by Nikky Kaye
We headed back downstairs, where Ash was waiting in the conference room for me with a styrofoam container and a cold bottle of water. He had his computer set up, staring at it with a small smile on his face and shoveling seaweed salad into his mouth.
“Sorry, I started without you. I was starving. Just came from the gym.”
That explained the fresh shower. I tried to imagine him at the gym. Was he a treadmill runner? A lifter? Which muscles did he flex… agh!
“Thanks for lunch.”
He nodded. “I think I know which question we should do this week,” he announced.
I flipped my laptop open. “Please don’t say the Shark Week one.”
“Eww.” His nose wrinkled. “No.” Then he read out: “
“Dear Guy’s Guy, I want to join the 21st century and try Internet dating but I don’t know what site to use. Where can I find a nice girl?”
Huh. That was so… straightforward. I’d been expecting something a little more… twisted from him. A little more salacious.
“Okay.” I looked at my California roll then over at his lunch. He had spicy tuna, and was adding more wasabi than I believed a human could survive. “So how do we answer him?”
“Well, I know a little bit about dating sites.”
“Really? I thought women just dropped at your feet in the streets.”
He grinned, pointing his chopsticks at me. “Depends on what heels they’re wearing. I can’t be responsible for wardrobe malfunctions,” he joked.
At least, I think he joked. There was a good chance he got a long look at my heels earlier—and my legs poured into them. The possibility made me warm inside.
I grabbed a legal pad and started jotting down some notes. I was old-fashioned that way, too.
“So, we’ve got match dot com, eHarmony dot com, plentyoffish dot com,” I began.
“Trust you to know the mainstream, lame ones.”
“What’s your go to? Onenightstand dot com?”
“Ouch.” He put down his chopsticks and leaned over the table at me. “I’ll have you know I’ve never had a one-night stand.” His eyes darkened to almost black in his glare.
I froze, pen poised in my hand. “I’m sorry.” I’d gone too far with the bitchiness, but it was like I couldn’t control myself around him.
“I’ve yet to meet a woman who thought one night with me was enough.”
I threw the pen at him. “Ass. So you want to take Tinder and all the skeevy sites?”
“And I’m guessing Miss Behave wants to take eHarmony and OK Cupid.” He batted his eyelashes at me as he tilted his head and drew a heart over his chest.
Yeah, because I needed to notice his chest more.
“Don’t you think that people can find true and lasting love through the Internet?” I asked him, genuinely curious.
I knew more people who used dating sites than who didn’t. These days, when the first thing you did upon meeting a person was Google them, it made sense to vet potential relationships online.
“Do you think that true and lasting love even exists?” he lobbed back at me, pushing away his empty containers.
I squished a stray piece of avocado with a chopstick. “I’d like to think so.”
“How very optimistic of you. Most people can’t even sustain a lasting relationship with a plant, much less people.”
“Okay, what’s next?” I asked. I wasn’t about to tell him about the plants that had taken over my dining table. “We’re not doing this every day. Let’s punch out a week of questions at a time, and then we can do the back and forth over email.”
Thankfully, the Powers That Be had given us a couple of weeks to get up to speed and write enough columns to get ahead.
“How about this?” he asked.
‘My girlfriend likes being on top, but she’s fat and the view kills my boner. How do I tell her that?’
I cringed. “Oh my god, really?”
Ash nodded.
I shook my head in disbelief as I scanned the spreadsheet. Some people. “Here’s one.”
“My BFF doesn’t respond to my texts anymore. I think I’m being ghosted. What should I do? I don’t want to lose our friendship.”
“You are being ghosted, sweetheart,” he scoffed. “Get over it. Nothing lasts forever.”
“Is that the theme of all your responses? I gotta ask—what qualifies you to be an advice columnist? Because I can get better advice from a fortune cookie.”
“I tell it like it is.” He got up to throw out his sushi box. When he leaned over my shoulder to grab my trash, he turned his head and added close to my ear, “Most people want to hear the truth, in my experience.”
His breath warmed my cheek. “Even if the truth hurts?” I asked, feeling on edge at his nearness.
“Especially if the truth hurts. Come on. They’re not writing a stranger with the expectation that they’ll hear what they want to hear. They’ve got friends and family who can tell them that.” He lifted my empty container and backed away, leaving the ghostly imprint of his body heat beside me.
“What about empathy, compassion, sensitivity?”
“They have their place—with real friends. These people aren’t your friends. You’re kidding yourself if you think they even really trust you. Hell, you don’t even know if they’re real or not. They could be making up these questions for shits and giggles.”
I jolted in my chair. That actually hadn’t occurred to me. I always approached every question as though it was a real problem, from a real person. Maybe I was too naïve.
I’d always tried my best to be kind, considerate, and sincere. As a result, I probably got more softball questions than Ash did, but that didn’t make them any less worthy of answering. Even people with wedding invitation questions needed help. Just because they weren’t kinky or offensive didn’t make them less valuable.
I told him that.
