Swipe Right

by Tagan Shepard

What should I say?

  Approximately one year passed while I watched the three little dots flash onscreen. It was in that moment I realized the utter cruelty of that particular addition to our electronic lives. Those three dots had turned into a twenty-first century equivalent of waiting for your home phone to ring. It was nerve-wracking to say the least. It felt like any chance of success I had with Skye hinged on surviving the dance of the three dots. Just as I was about to give up, Pen’s response arrived.

  I’m not usually the one who reaches out first, so I hope you can forgive me for not having a witty opening line. I’ve spent half my Sunday staring at your profile and it’s starting to make me feel crazy. Maybe you could message me back so we could chat and both be crazy? If you’re not interested, do me a favor and pretend this never happened? Thanks for a lovely distraction on this lovely day!

  I’ll admit, I sat in shock reading it over and over. It was perfect. If someone had sent me that message, I would have been a giggling mess on the floor. There was humor and humbleness and vulnerability. Exactly what I’d have written if I had any idea how to write a message to someone I liked.

  You’re a goddess.

  That’s true. Good luck, Kieran. Tell me about the response at work tomorrow.

  What if there isn’t a response?

  There will be. Good night!

  I agreed with her. No one could turn away a message like that. I copied her entire text and pasted it into a fresh envelope icon on Swingle. The electronic whoosh as it flew out over the airwaves toward the alluring Skye felt like the whoosh of my heart as something big was starting. I sat for a little while, staring at the app, waiting for an immediate reply. After ten minutes, I realized it would take a while to formulate a response, so I popped my earbuds back in while I made myself dinner. Surely by the time Juliana and Rodrigo finally tumbled into bed and my frittata had set, Skye would have responded. I daydreamed about their present giddiness at receiving such a good message while I sliced asparagus and grated Gruyere cheese. Even if they were out of the house for the day or even the weekend, they’d be back and messaging me by late evening.

  When I went to bed at ten o’clock Juliana was pregnant and Skye had not sent a response.

  Chapter Twenty

  When I still hadn’t received a response from Skye the next morning, I resigned myself to rejection. I had discovered through painful repetition that, in the world of online dating, a message which hadn’t been returned within a few hours was being ignored.

  The rejection made a dreadful Monday even more tedious. Our monthly staff meeting was worse than usual thanks to the conjunction of a rare Randy hangover and the dawn of corporate tax season. While HomeScape was in no danger of closing, each new tax season was a reminder that Randy’s business was not particularly lucrative. He liked to yell when he was hungover, thus sharing his headache with the world, so the meeting was a lot of cringing and covering our ears.

  Afterward most of us hid in our offices. On days like these we’d all learned to keep our heads down until the storm passed. If we were lucky, Randy would feel sufficiently guilty about his outburst to bring in bagels the next morning. The main drawback was that I hunkered down in my office without enough work to distract me from Skye’s silence. It still stung, but my renewed hope, inspired by Juliana and Rodrigo, had me looking up other potential connections by lunchtime.

  I’d made chicken salad with pecans and red grapes for lunch. Fresh tarragon and dill brightened both my sandwich and my mood while I read a Swingle message from a woman in Maryland. She seemed nice enough, but a quick Google-Maps search showed she lived two hours away, so I turned her down as gently as I could. I spent enough time in traffic as it was. Contemplating a relationship with such a hellish commute made me shiver from head to toe. Unfortunately, the DC Metro area was so spread out and the traffic so bad that a lot of my matches were like this one—out of my reach. My options were dwindling fast.

  Even after a month off the site, there were depressingly few new potential matches. I’d seen the same faces so many times, I’d sorted them into three groups: for someone else, far away, and femmes. I knew there was little chance I’d find “the one” here, but I went through them again anyway. Pen had said this was the best site for me, but maybe it was time to start looking at the other options. The person I was looking for didn’t seem to be on Swingle, but they could be somewhere else. The way Skye caught my attention had reminded me how good it felt to have a crush. I’d find that with someone, even if it wasn’t with them.

