Chapter 17
Aubrey
Six Months Before the Outing
The yellow pad of sticky notes trembled in Aubrey’s hand. She’d needed to jot down the potential fix for the load-time lag
in the ratings component of “How Wide’s My Smile.” Of course there was a lag time. The feature wasn’t designed for this many
subscribers. They’d never expected it to take off like this. More than three and a half million at last count, three and a
half million people whose smooth user experience Aubrey was responsible for.
All day in the office, all evening while she waited for Ethan in his apartment, she’d tried to sort out what wasn’t working.
It hit her right in front of his desk, so she yanked open the top drawer and grabbed the stickies, tore off the top note with
scribbles in his handwriting, and wrote down the solution before it flittered from her brain and she was left debating whether
it was a back end or database issue even though she’d once been so sure.
She’d placed Ethan’s scribbled note back on top and was about to return the pad to the drawer when she realized what it was: a pro-con list. She was rubbing off on him. A smile took over until she read the title: A lifetime of Aubreyisms.
Two columns, unlabeled, a line down the middle, and that phrase at the bottom of the second one, circled and underlined. The
first column had: Plays video games and Lets me choose dinner *and* Netflix and Sexy in a geeky way. The second column had: Asks so many damn questions about stupid stuff and Geeky sometimes annihilates the sexy and Codependent AF and of course that A lifetime of Aubreyisms.
The second column outweighed the first. She heard the door to the apartment open, and she quickly shoved the sticky notes
back into the drawer.
Three days later, she was drinking a glass of Chardonnay he’d ordered for her even though she never really liked the buttery
flavor. She was perched uncomfortably on a cold, metal stool at the bar of a restaurant that was on every Boston “best of”
list even though it exclusively served tinned fish that required no cooking, only plating. He was unsuccessfully sawing through
the long, skinny razor clam drowning in olive oil that cost more than her last grocery bill when he stopped, set down his
knife and fork, and stared at her.
She was sure that she had a smoked mussel dangling from her chin and reached for her napkin. But he’d pressed the burlap cloth,
which was really too scratchy for something you used to wipe your lips, back into her lap and said, “This is working, isn’t
it?”
“Well, not great. Really could use a steak knife.”
He grinned one of those grins that didn’t come often, the one that puffed his cheeks so much that it brought out those cute
lines around his eyes that Aubrey forever longed to see. “Sometimes you’re just right.”
And she smiled, and when he said they’d been together for nearly half a year and they might as well keep it going and maybe even make it official, she forgot for a second the list she’d found in his desk drawer.
“Like married?” she said.
“Engaged. Let’s get engaged.”
And then the list came back. The list that was heavier on the “con” side, and she was overwhelmed with a gripping fear that
he’d forgotten, and that if she didn’t say yes now, despite the way he asked without actually asking, without a ring, that
he’d remember and maybe even add to that second column until it outweighed the first so much that he’d make a different choice.
So she made the only choice she could.
She said yes.