“Zebras, this is Kieran,” Pen said, her wide smile returned by everyone. “Kieran, these are the Rainbow Zebras.”
“Pleasure,” I said. My West Virginia twang, always more prominent when I was super drunk or super nervous, drew out the word into something almost risqué.
“Come sit next to me,” Vanessa said as someone called Pen over.
I was happy to drop into the seat beside her. I’d worn taller heels than usual today. A hint of vanity I allowed myself after the previous night’s humiliation. If I had one quality feature, it was my calves.
“So you’re the famous Kieran,” Vanessa said, leaning on the arm of her chair and looking me over. “I thought you’d be taller.”
I snorted into my water glass. “And you’re the famous Vanessa.”
“You thought I’d be shorter, didn’t you? I did lose an inch or two. Five ankle surgeries before thirty will do that to you. That’s a benefit of the chair. No one knows I’m tiny.”
A waitress came by to take everyone’s order, and I used the distraction to wrack my brain for all the details Pen had shared about Vanessa. As with everything else in her life, she hadn’t said much. I knew Vanessa had thrown a big party the previous summer right after she was fitted for her chair. She’d called it her Walking Retirement Party and had lit a ceremonial pyre for her forearm crutches. The fire department had been called.
I’d been amazed at the time that anyone would celebrate the loss of her mobility, but seeing her teasing smile now, it made perfect sense. When joint degeneration was inevitable, acceptance seemed the most reasonable choice.
“Can I ask you something?” I leaned closer to Vanessa so she could hear me over the lunchtime crowd.
Vanessa’s suggestive drawl rivaled Pen’s when she answered, “Libra, but on the cusp so I’m wild as a Scorpio.”
I laughed and she winked back. “Why do you call yourselves The Rainbow Zebras?”
“Cause we’re all queer, sweetie.”
“I picked up on that.” There were more tattoos and pompadours at the table than Riveter’s saw in a week. “Since you’re all women. I actually meant the zebra part.”
“Actually that’s not because we’re queer, that’s ‘cause of Ehlers-Danlos.” When I gave her a quizzical look, she continued, “EDS is more common in women than men. Helpful for those of us who like to cruise the message boards looking for dates.”
Every woman within earshot rolled her eyes. More than one made snide comments about having to chase both Vanessa and Pen off. Pen looked our way with a predatory gleam in her eye, but she immediately turned back to her conversation with the only member who looked unhappy.
“So,” I nudged Vanessa back on topic. “The zebra thing?”
“Zebras are the mascot of the EDS community. Ever heard the saying ‘when you hear hoofbeats, look for a horse, not a zebra’?”
“Sure. I grew up in the country, there’s an old adage for everything.”
“Most medical students in America have it burned into their minds. To look for the mundane. The easiest explanation is usually the correct one.”
“Makes sense.”
“Except sometimes it really is a zebra.” While she explained I looked around the table. The group included the full spectrum of women. Femme and butch and everything between. Tall, short, thin, heavy, and several races. This group was a rainbow in more ways than one. “EDS is rare and difficult to diagnose, most of us have a hard time getting a doctor to even believe us. When I complained of pain to my first doctor, he told me I had fibromyalgia.”
“I’ve been accused of drug seeking by two doctors,” said a willowy Black woman across the table. “The rest say I’m flexible and I should be glad.”
“I’ve had it lucky,” Vanessa said. “At least fibromyalgia is real. A lot of doctors think we’re making it up.”
“They refuse to see our stripes and call us wild horses,” drawled a pale blonde with a mountain twang that rivalled mine.
The whole table laughed along with her. The sentiment had the practiced ring of a group motto. Pen looked up at the laughter and caught my eye, but then she turned her grin on Vanessa who held her hands up in mock innocence. If there were ever a pair of wild horses, it was these two.
“I’m surprised Penny didn’t tell you about the zebra thing,” Vanessa said as the waitress deposited a hummus platter in front of her.