  That thought kept my hope alive, but my half-hour lunch break was up. I’d have to cast my broader net after work. The afternoon was far more interesting than my morning. Pen crashed into my office around one to inform me I was being kidnapped.

  “Do I have any choice in the matter?”

  “None whatsoever,” she said as she grabbed my purse from the coatrack and thrust it at me. “Don’t worry. It’s work-related.”

  I was skeptical, but there was no way I’d miss out. “Does Randy know?”

  “Hell no. Carol says he’s cranky. I don’t do cranky men.”

  “Come to think of it,” I said, taking my purse and marching out the door. “Neither do I.”

  Once we were on I-95 heading north, Pen finally told me what we were up to.

  “I need you for some role play.”

  “We’re not that sort of friends, remember Pen?”

  “Aren’t you the comedian,” she said, whipping around an RV from Arizona and gunning it until her engine whined.

  “Just giving you a taste of your own medicine.” She whipped around another car, nearly sending the bewildered driver into the median. “What’s wrong? You only drive like a maniac when you’re stressed.”

  “I’m not driving like a maniac,” she said as she sped onto the exit ramp. She came within an eyelash of clipping a Mercedes. “Okay. Maybe I’m stressed.”

  “Wanna talk to me about it or just take out your feelings on that guy’s bumper?”

  Pen flew onto the 110 and we tore through Arlington, chewing up miles as she chewed on her lip. “I’m nervous,” she said in a whisper.

  I forced myself not to laugh. “You’re what?”

  “You heard me!” We weaved through traffic as we crossed the Potomac and Pen finally explained, “The Georgetown house is ready to show. I’ve got this massive commission headed my way but…Well, this property is different than I’m used to.”

  “A house is a house, right?” That’s what she always said to me when I was flustered with a title search.

  The SUV’s engine purred as she coasted to a red light. She tapped the brakes and we both jerked in our seats.

  “Not exactly,” she murmured. She stared at her white knuckles on the steering wheel and took a long breath. “I don’t know how to sell an eight-million-dollar property.”

  “Eight million?” My voice squeaked and Pen gave me a panicked stare like a wild animal. “I didn’t realize it was that high.”

  “I didn’t either. I did my comparisons last week and realized my initial assessment was too low. Met with the client over Zoom from her summer home in Cannes.”

  The light turned green, but we didn’t move. I checked the rearview mirror, and the street was mercifully empty. Pen’s eyebrow twitched as she repeated, “Her summer home in Cannes.”

  Granted, the usual Three Keys/HomeScape client didn’t own a summer home in France. Most of them didn’t even own a home yet. We did a lot more first-time homebuyer business than multi-million-dollar Georgetown properties. Still, Pen was outclassing us all even without rich clients. She was a born salesperson and an honest one at that. The combination was rare enough to be pure gold.

  I reached out for her hand, but the light turned yellow and she smashed her foot on the gas, slipping through the intersection as the light overhead flipped to red. The momentum yanked my arm back and I let it fall.

  Pen drove more carefully now that we were in a residential area, and
her voice was equally calm. “The client barely listened to anything I had to say and that scares me even more.”

  “Why?”

  “If she has no spoken expectations, that means she has rich-person expectations.”

  “Which are?”

  “The moon at least. She’ll expect I get a deal that’s way over asking, but she’ll accept anything even if I advise against it. That way she has her money and she can blame me if it doesn’t live up. I’m screwed.”

  “A lowball offer on an eight-million-dollar property though. Even that would be a huge…”

  “It isn’t about the commission,” she growled as she swung her SUV into a gated drive and punched in the code for the underground garage. “You know that.”

  I did know that. Pen took everything in life completely seriously. She played hard, she worked hard, and she was the best at everything. It was a compulsion and she knew it, but there were too many layers of psychology to tease apart to explain it. Instead, she dove into everything head first and made sure she excelled. It was why she’d earned this listing in the first place. No one Pen had ever represented could say anything bad about her, even if their home didn’t sell as high as they wanted.

