by Susannah Nix
“That bad, huh?” Dammit, Jonathan, you had one job.
“It wasn’t bad, exactly, but…you know that fluttery feeling you get in your chest around a guy you really like? I didn’t get that, not once. I guess I was hoping for a little more chemistry.”
Esther brushed a clump of cat hair off the couch. “Well, it’s just the first date. Maybe you need to give it more time. Get to know each other a little better.”
“Maybe,” Jinny said without much conviction. “I felt the fluttery thing with Stuart the first time he talked to me though.”
But Stuart is an asshole, Esther thought but didn’t say.
“Where’d you go?” she asked instead, like she didn’t already know.
“This noodle bar on Venice. It was good. And the lady behind the counter called him Jon Jon, which was adorable.”
Nice. Score one for Esther’s advice. “So far it doesn’t sound bad.”
“Yeah, but then he spent like half an hour talking about the original Blade Runner, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him I didn’t like the movie.”
“Wait,” Esther said, shaking her head to make sure she’d heard right. “How can you not like Blade Runner? And how did I never know this about you?” Blade Runner was one of Esther’s top ten favorite movies. Her brother had taken her to see it at an art house revival when she was twelve, and she’d thought it was one of the coolest things she’d ever seen.
“It’s so slow! And boring. I don’t understand what the big deal is with that movie. The new one with Ryan Gosling was a little better, but still not great.”
Esther was speechless. It was like hearing someone say the Star Wars prequels were better than the original trilogy. It was sacrilege. It should be grounds for a seventy-two-hour psychiatric hold.
“That movie influenced an entire generation of cinema,” she said. “I feel like I don’t even know you right now.”
“Whatever,” Jinny huffed. “I didn’t want to hear about it for half an hour. He spent a lot of time talking. I barely got a word in edgewise the whole night.”
Oh, no. That was definitely not good. “He was probably just nervous. Some people talk too much when they’re nervous.”
“I guess.”
Esther leaned her head back and stared at the ceiling. “How’d you end things? Are you going out with him again?” If Jinny decided she didn’t like him enough to go out with him a second time, the whole plan was busted.
“I don’t know. He left it with a vague, ‘We should do this again sometime.’ Which could mean anything. I may never hear from him again.”
She’d better hear from him again. He’d made a deal, and Esther planned on holding him to it.
“But if he asked would you say yes?” Esther pressed. She’d have to coach him more next time. Obviously, the guy needed even more help than she’d anticipated. But that was fine. She could work with that. She’d be the Henry Higgins to his Eliza Doolittle if that was what it took. She’d Pygmalion the shit out of him. As long as Jinny was willing to give him another chance.
“Mmmm. Probably. He’s a good kisser, at least.”
“Wait. He kissed you?”
“I kissed him. He was a little shy at first, but once he got into it, it was pretty great. Really great, actually.”
“Huh,” Esther said.
“Yeah, it makes me wonder what he’s like in bed. Based on that kiss, I’d say pretty damn good.”
“Wow. Okay.” That must have been some kiss. Good for him. And for Jinny, apparently.
So the plan was still on track. Jonathan just needed to up his conversation game a little. No problem. They could work on that before the next date.
“It sounds like there was some chemistry after all,” Esther said. “It must not have been completely terrible.”
“No, not terrible,” Jinny conceded.
“Well, I’m glad. Maybe your second date will be better.” There was still time for them to actually hit it off. With a little coaching, Esther was convinced, Jonathan could make a good boyfriend for Jinny. And Jinny could be good for him too. They could be good for each other.
“If there is a second date,” Jinny said. “He might not call.”
He was definitely going to call. And the next time, he’d be a better date. Esther would see to that.
A little past noon the next day, Esther knocked on Jonathan’s door. It took so long for him to answer it, she’d just about decided he wasn’t home when she heard the deadbolt turn.
The door opened a crack and he squinted at her. “Oh. It’s you.” He sounded about as thrilled to see her as she was to be there.
“It’s me,” she said, and waited.
He pulled the door open wider—but not wide enough to invite her in—and ran his hand through his hair. He wasn’t wearing a beanie for once, and he had a truly impressive case of bedhead. His half-hearted attempt to smooth the unruly locks only succeeded in making them fluffier.
“Did I wake you?” Esther asked. He had the rumpled, bleary-eyed look of someone who’d just crawled out of bed.
“No,” he said, clearly lying. He was wearing sweatpants that hung low on his hips and a plain white T-shirt that was so stretched out it was nearly see-through.
“I can come back,” she offered.
“No, it’s fine.” He stepped back and held the door open, waving her inside. “Come on in.”
Esther stepped inside and peered around curiously. It was dark except for the slits of sunlight leaking in through the closed mini-blinds. The layout of his apartment was the mirror opposite of Esther’s, and his furniture all looked like it had been rescued from a curb. There was a hideous plaid couch, a set of bookshelves constructed out of cinderblocks, and a cheap footlocker doubling as coffee table. An old Formica dinette table had been pushed against the wall to serve as a desk. It was stacked with precarious towers of books and papers and scripts, with a MacBook Air squatting in the center of it.