He didn’t pull any punches. “Which is why you’re Miss Behave. I’ve figured it out. They write you knowing what tone you’re going to take. You’ll let them off the hook. You won’t make them accountable, but I will. I do.” The criticism in his voice was clear.
“I make people accountable!” Somehow he’d managed to make me feel like a lesser journalist.
He sat down in front of his laptop again, looking skeptical. Saying nothing.
My forehead creased. “I’m not just a hand-holder!”
“Okay. We’ve got a few more questions to decide on, here.” He checked the time on his phone. “Let’s keep moving.”
The rest of the meeting went faster, but it felt more like picking a jury than working together. He had objections; I had objections. In the end, we had a week’s worth of questions that neither of us was crazy about answering, but hopefully that’s where our writing skills would come in.
I was already formulating responses in my head to some of them, now super sensitive to the fact that I might be ‘too nice’.
But that was what the editors had wanted with Miss Behave. They wanted an old-fashioned kind of column, which is what I gave them—even if sometimes it went against the grain of what I really thought.
Thankfully, I could use some of those questions for my blog. I needed to get a new post out, but I was struggling to balance being Miss Behave and Miss Givings.
With the dreaded day job winning out recently, I found myself worried that I was becoming too behaved. Soon I would need to write into my own column to sort out my looming identity crisis.
Where did Miss Behave leave off and Lizzie begin?
4
Ash
“So is she hot?” my buddy Mike yelled over the music. We were enjoying opening night at a new club downtown, complete with bottle service and half-naked waitresses. As an “Internet celebrity”, I had VIP passes.
It was a scene that I thought would never grow old—until it had. Recently. Every woman I met bored me, and fleeting, furtive flirtations had begun to fizzle out. Maybe I was just getting older, but cas
ual encounters and mutually beneficial friendships felt lacking in something. I was honest with every girl I met and demanded honesty in return, but… honestly? Something was missing.
“Who?”
“This new chick you’re working with!”
I sipped my drink and visualized Lizzie’s pink sweater and matching shoes. The caramel-colored hair that constantly slipped out of ponytails and hazel eyes that turned green when she was pissed at me. The black pants she wore at our last lunch—the high-waisted ones that smoothed over her hips and nipped in at the right spots.
“Yeah. She’s hot.”
“So?”
“So what?”
He held his palm up in a questioning gesture then curled his fingers in and did a slight fist pump. His eyebrows waggled. Mike had pretty thick eyebrows, so that on its own was entertaining.
“I don’t just fuck anything with a pulse, man.” I frowned at him. Was that what he thought? It was a little insulting.
“I’m just jealous that you get to fuck anybody you want,” he whined.
Mike was married and worked in IT consulting. His life was about as dull as you could get. They lived in a small condo where his wife had a purse-sized dog that she treated like their child, and he golfed with his father-in-law once a month. He threw every game.
Barf.
His wife was nice and cute and all, but he’d confided in me that sometimes he really missed being single. Usually he said it when a server in hot pants was sashaying away from us.
I knew from personal history and the hundreds of emails that came in to my column that cheating happened. Oh, it definitely happened. Adultery happened in one-third of marriages, according to the stats. As much as Mike liked to pretend he was still twenty-one and a player when we went out, it was all an act. The more insecure, the more the bluster kind of thing.
“So are you going to fuck her?” Mike was getting a little cruder with each round of drinks. He had a hall pass to go out tonight, and he was milking it for all it was worth. He was a good guy, but next time I’d suggest we meet for coffee.
I gave him a withering look. “Dude.”
It was a non-answer.
The truth was that I hadn’t gotten laid in a few months. It had definitely been a dry spell for me, but I also hadn’t been meeting a lot of women worth getting to know. They were too dumb, too clingy, too high maintenance, too young, too old, too serious, too full of themselves…
Yeah, I had gotten more selective, but that came with age, right?
I was nearly thirty. I made a good living—which I didn’t really have to, since I was “lucky” enough to have an inheritance from my mother. Believe me, I’d rather have her back than all the money in the world.
I’d been a trust fund baby since I was a teenager. Daddy dearest was a divorced playboy investment banker who gave me an allowance instead of parenting.
It was a miracle that I didn’t grow up into a total douche-canoe.
I rented a decent apartment, in which I had yet to kill any plants or pets. My dishes matched and my towels coordinated. I kept a phone charger and magazines with articles in the drawer beside my bed, not just lube and a box of tissues.
That sounded pretty fucking grown-up to me.
Just because I wasn’t in a hurry to settle down didn’t make me a man whore.
Before, I’d been busy living vicariously through the crazy-ass emails I got at work. But even trying out sexual positions and testing pick-up lines got old after a while. A man could only take as much advice as he could dole out.
Maybe Lizzie was on to something with her “relationship” angle. I had to admit that some days, I’d rather have a good conversation over morning coffee in bed than a spectacular blowjob.
Some days.
“I think she might still be a virgin,” I joked to Mike. “Wouldn’t surprise me.”
“Fuck off! How old is she? What’s wrong with her?”
