to say just that because You don’t know me well enough to order for me was on the tip of my tongue. His telling me he’d ordered for me was akin to telling someone you’d done a nude drawing of them and you couldn’t wait to show them, but you’d never, in fact, seen them naked.
See me: not naked. See Rick: showing me a drawing of me naked, draped on a couch and wearing nothing but the The Heart of the Ocean.
No. Just no.
I breathed deep and shut my eyes for a second, willing my internal outrage to remain internal. This guy was trying to be charming. He was failing on so many levels, it wasn’t even funny, but it wasn’t totally his fault he jumped the gun. Maybe most girls liked that on a first date. Plus, maybe he chose well. If this place was as good as it was rumored to be, then he probably couldn’t go wrong.
I swallowed my ire and said, “Oh, did you? That’s interesting.” It was basically as nice as I could be. My voice was about an octave higher than usual, but he didn’t notice.
He looked at me with a small smile like he knew I was happy, and it was one of many moments that night that told me Rick and I had no future.
“So… you were picking wine?” I tried to address at least one of the issues at hand.
“Yeah, I love a good red, thought that’d go with our meals.” He smiled at me enthusiastically and leaned over a bit with his finger pointing to a pinot noir on the short, laminated list.
“Would you mind if I just had a beer?” I asked, wondering why my voice continued to climb into the rafters.
“Oh, no, of course not. I should have asked you. Beer’s great.” He flipped the drink menu and handed it to me, and I took it gratefully.
The rest of the night followed suit. After we made it through the typical hoops of where we’d grown up, and how I was settling in, the conversation became stilted and surface-level. Maybe I had no patience for first dates anymore, but this one seemed particularly lacking.
True, I hadn’t been on more than one or two first dates since I was engaged to Marcus, and my date with Luke didn’t count since we knew each other. So maybe it was me. In a group, I hadn’t noticed Rick and I didn’t have much in common.
Or, again… maybe it was me.
“Do you like movies?” he asked.
See? He really asked that. He asked if I liked movies, like there was a huge subset of the population who doesn’t like movies. And I felt terrible about it because he tried to get me talking about some TV show he watched—Black Mirror—and I hadn’t seen it. That stalled out, and so he was justifiably searching for something else.
“Yeah. Yeah, I like movies a lot. Love a good movie.” I tried not to sound sarcastic. I did try. At this point I was feeling furious with myself for ever agreeing to come, and I also felt guilty as all get out for subjecting Rick to my charmless presence at all.
“Have you seen the newest Transformers?” He was attempting to set up date number two to go to a Transformers movie.
Trans. Formers.
I loved Josh Duhamel as much as the next girl, but if we were resorting to the common ground of Michael Bay’s latest filmsplosion within the first twenty minutes of a date, this might signal we had little in common.
“You know, I’m not huge into Transformers. What number is this? Number five? Six?” I wasn’t going to lie because I knew I’d already been doing that to myself, and by extension, to him.
The lure of hipster barbeque and my own hurt pride had been too much to resist, but I’d learned my lesson. An hour after we arrived, we hugged, and I gave Rick the friend pat as he leaned in, making clear, I hoped, that he was a great guy, and we’d be friends. I walked the twenty-minute walk home feeling guilty and stupid and lonely and supremely angry with myself.
Lesson learned.
Chapter Twelve
Luke: What’d you do this weekend?
It was Monday morning just after I got in to work. I had mounds of work to do and was trying not to dread seeing Rick. He might not even h
ave realized how bad the date was, but it was bad. I was still reeling from how stupid I felt for agreeing to go. He was a nice enough guy, if a little unobservant, but we had not clicked in the one-on-one setting. I didn’t typically see him in this part of the building anyway, so there was hope I could avoid him for a few more days. I felt the awkwardness of the situation settle in around me when I arrived, but I’d pushed it away and was focusing on reviewing the new account and the work my account leads were working up for a local hospital’s nonprofit foundation’s yearly fundraiser scheduled a few weeks before Christmas. They’d won the bid just two weeks ago and we hit the ground running.
Whether I wanted Luke to know I went out with someone was an entirely different conversation I was having with myself. Part of me was hoping for him to ask this very question so I could say something coy about going out with a friend. I wasn’t trying to make him jealous, but I did want to see what his reaction would be.
Ok, maybe a small part of me was trying to elicit a reaction, and I might have been not altogether upset if he was a tad jealous.
Me: I went for a long run and then out to dinner Saturday. Church and some baking Sunday. You know, Earth-shattering stuff. You?
I settled on “dinner Saturday” because that could be anything, date or not, and it was up to him to ask if he wanted to know more. If it was just casual conversation, I didn’t need to explain and he clearly didn’t need to know.
Luke: What did you bake?
Me: I made some peach cobbler that I brought to work because if I keep it at home I’ll eat it all tonight in one sitting, and some granola, and I made some triple berry muffins for my boss’s daughter who just had a baby.