“Please, call me Kristin. And it’s not too late.”
I chose to believe she meant to find someone else to marry, not to have kids. “I’ve actually just gotten back into the dating scene.”
“Good for you,” Mr. Spencer said. “Found anyone special yet?
After explaining the next document to them, I admitted, “I keep thinking maybe so, but it’s not as easy on this side of thirty. I…well, I’m using one of those dating apps. It’s embarrassing, but nothing else worked.”
Her husband held the paper for Kristin so she could sign one-handed while juggling their baby. It was sweet how he stepped right in to help without her having to ask. A moment of appreciation passed between them. It was the briefest touch of their eyes, but there was an affection there that I craved. I wanted to have those simple moments with someone.
“That’s not embarrassing at all,” Kristin said, pushing the page back to me. “Everyone uses dating apps.”
“Maybe in your generation,” I said, feeling every one of the ten years’ age difference between this couple and myself. “But last time I was dating it wasn’t exactly seen in the best light.”
“Well, it’s seen very differently now,” she replied, the warmth in her tone making this feel like a friendly chat rather than a lecture on modern society. “Matthew and I met on a dating site and look at us now.”
She slid her hand across her husband’s arm and he smiled down at her. It was such a sweet moment that I didn’t ruin it by mentioning the milky spit bubble forming on Chester’s lips as he slept. Or the distinctly unromantic smell coming from his diaper. It was great to know real people found love on dating sites. Not hookups like Pen or disasters like me.
The rest of the closing went like clockwork and, when they shook my hand with tears in their eyes, I was sad to say goodbye. That was until Chester woke up and started singing the song of his people again, but you can’t have everything. Their Realtor came to not long after Chester, ripping herself away from her phone and scurrying from the room.
I took the paperwork back to my office to sort for filing at the courthouse. My phone pinged. The Swingle app opened straight to the new message. The sender was a man and I was close to deleting it, but his profile picture caught my eye. I took the plunge and swiped right to see more. Instead of squinting, I pulled up the site on my work computer, looking guiltily toward Randy’s office as I did. The guy was cute, with a square jaw and a light growth of beard. If I had a type when it came to men, he fit it almost as well as Chloe had fit my type for women.
What the hell, I needed to put myself out there, didn’t I? With a deep breath and another guilty look around the office, I started my reply.
Chapter Sixteen
He didn’t turn out to be as charming as Chloe, but he wasn’t as flirty as Carla, so I decided to give Kevin a chance. When we chatted online he was less talkative than I would like, but I chalked it up to being a guy. I’d never met one of the species who shared as much as I wanted him to, though I’d heard tales that such a creature did exist.
Within the first few days of chatting, I’d learned that we shared a love of Early Mountain Vineyards and a dislike of team sports. Everything else was pretty much surface-level discussion of our days. I didn’t hate chatting with him, but I wasn’t exactly yearning to get my hands on him. Maybe that was a good thing? Yearning hadn’t worked out for me yet. Maybe ambivalence was the key to lasting love.
After a week, he asked me out. I’d started messaging someone else too, but that wasn’t going anywhere. It was all making me a little sad, so I accepted the date with Kevin. Not the best reason to agree, but Pen kept encouraging me to give everyone a try. This date couldn’t be worse than the last two. That thought was the best proof yet how naïve I was being about this whole dating thing.
Kevin seemed excited, the first time he’d shown any real emotion in our interactions.
Excellent. I have the perfect date planned. How about next Monday?
Perfect date? That’s a lot of pressure for a first date.
Trust me.
He followed it with a winking emoji but wouldn’t give me any more details. I should’ve been nervous, but he was so excited that it rubbed off on me. I looked at his profile picture again and felt the familiar butterflies of physical attraction. He could not have looked more different from Nick and that was absolutely a good thing.
I’d met Nick my sophomore year of high school. I’d gone to a tiny school outside Morgantown, West Virginia and there weren’t exactly a lot of newcomers to the area, so when he showed up my hormone-riddled heart turned to mush. At the time I mistook my interest in butch women, of which there were many straight versions in West Virginia, for an attraction to feminine men. Nick fit that bill. He was tall and thin with delicate features, pouty lips, and long eyelashes. He also paid me a lot more attention than I was used to.
I didn’t exactly fit into Appalachian culture with my dislike of the outdoors, hippie intellectual parents, and undefinable otherness. It took a long time to realize that my otherness was queerness, but by then I was in love with Nick so it didn’t seem to matter much. When we were married and settled in the DC suburbs, I decided I could trust him with my truth. The revelation didn’t go over well. I’d fallen for him because he wasn’t like the closeminded rednecks I grew up with. In the end he wasn’t as openminded as I thought.
Nick stretched far enough to agree to couple’s counseling, but he never committed to the process and I was too bitter about his rejection of my sexuality to be understanding. I still loved him though. I wanted to make it work. That’s why it hurt so much when I found out about his affair. It hurt even more when he told me he wanted a divorce so he could marry her. I should’ve been the bigger person, happy for him finding love again and having the children I never wanted. Even after all these years, I couldn’t bring myself to forgive him for breaking my heart. Kevin may not score points for charm, but at least he didn’t remind me of Nick.