I bristled a little. I didn’t expect him to take me seriously. “Nothing’s wrong with her. She’s pretty and smart and funny. She just seems a bit… I don’t know, old-fashioned. She’s the kind of girl who expects you to open her door.”
“Even in a cab?”
“Especially a cab.”
I tried to imagine the twinkle in her eyes if someone brought her flowers on a first date. She’d like that, probably. It got me wondering what Lizzie would like for a first date? Coffee? Dinner? A museum? A club, like this one?
The sweaty bodies on the dance floor didn’t exactly bring Lizzie to mind. Nor did the dry humping slash dancing or the body glitter.
But I could imagine her sitting demurely in a corner, watching everyone with big eyes and sipping a glass of wine.
An oversized blouse slipping off her shoulder and an incredibly short skirt that kept riding up.
Suddenly my pants were very uncomfortable.
I’d gotten more out of the image of Lizzie with red wine on her lips than an hour’s worth of the server’s supple thighs passing by us.
Maybe my dry spell had gone on too long.
Or maybe I just had to admit to myself that I was developing a little crush on my new co-writer.
She was a breath of fresh air compared to the women I’d been meeting for the past year. If you asked them how they were, they’d just sigh and recite the contents of their bullet journals. And they expected you to order their Ubers for them, all the freaking time. I’d done it so much for one girl on my account the year before that every driver I met called me Taylor for a while.
“A virgin, huh?”
I shrugged as I finished my vodka and soda. For all that Lizzie seemed like an idealistic, naïve girl, she also seemed pretty self-sufficient. If she was still a virgin, she’d probably researched sex enough for work to efficiently get herself off on a regular basis.
Every aspect of that last thought brought my brain to a standstill and my body into overdrive.
I shook my head at Mike. “I don’t know that for sure, man. I could be wrong.” I hoped I was wrong. That would be a tragedy. But then the alternative was imagining her under some other guy, and that was equally discombobulating.
“So find out.”
“How?”
“Date her.”
Judging by her scorn when we were writing about dating websites, I didn’t know how well she’d respond to an offer from me. She seemed to think I swiped right on everything. Maybe if I handed her a compatibility questionnaire…
“Or you could just ask her,” Mike suggested. “Isn’t that what A Guy’s Guy would say?”
I snorted. “Great advice. Thanks.” But he wasn’t wrong.
One more drink later, I left Mike to flirt with the servers and headed home to my one bedroom plus den apartment. On the way home, I thought about Lizzie; my dick aching and my hand restless.
When I got in the door, I went to the couch and flipped open my laptop.
After staring at it for a few minutes, deep in thought, I went to Miss Behave’s web page and began typing.
“Dear Miss Behave…”
5
Lizzie
“So far, so good,” my editor Rob said, hovering outside my cubicle like the boss from Office Space. I was almost expecting him to say “Yeah, I’m gonna have to ask you to come in this weekend…”
The irony, of course, was that I already worked weekends. That was the thing about being a writer, even a journalist. I was never not working.
Dara and I had managed to get together for drinks on Saturday, but she couldn’t convince me to go out dancing afterwards. Clubs just weren’t my style. I felt like I’d outgrown them. To be honest, they scared me a little bit. A lot of weird shit could happen to you in a bar, surrounded by a lot of drunken strangers.
“What’s happening with the news desk?” I asked Rob.
“They’re working on the staffing for each department at a time. You really that anxious to lose your job, Lizzie?”
I flushed and looked down. My blog
wasn’t doing nearly well enough to risk my paycheck. “No, I don’t want to lose my job. I just…” I gave him a plaintive look. “You know I wanted to be in news. That was always my goal, ever since I first got here.”
“You’re doing a great job with Miss Behave. If the owner didn’t think so, he would have just merged the columns and given it to Ash alone. Obviously you’re bringing something to it that they want to keep. Just keep bringing that.”
What I was ‘bringing’ was a naïveté that I felt more and more in conflict with.
“Actually, the owners wanted me to ask you something.”
That explained why he was hovering over my cubicle. “What?”
“They loved the column you guys did on dating websites. The CTR for ads on that page were insane. They want you guys to follow it up.”
“How?”
“Go set up a profile somewhere, and write a column detailing the kind of responses you get. Ooooh…” He rubbed his hands together. “Better yet, make a profile for each other.”
Oh dear god. “Hasn’t that been done before?”
“Not by Miss Behave and A Guy’s Guy.”
I sighed. These were what you would call sacrifices for the work-life balance—a teeter-totter that I inevitably would get my ass bumped on.
“They want you to go on a few dates, too.” He looked vaguely embarrassed.
Bump. I stared at him in horror. “You’re pimping me out, Rob?”
“No, I mean with Ash.”
My heart sped up. “You mean together? Like together together, or some kind of double-date?” Both options sounded dangerous.
“Let me see what I can do,” he said. I could see his brain working on a way to spin ideas to his bosses. “They also want you to find a question you can follow for more than just one column.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Like an ongoing dialogue. Therapy online, in a sense. Find a question that you think could have legs.”
“How would I choose something like that?”