“Oh, I try not to be too nosy.” I thanked the waitress for my club sandwich and explained, “Didn’t want her to feel like she was some interesting museum exhibit.”
That’s how I’d felt when I came out. Everyone I told started in with the twenty questions and it was exhausting. I’d gone through it again when I explained Alex’s pronoun change. I shoved a fry in my mouth and chewed as Vanessa watched me.
“What brings you to our little group today?”
“Pen’s trying to cheer me up.” Grilled sourdough bread hugging a huge stack of deli meat was improving my mood, so I decided I could be honest. “I had a horrible date last night.”
Vanessa nodded and dropped the remnants of her pita triangle back onto the plate. “I have some horror stories myself. Being in the chair doesn’t help, although I kept myself busy for a while with folks who liked the kink.”
I choked on my fry and she chuckled.
“Speaking of, you’ll have to forgive me for not flirting. Penny would kill me.”
My forehead crinkled, but I noticed that Pen was keeping a close eye on us. She was always watchful, but this felt more protective. It actually felt kind of nice for her to look out for me. “Why? Are you a player?”
“Of course. Just like her.” Vanessa continued, “Penny’s very protective of her friends and she talks about you enough to make me run the other way.”
Before I could ask what she meant by that, Pen leaned over us, a hand on both our shoulders. “And what are you two lovely ladies talking about?”
“Me dating,” I said.
“You,” Vanessa said at the same time.
Pen’s face went so pale I thought she might pass out. She didn’t look at me, but rather at the remains of my lunch when she asked, “You and me dating?”
Vanessa roared with laughter and smacked the table. I could see her wrist bend back farther than should have been possible, but the movement didn’t seem to hurt her at all. Color came back into Pen’s cheeks and she finally met my gaze, rolling her eyes as she jerked her chin at her friend.
“Funny,” Vanessa spluttered. “As if you would ever date anyone.”
I could feel Pen’s hand relax against my skin. Her whole body slumped beside me, in fact. I laughed along with them, but I couldn’t help the ripple of annoyance that spread through me. Was the idea of dating me so awful? It’s fine that she didn’t commit, but she didn’t have to freak out quite so much at the mere thought of being my girlfriend.
“So how are things going with that cougar of yours?” Pen asked Vanessa.
“Claire is hardly a cougar. She’s only fifty.”
“Yeah and you’re thirty.” Pen shot me toothy grin. “I do love an age-gap romance.”
The two of them fell into a banter that had the ring of familiarity to it. The longer they chatted, the more I relaxed. There was something intimate about this moment that I hadn’t seen in Pen’s banter with Ashley or any of her colleagues. It wasn’t like what she had with me, either. She was teasing like usual, but she was flirting, too. Pen never flirted with me, even after Nick and Alex were gone, but she was relaxed when we talked. I could see the walls she put up with Vanessa. Or maybe they were different walls when it was just Pen and me. Either way, I was quickly forgetting all about the previous night’s disaster.
The reprieve only lasted as long as the meal.
Back at work later, I couldn’t settle to anything. I stared at my computer screen without blinking for so long my eyes dried out. I checked Swingle in case Chloe had messaged, but she had disappeared from my app. That meant one of two things.
She had either blocked me or deleted her profile. I dug my Goonies pen out of my purse and spent approximately thirty minutes agonizing over which one it was and what it meant. If she’d blocked me, she had no intention of dating me. If she’d deleted her profile, she had no intention of dating anyone because she was back with Blair. That realization took two minutes. The other twenty-eight minutes of my ruminations were spent sloshing the pen back and forth while realizing that it didn’t matter either way. I wouldn’t be hearing from her again.
I couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong. Why would she have messaged me in the first place if she wasn’t over her ex? Was there something about me that drew her in when she was clearly still rebounding? It was impossible. All she knew about me was in my profile. There couldn’t be anything there that would say I would be a good person to hook up with while she was still into someone else. Was there? I wasn’t sure because Pen had written the whole thing.
