Flirting with Forever

by Cara Bastone

  “Sure. Something light. I didn’t mean to go into my whole history.”

  “Right. Okay. Um, here. You can just check it out.” She dug through her purse and handed him her phone once she’d opened the app. “It’s one of those kinds where the guys can’t reach out to me unless I reach out to them first. You cruise them there on that page. And if you want to connect, you can either write them a message in that box there, or you can tap them using these emojis.”

  “This app is my personal nightmare.”

  “Why? All the hot older-man action?”

  He laughed. “No. The idea of a woman reaching out to me with just an emoji and then me having to try to figure out what to do next? I’d never sleep again. I’d just spend all my time trying to guess the difference in meaning between a waving-hand emoji and a cat with hearts for eyes.”

  “I’d never send the cat with hearts for eyes! Are you nuts? The man would think I was a psycho. You send that emoji as an icebreaker and you’re practically showing up at his house with a boom box held over your head.”

  John laughed. “See? I’d fail. I don’t speak the language of the emoji. I think I’m too literal minded.”

  “Most of the guys don’t use the emojis. Most just respond with words.”

  “Are these your chats up here?”

  “Yes. You can look, but I’m warning you, I haven’t screened them yet today.”

  “Screened them?”

  “Take a look for yourself, if you’re feeling brave.”

  John clicked into her messages. Apparently, Ritz-cracker eyes were hereditary. He nearly choked as he took in the dick pics from four separate guys. There were three other perfectly nice chats as well. Kind, considerate men who hadn’t replied to her “Hi, I’m Mary, how are you?” opening line with a horrifying photo of an erect penis.

  “Good Jesus,” John murmured, slamming his eyes closed and pinching her phone between two fingers like it was suddenly contaminated with perv germs. “That’s awful. You have to screen those out every day?”

  “Yup. I just forward them to the customer service concierge and then block the guy.”

  “What is wrong with people?”

  She shrugged. “They’re lonely? Horny? Depressed? Looking for a way to feel alive? Scared of the life unlived? Desperate? Sad? Overzealous? Proud? I think there’re a lot of reasons why.”

  “Mary, you might be the most compassionate person I’ve ever met in my life. I would have just said they were all dirty perverts and left it at that.”

  She laughed. “And this from the public defender? Takes more than an unsolicited dick pic to send me running home.”

  He squinted at something at the top of the app. “Mary, you said this app was called Silver Fox.”

  “Right. See?” She pointed at the logo.

  “That isn’t an o in Fox. It’s an asterisk.”

  “So?”

  “So, asterisks usually indicate the vulgar spelling of a word, right?”

  Her brow furrowed. Then a look of horror transformed her face. “You think this app is pronounced Silver Fux?” She buried her face. “Oh-my-God. No wonder I’ve gotten so many dick pics. This is not a dating app. This is a hookup app.”

  She might have shriveled up into a dust bunny and let herself be blown away on the breeze right then and there if John hadn’t laughed. And not that airy exhalation of a chuckle that she’d heard him do before. But a real laugh. Deep and quiet and rolling and, actually, quite charming.

  When she gaped up at him, he looked like he was trying to hold it back and couldn’t. His lips were pulled over his teeth and his face tipped away, like he didn’t want to show her what he looked like unarmed and open. But there was no hiding a laugh like that. It was utterly infectious. The CDC would have rated it highly contagious.

  Mary couldn’t help but laugh as well. “That’s the last time I buy an app without reading the reviews.”

  He laughed harder. “It was an honest mistake.”

  Her phone chose that moment to bark, and she jumped about six inches in the air, making John laugh harder.

  She shoved her phone in her purse.

  “You’re not going to check that notification?”

  She did her best to glower at him, but she was so charmed by his laughter that she only ended up smiling. “I’ll pass.”

  “You can’t leave them hanging, Mary. It’s rude. The barking dicks await.”

  She burst into laughter again, and it was half a block before they’d wound down, a silence settling over them again, but this one wasn’t tense like when they’d left the restaurant.

  “Mary,” John said softly after a moment, his hands in his pockets and his eyes focused dimly on the night in front of them. “Did I ruin everything?”

  “Ruin everything? When?” She was taken aback by the quiet tone of his voice, the set of his shoulders. She had the almost unquellable urge to knock her shoulder into his, try to cheer him up.

  “On our first—On our date. When I said that stupid shit about expecting someone younger. Did I absolutely ruin any chance of us ever being—”

  “Friends?” Mary cut in, horrified that he thought he’d ruined the chance to become her buddy. Maybe she’d been mad at him at the beginning. But those days were long gone and John had proved himself to be a kind enough person. A little rough around the edges, but he was looking out for her, she knew that. She’d never withhold friendship from someone as worthy as John on the basis of one stupid comment. No matter how much it had hurt her feelings. No matter how alone she’d felt in the wake of it. “Of course you didn’t ruin it! I think we’re actually becoming pretty good friends. Don’t you?”

  “Ah. Yeah.” She watched his profile as his eyes dropped from the middle beyond to the ground. He watched his own wingtips as they walked another half block in silence. She tried to get a bead on his mood, but he was so mercurial, she gave it up as a lost cause.