  She threw the car into park and killed the engine, dropping her forehead against the steering wheel. It was so sweet and so strange to see her this vulnerable. I was such a sucker for butches with emotion.

  “Hey,” I said in a soothing voice. “You’re going to be great.”

  When she didn’t respond, I put my hand on her shoulder. That made her tense even more, so I decided it was time for a grand gesture. I turned her shoulders to face me and cupped her round cheeks in my hands. Her eyes were big as saucers and full of so many emotions. It looked like a storm was raging inside her.

  I put my face so close to hers our foreheads nearly touched. I waited for her eyes to settle on mine and whispered, “You are going to be great. We’ll go through every detail and you’ll sell this house and earn a dozen listings just like it for next year. Hear me?”

  She nodded dumbly, her face bobbing in my hands. I smiled and she managed a barely perceptible twitch of her lips in return. Her eyes still swam, so I pulled her toward me, sliding my cheek along hers, and wrapped my arms around her.

  In eleven years of friendship, I could count on one hand the number of times we’d hugged. She usually resisted and it always confused me because, when she gave in, she threw herself into the embrace. She hugged like she never wanted to let go, but it always started like this, with every muscle rigid as steel.

  Finally, her body relaxed and she rested her chin on my shoulder. I held her loosely, not wanting to tweak any of her joints out of place but wanting her to feel the weight of my friendship. Sitting here in the low lighting of the garage, with the mingled smells of underground places, motor oil, and Pen’s sandalwood and lavender scent, felt so right.

  All I could think of was the scene where Juliana had held Rodrigo after his best friend was injured in battle. The only difference was those two were in love and the hug was a place holder for a more intimate encounter to come. This was as intimate as Pen got. Letting me into her fear was a step further than she’d ever allowed me. I knew Pen so well, but her emotions were as compartmentalized as her friend groups. Maybe there was someone out there—someone whose name she’d mentioned in passing over the years but I’d never met—who got to see Vulnerable Pen all the time, but that person definitely wasn’t me. I held onto her now and hoped she understood that, if she ever trusted me enough to be that person for her, I was ready. When Pen pulled back, I realized I’d been holding her too long, but it had been so nice to have her arms around me.

  We started our tour in the back yard. The landscaping was immaculate. A high privacy fence covered in climbing roses and bougainvillea circled the property. The yard was bricked over and boasted a lagoon-style pool off to one side that Pen labelled “quaint.” I recommended a change to “intimate” because the setup reminded me viscerally of Shane’s pool scene in the first episode of The L Word. On the other side of the yard, and in full view of the sunroom, was the famous Wi-Fi-connected hot tub. Behind the hot tub was a waterfall cascading down a rough stone wall. Pen used her phone to activate both the waterfall and the tub’s jets.

  “It’s still ridiculous to connect your hot tub to Wi-Fi,” I said as we moved inside. “But I’ll admit it’s super sexy.”

  Pen winked and replied, “I’m not going to spell it out during the tours, but that will be heavily implied.”

  The sunroom was the highlight of the house for me, but Pen focused more on the wired sound system than the spectacular backyard view. The interior wall had a pass-through fireplace to the living room, making it a four-season room, and the furniture invited long, leisurely Sunday mornings with coffee and newspapers. And pancakes.

  The main-floor living room, one of three in the house if one counted the sitting area in the au-pair suite, was a bit stodgy for my taste. The opulence was distinctly masculine and old-world, with mahogany and dark leather predominating. I would have gone for something more welcoming for the first floor and saved the haunted-library motif for upstairs. Still, I didn’t have eight million bucks, so it didn’t matter what I thought.

  What struck me the further our tour progressed was how passionate Pen was about the listing. It was clear Pen loved this house, but she didn’t push her love onto me. She led me on the journey and compelled me to follow. Soon enough I stopped seeing myself as Pen’s friend listening to her pitch and more as a potential buyer falling in love with an amazing home.