On Sunday night, Kevin texted me the address of a bar in Alexandria and told me to meet him there at seven o’clock the following evening. The timing worked out well and I made plans to meet Pen at nine, leaving it to her to find a place to ogle women that wasn’t in the heart of DC. I thought it would be a big ask considering Alexandria is mostly Department of Defense contractors and rich, white professionals, but apparently Pen had a spot there anyway. To make my intentions clear with Kevin, I told him I had an early start Tuesday and he readily accepted my need to leave early. Another point in his favor.
Since I wasn’t going into the city, I had time to go home and change beforehand. Kevin had been texting me since late morning, each message better than the last. I teased and he flirted, I flirted and he teased. It was clear he was excited about his surprise date and that made me excited, too. I spent the drive trying to guess what he’d planned. We’d talked a little about our interests, but nothing in our favorite food, movies, and TV shows pointed to an obvious perfect date. But I didn’t know what my perfect date looked like. It would be really exciting if Kevin knew.
The address he’d given me was for a bar in Old Town. I’d looked it up online, but there didn’t seem to be anything special about it. It seemed likely that this was somewhere to meet to grab a drink before our perfect date began. I had noticed that their wine list included a few bottles from Early Mountain. Maybe that explained why he’d chosen this place to start our date.
I wore a conservative sun dress in a shade of blue that complimented my eyes but wasn’t too flashy. This was nothing like my date with Chloe. I was not going to go home with him tonight and this outfit was designed to be cute but not give anyone the wrong impression. Unfortunately, this turned out to be one of those rare chilly summer nights. I hurried down the sidewalk to get out of the brisk air.
The bar was thumping and Kevin was pacing the sidewalk.
“Hey!” he yelled, waving me over.
Kevin was even better looking in person than his pr
ofile picture. He hadn’t shaved in a few days, sporting a thin growth of neck beard. He looked great in a tight-fitting T-shirt under his sports jacket and an even tighter pair of dark-washed jeans. He bent down to kiss me on the cheek, which I thought was a little forward for our first meeting, but at least he didn’t try to look down my dress.
“Perfect timing,” he said, with a hand on my shoulder leading me toward the bar. “The show just started.”
“Show?”
My question was swallowed in a blast of sound as he opened the front door. It bore little resemblance to music and was so loud I cringed. I thought it might sound better once my mind had time to adjust to its new surroundings.
It did not.
Kevin kept his hand on my shoulder as we wove between people and furniture. I was about to shake him off when he stopped and pulled out a barstool stuck under a high-top table near the side wall. Unfortunately, it was also near a massive speaker, which probably explained it being the only unoccupied table in sight.
Kevin shouted something at me but I couldn’t make out his words over the roar of music. I shrugged and he mimed tipping back a drink before scurrying off. He hadn’t asked what I wanted, but I assumed he’d bring me one of the wines we’d discussed. I assumed wrong. Seemingly hours later, as the band was winding down a song that sounded like mumbled Mandarin accompanied by toddlers banging on pots, he pushed his way back through the crowd with two cans of beer.
“Whew,” he said, plopping down across from me and shouting over the banter of the lead singer. He pushed one of the cans toward me. “Gansey.”
“Beg pardon?” My ears were still ringing.
He waggled his beer can. “Narragansett. You like it?”
I took an experimental sip. No. No, I did not like it. It tasted like a shittier version of PBR, something I did not think was possible. I tried diplomatic noncommittal in my answer, “Mmm. I’ve never had this before.”
“You’ve never had a Gansey?” He said it like I’d confessed to never noticing the sun. “It was my favorite back in my school days. We never had anything else at the frat house.”
That little nugget was the only thing I learned about him because the band started up again with a bass line that rattled the fillings in my teeth. This song was worse than the last, though Kevin was transfixed. That song bled into the next and the next. Kevin kept his eyes glued on the stage apart from the occasional glance my way. The smile I returned grew weaker with each song. Had he really thought the perfect first date included an activity that kept us from speaking to each other for an hour? My boredom led me to look up the band on my phone.
According to the sticker on the drum kit, they were The C-18s, an experimental punk band made up of laboratory chemists from Quantico. Nothing on the band’s religiously updated Facebook page told me why Kevin would be a fan or why he thought I might be. The only other break in their hour-long set came while Kevin was waiting in line for another beer. That first sip had been all I’d needed and hadn’t touched mine since. He sang along to the encore song before turning his sweaty grin on me.
“Cool, right?”
I gave a half-hearted nod and he grabbed my hand, dragging me back through the crowd toward the exit. Since another band was about to set up and they looked to be in the same vein as The C-18s, I saw this as a blessing. Yet again, I was quite mistaken.
He hurried me through the streets, giving me little time to wonder where we were headed. Preferably somewhere quiet and quaint with a dessert menu and craft cocktails. We zipped past the bar where I would soon meet Pen, and I considered yanking my hand free and darting inside. I didn’t have the chance. He was practically running.
“Where’s the fire?” I gasped as we waited to cross the street.
“I know you have to be home early,” he said, jogging between cars and throwing up a friendly wave to a sedan blaring its horn at us. “I want to make sure we make it for the main event.”
