Chapter 8 #3
“He looked like his pictures. And he works remotely for a Boston-based company in sales. He’s one of three kids, with two older sisters.” Brynn rattled off the facts that she’d learned on their twenty-five-minute date, if you didn’t include her travel time to and from the cafe on foot.
They’d mostly stuck to the basics, at least as far as Brynn was concerned.
She’d told him that she was an assistant manager at a local inn.
Another nugget of wisdom from Hallie had been to keep it light on specifics regarding real-life places she frequented, worked, or lived near, just in case a date sought Brynn out in the future with unwanted attention.
“Okay…” Hallie stilled, like she was mulling her next question over before she asked, “What else did you two talk about? Anything that ended in a weird look from him or a long, protracted silence?”
Again, she felt a deep appreciation settle in her chest at Hallie’s clarity. Because yeah… those things had happened. Brynn had just assumed they were first date hiccups. Specifically when… “I asked him about his blood type.”
Hallie’s brow shot up even as she smiled. Brynn felt like it was probably close to exasperation, but, as usual, Hallie seemed to be enjoying herself. “And what, pray tell, made you ask him that?”
This one was easy. “Well, I was thinking about how you’d said he was the definition of winning the lottery and then getting struck by lightning.
On my walk there, it got me thinking about other incredibly rare things.
One of the rarest things in the world is a blood type called Rhnull, and someone who has it has ‘the golden blood type.’ There are fewer than fifty documented cases in the world, and I was struck with this thought about how incredibly improbable it would be that Jake could also have this blood type.
So I asked him—” At this moment, she realized that Hallie had started to laugh.
“Oh my god, Brynn,” Hallie said between bouts of belly laughter, clearly delighted by the story.
Anyone else laughing at her like that, especially after she’d just explained her thought process, would have made her stomach churn or have caused her to flee from the situation as soon as possible.
But there was a lightness, a playfulness, in Hallie’s eyes that, as usual, made Brynn feel like she was in on the joke, too.
Which was crazy because she had absolutely no idea what Hallie was getting at.
Finally, her question was answered when Hallie pushed out, “He probably thought that you wanted to farm him for organs or something.”
Brynn’s mouth dropped open. Even if she had tried to guess the most unlikely words that could come out of Hallie’s mouth, “organ harvesting” wouldn’t have been even a remote possibility. “What?” she finally spat out. Seriously… what?
Hallie settled down, thankfully—or not, because Brynn didn’t know if she wanted to hear the rest—and added, “A gorgeous, smart, seemingly perfect woman walks into a coffee date and then asks a man for his blood type. It’s the start of a great horror movie.
You go home together, and next thing he knows, he’s in some makeshift operating room that used to be a warehouse, a few organs lighter.
All because he didn’t listen to his gut.
And now he doesn’t have one,” Hallie pushed out with one last burst of laughter.
Brynn thought about clarifying that kidney transplants were actually the most commonly completed organ transplant annually and that they were actually a part of the renal system, not the digestive system.
But if Hallie was talking about the liver, then yes, she would technically be correct since it was an adjacent organ to what was colloquially known as “the gut.”
No. Brynn wasn’t going down this path. She shook her head to clear the thoughts. This wasn’t helping her case in the slightest. Even she could see that.
But as soon as she stopped thinking, she felt heat bloom across her chest, snaking up her neck and then splashing across her cheeks.
Someone like Hallie calling her gorgeous, smart, seemingly perfect was not nothing.
A whole lot more than that, in fact. And it landed in a completely different way than it had for anyone who’d paid her similar compliments on the apps so far.
For the first time since they’d met, Brynn didn’t know that she could easily laugh something off with Hallie. What she really wanted to do was wrap herself up in the compliment like it was a blanket and bask in its warmth.
It must have been because she actually valued Hallie’s opinion and trusted her judgment. That made the most sense, even as a thought that didn’t slot into a neat box nagged at her peripheral.
A weird, sharp sound dislodged itself from her throat, some sort of hybrid bark of laughter mixed with anxiety.
Thankfully, Hallie, none the wiser, was too distracted as she wiped tears from her eyes. “I have to tell you, I cannot blame Jake for unmatching you. With that being said, the enjoyment you just gave me by telling me that story was one for the record books, Brynn. Truly.”
Brynn remembered to smile as they shifted back to discussing the date that had gone horribly wrong. It was for the best; she still had a strange, buzzy feeling in her limbs that was making her feel a bit off-kilter.
So yes, even if she’d completely flubbed her first online date, at least she knew why now.
It was all because Brynn had been curious.
In her defense, she had explained her thought process to him, but now that she was thinking about it, she could understand that someone else may possibly construe her question as a convoluted ruse to get information.
With that in mind, she laughed genuinely, not the awkwardly pitched sound that had come out of her mouth a minute ago. “There really are some crazy people out there.”
Hallie nodded in agreement, her own face slightly red, too. “I’m always saying that other people are the best and worst things about being alive.”
This was good. Normal conversation was good. Brynn’s pulse was finding its way back to an expected range, and the room was finally feeling more temperate.
Hallie pulled her hand away then, and Brynn almost chased it with her own, missing the closeness and comfort. Pushing herself out into the world of dating felt so much safer when she knew that Hallie was there, waiting in the wings to catch her not if, but when she fell.
With that in mind, she said the first words that popped into her head. “I think I’d like to, like, officially go on a date with a woman. Can you help me make that happen?”