“I just came to see how last night went,” she said.
“You want some coffee?” he asked, wandering into the kitchen. It was full of dirty dishes, at least half of which were coffee mugs.
“No thanks.” If she had more than two cups a day, she got jittery, and she’d already had her allotment this morning.
Jonathan filled an electric kettle with water and switched it on. “I’m sure you already heard all about it from Jinny.”
“Yeah, but I wanted to hear how you thought it went.”
He shrugged. “It wasn’t as bad as I was afraid it was going to be.”
“That’s a ringing endorsement.” Esther watched him scoop coffee beans out of a brown paper bag into a burr grinder. There was a layer of coffee grounds all over the counter. “You grind your own beans?”
“Yeah. It’s a fair-trade organic blend from a co-op in Peru that I special order from a small-batch local roaster.”
Of course it was. And of course he did.
He switched on the grinder, which made an ear-piercing racket as it pulverized the beans. That explained the weird sound Esther heard coming through the wall from his apartment every day. She’d thought maybe he had a power tool fetish. Turned out it was a coffee fetish.
“I don’t think Jinny liked me all that much,” he said when the grinder was done.
At least he’d noticed. Esther supposed he deserved a few points for that. “What made you think that?”
“I don’t know.” He dumped the coffee grounds into a cone-shaped filter on top of a glass carafe. “She didn’t talk much.”
“Is that your coffeemaker?” Esther asked, leaning in for a better look.
“It’s a Chemex,” he said, as if it should be obvious.
“I don’t know what that is.”
He poured hot water over the coffee grounds and set the kettle back down, waiting for it to filter through. “The special filter and glass design make a purer cup of coffee than traditional drip coffeemakers.”
Esther nodded with pretended i
nterest as he launched into a lecture about ideal “brewology”—which was definitely not a word—and the importance of letting the grounds “bloom.” Christ.
“Maybe you talked so much Jinny didn’t have a chance to respond,” she suggested when he’d finished explaining his absurdly fussy coffeemaker.
He looked up, his brow furrowing. “Is that what she said?”
“Not in so many words.”
“So she didn’t like me.” He poured more water over the grounds and set the kettle down again. This thing had better make the best coffee in the world, because it seemed like the slowest, most inefficient way imaginable to make coffee.
“I didn’t say that.” Esther leaned against the counter, crossing her arms. “Okay, maybe she wasn’t instantly wowed. But she didn’t have a totally bad time.”
His jaw clenched. “Great.”
“You’ll do better on the next one.”
“Assuming there is a next one.” He poured a little more water over the coffee grounds. Seriously, how long did it take to get a cup of coffee out of this thing?
“No wriggling out of this,” Esther said. “Three dates—that was the deal.”
“It just seems pointless if she doesn’t like me.”
“You’re her rebound guy. You’ve got to go out enough times that she, you know, rebounds.”
He nodded, tapping his thumbs on the edge of the counter as he watched the water drain through the coffee filter. “What if she says no to a second date?”
“She told me she’d go out with you again if you asked.”
He looked up, surprised. “She did?”
“Yeah. She said you were a good kisser.”
His expression turned smug. “Really?”
Esther rolled her eyes. “Yeah, really. You just need some coaching on the other stuff.”
“What other stuff?”
“Talking. And maybe not doing so much of it. Show some interest in her. Ask her about her life, her likes and dislikes. Make an effort to get to know her, don’t just tell her about yourself.”
“I thought I had.” Apparently the coffee was finally done, because he dumped the filter into the trash.
“What does she do for a living?” If he’d actually bothered to ask Jinny about herself, he should know the answer.
“She works with you,” he said as he poured coffee from the glass carafe into a mug.
“Doing what?” The scent of fresh-brewed coffee wafted in her direction. It smelled pretty good, but it still didn’t seem worth the trouble.
He shrugged, leaning his hip against the counter as he cradled his coffee. “Some kind of engineering-type stuff? Like you do.”
She shook her head. “I’m a mechanical design engineer. Jinny’s a network systems engineer.”
He frowned as he blew on his coffee “What’s the difference?”
“Ask her about it,” Esther said. “Where do her parents live? What do they do for a living?”
Jonathan looked blank.
“Does she have any brothers or sisters? Where’d she go to college? Where’d she grow up?”
“I know this one,” he said. “Irvine. See, I grew up in Newport Beach, which isn’t that far—”
“You’re talking about yourself again. We’re talking about Jinny now, remember?” God, no wonder Jinny hadn’t been impressed.
He pressed his lips together. “Right.”
“Next time, ask her about herself and then shut up long enough to let her answer.”
He walked past her, carrying his coffee into the living room, and sank down on his ugly plaid couch. “I’m not very good at this stuff.”
Esther chose not to sit down. “What stuff?”
His eyes flicked up at her and then away. “Talking to women. I get nervous and can’t think of anything to say. Then I end up trying to fill the dead space by rambling about something lame.”
She felt a stab of sympathy. Making small talk on a date with a near stranger wasn’t her favorite activity either. It was part of the reason she didn’t do a lot of dating.