Great. Another event. Not a quiet place where we could get to know each other.
He skidded to a stop outside the one place that was my worst nightmare. Okay, not my worst nightmare. My worst nightmare would be a karaoke bar packed with creepy clowns and drunk coeds. This place didn’t have a single clown in sight.
There was a ten-dollar cover to attend this travesty of musical incompetence, but Kevin was gentlemanly enough to pay for both of us. He was also gentlemanly enough to buy us drinks, though he neglected yet again to ask me what I wanted and returned with a pair of cans suspiciously similar to the one I’d left behind half-full. This beer was actually worse because it was lukewarm, so I didn’t even taste it. Truth be told, it would’ve been better to get blackout drunk so I didn’t have to be on this date anymore.
“Are you gonna sing it?” Kevin asked, leaning in uncomfortably close to me as he started on his second beer.
“Sing what?” I asked, pressing my untouched can to my lips to avoid any attempt at kissing.
“Come on!” He dragged out the last word, giving it the tone of an inside joke. “Your song.”
It was at this point in the evening that I began to wonder if he had asked me out by mistake, intending this date for some other woman he was chatting with. Someone for whom this may actually be fun. He smiled and shook his head, returning his attention to the blonde singing so vigorously she tumbled off the stage.
When she was done and her friends serenaded her with hoots and whistles, Kevin turned his grin back on me. “Are you ready to sing it?”
“Kevin,” I said, checking my watch. “I don’t know what you’re talking about and I have to…”
“Country Roads!” he shouted. “Come on, I told the emcee to keep it on hold for us. I thought we could do it as a duet.”
I stared at him and silently counted to ten in my head. When I was finished, I set my full can on the table, grabbed my purse, and headed for the door. He caught up with me on the sidewalk.
“What the hell, Kieran? I went through a lot of trouble to set this all up.”
“Had you put any time into actually asking me what I wanted to do, you would have known I think this is ridiculous.” I could see the bar where I wanted to be—the bar where Pen was—directly over his shoulder. The sooner I got rid of Kevin, the sooner I could go over there. “Why would you think this is a date I would want to go on?”
“Is this some sort of joke? You talked about music nonstop in your profile.”
“Did I?”
“Country Roads is your favorite song!”
“I’m from West Virginia. It’s practically a requirement for us to like that song. It reminds me of home and my parents.” The bouncer slipped off his stool and through the door as I started to shout. I wasn’t that angry, but I was deaf from sitting next to a speaker all night. “If you’d asked me about it, I would have told you I love that song, but I hate when it’s covered by crappy bands, sung at karaoke, or wailed at weddings.”
“What? Why?”
“Because there’s nothing worse than listening to a scream-pile version of a sentimental song. I would never sing it at karaoke.”
“I mean you could’ve said that part in your profile.” He spat the words at me with such bitterness I took a step back.
“And how are we supposed to get to know each other when we can’t even talk because the band is so loud? Why would you think I’d love that band?”
“You love live music.”
“Since when?” I shrieked, running clawed fingers through my perfectly styled hair. I noticed then how much it stank of stale beer and vape smoke.
He threw his hands into the air like a spoiled child having a tantrum. “Whatever.”
I didn’t have to walk away from him because he left of his own accord, slinging the door to the karaoke bar back open and storming inside. I growled in frustration and stomped my foot on the sidewalk. Another wasted evening. I’m not proud to admit I stomped every step of the two-block walk back to the bar where Pen was waiting.
; Chapter Seventeen
I found Pen in the back corner of the bar, a martini in one hand and a forty-something redhead in the other. I found an unoccupied barstool nearby and ordered a glass of wine. While I waited for Pen, I pulled out my phone to check my profile.
There was a section for musical interests and Pen had written that my favorite song was “Country Roads.” Kevin had been right that she hadn’t added anything about my aversion to karaoke, but even I could see there was no way to share that nuance in the limited space given. I stood by my assertion that he could’ve found out through a conversation with me.
“Hey gorgeous,” Pen drawled over my shoulder. “Can I buy you a drink?”
The bartender chose that moment to drop off my wineglass. I took a long swallow, grateful for my first drink tonight that didn’t taste like recycled rainwater. “You can buy the next round, I’ll need it. That is if your friend doesn’t mind.”
I looked around for the woman who’d been draped over Pen moments before, but she was nowhere to be seen. Pen sat next to me, wearing a wide smile. Even in my foul mood, that smile was infectious. No wonder she got all the women.
“My friend decided to try her luck elsewhere after she heard the disclaimer.” If this turn in fortunes bothered Pen, I couldn’t detect it in her voice or her manner. “It’s for the best. She wouldn’t have waited while we talk about your date.”
“You’d rather hear my pathetic attempts at dating than hook up with a hot redhead?”
“She wasn’t that hot and she was vapid as hell,” Pen said, signaling for another drink. “I’ll pick your company over anyone’s.”
“You’re the only one who does.” I couldn’t help but sulk. It had been a tough month and I had nothing to show for it.
Pen put all her attention back on me, a little crease forming between her eyebrows. “It didn’t go well with Kevin?”
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