  “Look, don’t beat yourself up, John. You could have been a lot nicer to me that night, sure. But, truly, when I look back on it, you did both of us a favor.”

  “I crossed us off each other’s lists?” he asked, lifting his eyes to hers. She was relieved to see a self-deprecating humor flash there for a moment. Even if it gave way to his usual cold expression directly after.

  “Exactly. Because sometimes you date someone for a while before you realize that you’re not what they’re looking for or they’re not what you’re looking for. With you, we got that part out of the way immediately. So, we’re not meant for each other. No big deal. We’re friends now. Even better.”

  “Even better,” he repeated dimly.

  “Well, this is me,” she said, wishing they had a few more blocks to walk, feeling like she was leaving in the middle of a conversation.

  John blinked up at her front door. “Oh. You live above your shop?”

  Mary caught Sandra’s eye through the big window of the store and gave her a friendly wave. Sandra waved back, sneaking her phone back in her pocket, obviously hoping that her boss hadn’t seen her Tweeting when she should have been manning the register.

  “Yup.” She turned back to John in time to see that judgmental expression on his face. She hadn’t seen it since the first time she’d met him, not in full force like this, and she’d forgotten how much it could sting.

  “Wow,” he said tonelessly. “You have an apartment on Court Street. Fancy.”

  She leaned forward and, with her two pointer fingers, forcibly drew his eyebrows up out of their judgy V. He jolted at her touch, his expression quirking into humor for just a flash. “What was that for?”

  “I didn’t want you to pull a muscle while you judged me.”

  His face collapsed into a soft chagrin. “Busted. You’re right. It’s an asshole move to judge where you live.”

  “I’d never judge where you
live.”

  His eyes bounced back and forth between hers. “You really wouldn’t, would you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Even if I told you I live in a studio in a crappy building above a bus stop?”

  “I hope I get to see it someday.”

  He did that choppy exhalation of a laugh and shook his head, his eyes on his shoes again. “You’re something else, Mary.”

  “Something good, I hope.”

  “The best.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  JOHN TOOK A break from Mary for the next two weeks. It was necessary. A matter of survival, he felt. Two things had become extremely clear the night of the fake date. John wanted something more with Mary, and she, decidedly, did not.

  He figured it wouldn’t take too long to get over her, as long as he wasn’t forced to see and interact with her in the meantime. Which meant that John had to clear things up with his mother. The morning after the fake date, he called Estrella.

  “John? Is everything all right?” she asked as she answered the phone. “You’re calling so early.”

  He blinked in confusion at the clock on his microwave. “It’s 9:00 a.m., Ma.”

  “Yes, but I thought you might...be sleeping in this morning.”

  John groaned, her meaning so clear it stung. Despite her public stance on premarital sex, she’d apparently hoped he’d spend the night and morning with Mary. “Ma, enough. Enough.”

  “What?”

  He’d have to remember to have her come in and coach his clients on how to affect innocence so effectively.

  “You know exactly what. You have to stop trying to push me and Mary together.”

  “John—”

  “No. Ma, we both know what you’re doing, with the dates, with the terrible guys and getting me to walk her home and the tacos. We tried it out. It didn’t work. And now you pushing us like this is just getting—”

  He cut himself off because he wasn’t sure he wanted to say the word painful out loud right now.

  “Oh,” Estrella said after a quiet moment. “Oh, John, I hadn’t realized...”

  With a mother’s twenty-twenty vision, Estrella had seen to the heart of his words immediately. John sighed.

  “You have feelings for her,” Estrella guessed after a moment.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “And you don’t think there’s any chance that she...”

  “We’re friends, Ma.”

  “Right.” There was a long pause. “Cormac wanted to know if you’d come help with the backyard this weekend.”

  Cormac was a strapping beast of a man, but he was getting on in years and had had trouble with sciatica recently.

  “Of course. Why didn’t he text me himself?”

  “Because he doesn’t think he needs the help,” Estrella said sharply.

  John laughed. “Is there any business you won’t stick your nose into?”

  “Plenty. But you and Cormac are my business. It doesn’t count as nosy if it’s about you or Cormac.”

  Even as he rolled his eyes at his mother, he enjoyed the enveloping wave of her palpable love. Mary’s parents were neutral-palette people, expecting her to wear boring navy and grit her teeth through spending time with them. Maddox’s mother hadn’t even visited him when he’d been in rehab a few years ago. John was lucky to have a mother who loved him enough to mother-hen him.

  “I’ll be over this afternoon.”

  “John?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s good you have feelings for her. Even if it didn’t turn out. It’s been a long time since you thought about much other than work and family.”

  John grunted. “Woulda been better if she’d had ’em back.”

  Estrella sighed. “Maybe so.”

  * * *

  AND THUS BEGAN the Mary fast. It was sort of like when, a few times a year, John allowed himself to splurge on a quart of fresh-squeezed orange juice. He would literally set his alarm fifteen minutes early on those mornings so that he could sit down with a cup and truly enjoy it. It was such a bright way to start his day. But then, inevitably, the quart would run out and he was back to his lone cup of black coffee. It wasn’t that the black coffee was bad; it was just that juice was better.