“That’s okay,” she told him. “You just need to plan ahead. Make a list of questions in advance and memorize them.”
“Like what?”
She ticked them off on her fingers. “What did she want to be when she grew up? What kind of music does she like? What’s her favorite book? What’s her favorite movie—and whatever she says, don’t argue with her or try to tell her she’s wrong.”
He looked up at her. “What if she is wrong though?”
“There’s no such thing as a wrong answer to a question of personal preference.”
His eyebrows twitched, and the corner of his mouth pulled to one side. “There kind of is though.”
Esther was not going to get into a philosophical debate, even if she sort of agreed with him. “Not for the purposes of this date. Do you need to be writing all this down?”
He scowled at her over the top of his coffee mug. “No, I’ve got it.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.” He sipped his coffee. “Have you looked at the script yet?”
“Not yet,” she lied. “It’s been a really busy week.”
His tongue ran over his upper lip, and Esther remembered what Jinny had said about him being a good kisser. He did have a nice mouth under that beard, now that she was studying him up close. Supple lips that were the exact right amount of full—
“So when do you think you’ll have something for me? I need to have something to show my adviser in a few weeks, and also I need to know you’re going to fulfill your end of the bargain if I’m going to keep going on these dates.”
Esther dragged her eyes away from his mouth. “Can I have a week?”
He didn’t look happy about it, but he didn’t argue. “Yeah, okay.”
“How about next Sunday?” She didn’t want to meet with him before his next date with Jinny, because he wasn’t going to like her notes, and she didn’t want it affecting his attitude while he was on the date. “We’ll get together to go over it, and we can post-game your second date.” She pointed a finger at him. “Because you’re going to call Jinny today to tell her what a nice time you had and ask her out for next weekend, right?”
Jonathan rolled his eyes like a kid who’d just been told to clean his room. “Yeah. Sheesh.”
Chapter Seven
Every Monday night, Esther and Jinny met up with a knitting group at a coffee shop in Culver City called Antidote. When Esther got there that week, Vilma was already holding their usual table in the back corner. She was the oldest member of the group in both age and seniority, a teacher in her late forties with a husband and two teenaged sons.
As Esther walked in, Vilma looked up from the bundle of yarn in her lap and waved. Esther waved back and got in line at the counter.
One of the first things she had done two years ago, when she relocated to Los Angeles for the job at Sauer Hewson, was look for a local knitting group. She’d taken up knitting in college, when her roommate gave her a copy of Stitch & Bitch and a pair of Clover bamboo needles for her birthday. Esther had never considered herself a crafty or artistic person before, but she’d been pleased to discover that knitting was more like math than art. The order and repetition of it appealed to her, and since she didn’t go in for the touchy-feely-ness of meditation and yoga, it was a stress reliever she could actually enjoy.
Knitting was how Esther and Jinny had first become friends. Her second month at Sauer Hewson, Esther had been sitting by herself in the lunchroom knitting, and Jinny had sat down next to her and started asking questions about it. It turned out she’d been wanting to learn for a while, but didn’t know anyone who could show her how. The next day, Esther brought an extra pair of needles and started teaching her on their lunch breaks. After Jinny had gotten the basics of casting on and the knit stitch down, Esther had introduced her to the knitting group, and she’d been a regular ever since.
Esther paid for her beer—one of the best
things about Antidote was that they sold beer and wine in addition to coffee—and took it over to the low, round coffee table in the far back corner, flanked by an orange couch and a few old office armchairs.
“Congratulations on surviving another Monday,” Vilma said as Esther settled into a chair across from her.
“Same to you,” Esther offered, raising her beer bottle. She set her drink on the table and dug out her current knitting project. “Is that another chemo hat?” she asked Vilma.
“Mmm hmm.” Vilma held up the lavender hat she was knitting. She’d been doing a lot of charity knitting since her family had informed her they already had more handmade knitwear than they could possibly wear in Southern California, and could she please find someone else to knit for. “It’s a Berocco nylon and acrylic blend.”
“I like it. How’s it feel?”
“Very soft. You have to choose from a list of approved yarns, so it’s not itchy on bald heads. I’ve never used this one before, but it’s easy on the hands.” Vilma waved as Cynthia and Olivia, two more members of the group, walked in and got in line. She raised an eyebrow at the sock Esther was working on. “Another pair of socks?”
“Yep.” Esther was obsessed with self-striping sock yarn. She loved not having to make color decisions or weave in yarn ends at every color change.
Vilma pursed her lips. “You know, there is a whole wide world of things out there for you to knit that are not socks.”
“I am aware. I just happen to like socks.”
Esther loved socks. Aside from the fact that they were soft and comfy and kept your feet toasty warm, they were fast and simple to knit. She’d already knit as many scarves and hats as she could possibly wear, blankets were boring, and she could never seem to finish sweaters. But socks…socks were perfect. You could never have too many socks.
“Ladies,” Cynthia greeted, setting her glass of white wine on the table and taking the seat next to Esther. She was a tall, willowy black woman who favored long skirts in bright patterns, didn’t bother with makeup, and wore her hair cut short with shaved sides.