  Pen wasn’t simply describing modern amenities seamlessly incorporated into historic bones. She spoke about the house like a favorite niece. I tried to keep a critical eye, but part of me wanted to feel the same way about the house that she did. The critical eye dimmed with each new room and disappeared completely when we entered the primary suite’s walk-in closet. Or rather the Hers side of the His-and-Hers walk-in closets. It was the size of my entire primary suite back home and featured a fainting couch at its center.

  This was why Pen was so good at her job. She didn’t just love her properties, she made potential buyers love them, too.

  Our winding route had brought us back to the heart of the home, that beautiful sunroom. Pen asked me to sit and give my impression of the property. I told her my favorite bits and all the negatives I would confide in my Realtor if I was considering a purchase. She addressed some of my concerns with clever tricks to either fix or minimize them. It was a sly way to offer options without assuming my renovation budget was limitless.

  “Okay,” she said, sitting back and shedding the professional veneer. “How’d I do?”

  “Perfect.” When she rolled her eyes I continued, “Seriously. You had me planning new paint colors and fabric combinations like I actually have eight mill.”

  A wide smile spread across her lips as she seemed to finally believe me. “Okay. Thanks for your help. Come into the kitchen with me? I hate this room, it’s too hot.”

  “Why’d we talk here then?”

  “It was obviously your favorite room. Of course I would bring you here for the wrap up.”

  She tossed me a bottle of sparkling water from the refrigerator’s open-house stash while I tried to remember if I’d said the sunroom was my favorite. I couldn’t remember saying it out loud, but maybe she noticed how much my eyes lit up when we were in there. After all, she was excellent at reading women.

  I was telling her the two or three little things from her tour I’d tweak when my phone buzzed. Assuming it was Randy demanding to know my whereabouts, I checked the message.

  “Oh my god!”

  “What?”

  “It happened!”

  “What?”

  “They wrote back!”

  “Kieran, you know how much I hate repeating myself. Please don’t make me ask again?”

  “Sorry,” I shrieked, but I couldn’t help giving a little hop in my high heels that n
early sent me sprawling to the subway-tiled floor. “Remember how you helped me write a message last night? That was to Skye and they finally wrote back.”

  Pen took a long sip from her water and drawled, “Took long enough. What were they waiting for?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care.” Pulling up their super sexy profile pic, I turned the phone to Pen. “Skye. They’re a nonbinary content creator from Fairfax.”

  “What’s a content creator?”

  “I don’t know,” I sighed. “I can’t concentrate. Read this to me?”

  Pen rolled her eyes, set her drink down in a long-suffering way, took my phone and scanned the message. After a couple of shrugs and nods of approval, she finally started reading out loud.

  “Sorry it took me so long to answer your message. Inexcusable I know, but I hope to make it up to you in time. I hate making such a beautiful woman go crazy. And don’t worry about not having a witty opening line. The whole charade is so artificial. Your message clearly came from the heart. There’s nothing so sexy as a woman who allows herself to be vulnerable. Please write back and tell me you forgive me. Or better yet, tell me about the very first thing in life you were passionate about. It was dinosaurs for me. Specifically the stegosaurus. Alas my mother told me at the tender age of seven that I couldn’t grow up to be a stegosaurus. I was crushed. Skye”

  We stood together in stunned silence for a full minute, listening to the ticking of the grandfather clock in the living room.

  “Damn,” Pen finally said. “They’re good.”

  “That was good right?”

  “Really good. Can I help you write back?”

  “Yes please! I could never follow that up.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I woke up the following Sunday morning to another message from Skye that made my heart flutter. They were super good at this charming me thing, even if it had taken them two days to respond. I lounged in bed, my back supported by every pillow I owned against my padded headboard. A cup of coffee steamed on my bedside table as I read and reread the paragraph of text.