  “Mary’s funny,” Richie said with a laugh one afternoon while John stabbed at a soggy salad he’d brought from home.

  “Yeah. Wait, what?” John swiveled in his chair and blinked his eyes a few times. He’d been staring at his computer screen for an hour and real life was hard to bring into focus, literally and metaphorically.

  “Your friend Mary,” Richie said, waving his cell phone at John. “She’s funny.”

  John frowned, eyeing the cell phone. “You’re texting with Mary?”

  “No, I’m chatting with her through this game we both play. She’s the only person I’ve ever played who can beat me. Which would bother me, but she also talks some pretty hilarious smack while she’s at it.”

  “How the hell did you connect with her on that app?”

  Richie lifted an eyebrow. “We talked about it that day she came by the Supreme Court.”

  “And you’ve been playing ever since?”

  “Is this a problem for you, John?” Richie asked drily.

  “No.” John frowned even harder. “I just didn’t realize you two were becoming friends.”

  “She’s pretty easy to like.”

  With that, John swiveled toward his computer screen and gave up on his soggy salad, packing it back into his bag. Maybe he’d splurge today and get some fries from the halal cart.

  “You know, you’ve been extra crabby lately.” The sound of Richie’s voice told John that he was still facing him. John knew that if he turned around, he’d see Richie with one leg crossed over the other, his foot bouncing, an expression on his face that John had once dubbed The Untrained Psychologist.

  “Is that so?” John was going to play dead in the hopes that Richie would get bored and stop poking at him.

  “Yeah. I think you need to get laid.”

  Undoubtedly. “That’s not the issue.” Yes, it was. It was absolutely the issue.

  “Oh, so you admit there’s an issue?” Richie’s voice took on a predatory, victorious edge, and John, still facing away, pressed his fingertips to his forehead to smooth away the headache.

  Damn it.

  “Richie...”

  “All right, how about just a night out, then? I won’t even try to get you laid. Just come out for a beer.”

  “It’s a Wednesday.”

  “You know, in the state of New York, it’s actually legal to drink beer on Wednesdays.”

  John swiveled back around, his arms crossed. “If I agree to get a drink with you tonight, will you let me get some work done?”

  Richie grinned, pushing his stylish, white-blond hair up off his forehead. “I won’t make a peep for the rest of the day.”

  “I have court at three, so we better make it seven to be on the safe side.”

  “Perfect.”

  Finally, Richie swiveled to face his own computer, and John, with a sigh, dug back into his bag for his salad. If he was paying for a full-price beer tonight, street fries were out. He winced through a wet bite of lettuce, gritting his teeth as he listened to Richie chuckle at something else Mary had messaged him.

  John groaned as he looked at his notes on Hang Nguyen’s case. He was old-school. He liked to get his thoughts organized with a pen in a spiral notebook. But his cramped chicken scratch had already filled half of one, and he was no closer to clearing this young woman’s name.

  Seventeen and being tried as an adult. Three different solicitation misdemeanors slapped onto her list of charges. But the doozy, the reason her case had been assigned to a hard hitter like John, was the sex trafficking charge. This young w
oman faced up to twenty-five years in prison—thirty-five if the misdemeanors stuck.

  John had to prove that the money she accepted from various men was not, as the state claimed, in exchange for sexual favors. And, most importantly, he had to adequately show reasonable doubt that the rides that Hang Nguyen had given to various other women various other times did not amount to sex trafficking. No matter the age of those other women and what they were compelled to do once they arrived at their destinations.

  For the most part, John was laser focused on his cases. He didn’t let the greater themes of the world bear down on him. The world was a complicated, messy place, but here in his cramped office, Richie scratching away at his own notepad behind him, John was being active. Inside the walls of this crumbling but noble building, he was never passive. He was doing something about that complicated world. Each hour of concentration he lent to his cases he was making the world a more just, fair place.

  Normally, it soothed him.

  But there was something about this case that was under his skin. Technically, in the state of New York, a seventeen-year-old could be tried as an adult. He’d long ago accepted the crazy-making nature of this idea, this assumption that a child could have the same scope and understanding as a fully formed adult. There was nothing that John could do besides defend these people with his entire intellect, determination and passion. But this case? He just wanted to take the judge by the collar and shout, “Can’t you see that she wasn’t there willingly? Can’t you see that she was scared for her life? Can’t you see that she and her mother were one step up from homeless and in no position to turn away the cash that men were throwing at Hang after they did whatever the hell they were going to do to her?”

  But were those men on trial? No, they were not. Had they been tackled by cops and slammed to the ground, handcuffed and tossed in the clink while their mothers scoured hospitals, thinking they were dead, making frantic calls to 911 dispatchers in Vietnamese only to get hung up on?

  John sighed. Hang and two other young girls were the only people arrested in the prostitution bust in the East New York neighborhood.

  “Hey, there.” Sarah Riley, dyed brown hair and a blue pantsuit making her nondescript looks even more nondescript, poked her head into John’s office. “You left a message about a case?”