I went back to my profile, but there wasn’t a lot I could see on my phone. I needed to use a real computer to get the dirt on myself. Biting my bottom lip, I shot a glance over at the idling monitor on my desk. Randy didn’t pay for an updated monitoring program for the computer network. Unfortunately I knew that because I had once walked in on Art looking at some websites that would definitely fall under the “not suitable for work” category. No one should have a Thursday like that one. Still, I wasn’t like Art. It felt wrong to use my work computer to fine-tune my online dating profile.
My desk phone rang and I snatched up the receiver. “Uh…Kieran Hall, HomeScape Settlement Services.”
“Hello uh…Kieran Hall,” Penelope said, laughter swallowing her words. “Did I catch you at a bad time?”
“Nope. You’re just the person I wanted to talk to.”
“If I had a nickel for every time a woman said that to me.”
“You’d have one nickel,” I teased. “Listen, Pen, what did you put in my profile about Alex?”
“Alex? In your dating profile? Nothing.” I knew she was thinking because I could hear her clicking her fingernail against her teeth, so I waited. “Yeah. Nothing.”
“You didn’t say anything in there about me breaking up with someone recently?”
“Well, yeah. Under relationship status there was an option for ‘recently separated’ or something like that. I didn’t mention Alex though.”
While she spoke, I made the decision to misuse the company computer this one time. There it was, showing I was recently separated, but there was a comment section that Pen had filled in.
“I was divorced seven years ago from my high school sweetheart,” I read aloud. “After my divorce I had a serious relationship that recently ended and I’m ready to start looking for my next serious relationship.”
“Yeah,” Pen said.
“Alex and I broke up almost two years ago.”
“And you haven’t been ready to date until now.”
Indignation crept into my voice as I clicked the edit button. “I was enjoying some time to get to know myself. It’s not that I wasn’t ready.”
“That’s literally what you said to me when you asked for my help. You said you were ready to get out there again. Meaning you weren’t ready before.”
“I know what I said.” I sounded like a bratty teenager, but I couldn’t help it. “You didn’t have to tell the whole world.”
“Then change it, sweetie,” Pen said, her tone softening. “I’m sorry. I was only trying to help.”
“I know,” I said, feeling like a jerk for being so grumpy. “I appreciate everything you do for me. I just…”
“I know,” she said quietly when I couldn’t find words to complete the sentence. “It’s tough.”
I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from crying and saved the changes to my profile. After some thought I went back in and changed my relationship status from “recently separated” to “divorced” which wasn’t quite as accurate but it had more finality without the “recently” part.
“I’m sorry I’m such a bitch, Pen.”
“You’re not a bitch.”
“Debatable. Anyway, why’d you call me?”
“I’m heading out early to hit the pool. I’m going to catch an Uber so you don’t have to worry about taking me home.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I asked, thinking about the pain pill again. “Aren’t you in pain?”
“Girl, if I skipped swimming every time I slipped a rib laughing at your hookup attempts, I’d never get a lap in.”
“Very funny. Have you talked to your doctor?”
There was a long silence from Pen’s end of the phone and I realized I’d overstepped again. “Kieran, I’ve had EDS my whole life. I know how to manage my symptoms.”
“I know. I’m sorry,” I rushed out. Conversations were not going well for me today. “I’m being pushy.”
“It’s okay. I love that you care. Just don’t care too much, okay?”
“I think I can handle that.” I knew I couldn’t. Pen was the most important person in my life. She was more than a friend, she was the only family I had. I couldn’t stop caring, but I could at least keep it to myself. “Have fun at the pool.”
“Oh I will. There’s a very cute lifeguard there. Maybe I can convince her to help me with my breaststroke.”
I rolled my eyes as we said our goodbyes. As rigid as she was about her schedule, there weren’t a lot of times when Pen stopped chasing skirts. I turned back to my computer, ready to close out the Swingle webpage and pretend I’d never stepped a toe across the line of professionalism. Problem was, when I looked back I had a little red heart over the mailbox icon. It wouldn’t hurt to spend another few minutes on the site. After all, I thought as I pushed a stack of paperwork away, the job would still be there after I checked that one message.
Chapter Fifteen
The next few people I swiped right on turned out to be a waste of my time. There were two men who each seemed nice enough, but one got weirdly angry when I wouldn’t meet in person the same day and the other just vanished from the site. Pen said I got ghosted, but I thought that required actually knowing someone’s name first. We never even got to that point before he ran off. Then there was a woman that I didn’t click with. At least she and I were able to admit it wouldn’t work. A week after the disaster with Chloe, I was ready to give up and get a cat.
Thursday morning I was scheduled for a loan closing with a young couple buying their first home. I’d emailed the husband several times to set the appointment. Unfortunately, he neglected to mention he and his wife were bringing their four-month-old baby to the closing. At least they said it was a baby. It may have been a demon released from the pits of hell. I heard the wailing from the parking lot and hoped the parents were going to meet Pen. She hated kids even more than I did but she would never turn down a commission, even if there was an infant involved. The screaming grew louder and louder, then finally burst through the front door of our offices.
It was inevitable, of course. I was in some loop of misery that wasn’t destined to end any time soon. Carol came to collect me wearing that teary, sweaty look pregnant women had around cute babies. She was practically hopping. I groaned inwardly and pretended to be thrilled. I really didn’t want to explain for the millionth time how I was that apparently defective brand of woman who never wanted one of those smelly, screaming beasts of my own.
The baby, who was most unfortunately named Chester, howled through introductions as we settled into the conference room. I barely knew their accompanying Realtor, a wispy older woman who wore a business suit well enough to be labelled a mommi but lacking the attitude to pull it off. This was going to be a very long closing. I tried to shout over the baby for a little while, but it was a losing battle. The husband smiled sheepishly and apologized for his offspring.
“Teething,” he said as if I was supposed to know what that meant.
The wife got up and carried Chester around the room, bouncing him up and dow
n and cooing in an annoyed rather than soothing way. The husband watched her, smiling absently. When their eyes met, they shared a look so sweet it made my teeth ache, but then Chester shrieked and they both cringed.
The baby quieted enough that I could hear myself think, but then all I could think about was whether junior was going to barf. Mom was shaking him pretty vigorously and I pictured a can of soda exploding after the same sort of jiggling.
“Is this your first?” I asked as I notarized the first of many signatures.
The husband laughed and it was a pleasant sound. That, mixed with the attractive set of his jaw, was almost enough to smooth over my current low opinion of men. “How can you tell? We’ll get used to it once we get settled.”
When he glanced over his shoulder, his wife gave him a weak smile. I remembered smiles like those too well. They were two people who truly loved each other but worried every single day if the stress of what they were doing would shatter them. It had with Nick and me, I hoped it wouldn’t with them. Marriage was so hard. It took very special people to make it work. And very special love, too.
“It’ll help so much when we get our new place,” the wife whispered, sitting back down. The baby seemed to be asleep, but none of us were interested in testing it. “I’m sorry about Ches.”
“It’s fine,” I said, spinning the next page toward them on the desk. “He’s adorable.”
I followed the little white lie with an explanation of the Virginia Land Record. It wasn’t too complicated, but I was happy to see that both husband and wife gave the documents their full attention. The Realtor was texting. I’d never seen a Realtor less interested in a closing. This was, after all, the part where they got paid.
As I slid the signed document back into the stack, the wife and I snuck a peek at Chester. He was definitely asleep. His head lolled off her shoulder and his mouth was open in a perfect O. Drool liberally spiked with milk trickled onto his chubby cheek.
“Do you have any kids?” she asked.
I checked her name from the document in front of me. Kristin Spencer. She was kind of cute, too, behind the exhausted eyes and frazzled hair. “No, Mrs. Spencer. I married young and divorced young. No kids for me.”
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