Chapter 1
Blake
Seven is my limit.
I’m done.
Ready to admit defeat.
Tonight marks the seventh disastrous date in almost as many weeks. It’s taken that long to realize I’ve lost my touch with women.
It’s gone.
The Casanova of my youth is nowhere to be found.
Not that I’m old at thirty-two, even though it sure as fuck feels like it sometimes.
Don’t get me wrong, my date with number seven is going great if you ignore the part where my left eye starts twitching each time she says words like manifest or red flag.
This is supposed to be stereotypical first date small talk, not an oral history of her years in therapy and top ten dealbreakers in chronological order.
“So, have you ever been engaged?” she asks, like it’s a casual, first-date, small-talk question and not a hand grenade she just lobbed onto the table.
It’s been over a year since I broke off my engagement with my sociopathic, pregnancy-faking, fanatical control freak of a fiancée Taylor, and if tonight is any indication I’m no closer to getting back on the proverbial horse now than I was then.
And all I want to do is track down our server and ask for the check.
I take a sip of my drink that I ordered for the alcohol content and not the flavor. “Once,” I say. “Didn’t take.”
Her brows rise, interested in the way people get interested in true-crime podcasts. “Oh? What happened?”
I want to laugh.
It’s such a loaded question.
I still see it every time I let myself go there.
Taylor standing there holding that photocopy like it was a winning lottery ticket.
She’d been breathless and glowing, like we hadn’t been fighting for weeks about her wanting to set a wedding date and me second-guessing whether I wanted to marry her at all.
Except, my brain had done the math automatically and the timing didn’t make sense.
Not that she’d been withholding sex exactly…
no, wait, that’s exactly what she’d been doing.
We hadn’t fucked in months. But she’d pressed that picture into my hand like proof and looked at me with those wide, wet eyes, and I believed her.
In hindsight I think I wanted the fighting to be over more than I wanted the truth.
Spoiler alert: she wasn’t pregnant.
Eventually, I found the original sonogram printout. Her sister’s. Not hers. I remember standing there, holding that crumpled paper like it was radioactive, while Taylor shouted from the other room about nursery paint colors and middle names.
The meltdown when I called her on it is seared into my brain—the hysterics, the broken lamp, the way she’d hissed that no one else would ever put up with me.
That sex with me was boring. I was the villain who “didn’t trust her” and “didn’t deserve a family.
” The paperweight she’d thrown at me that missed my head by an inch.
The dent in the wall where it hit that’s still there.
Out loud, I go with, “Irreconcilable differences.”
“That’s so vague,” she says, laughing. “You sound like a divorce decree.”
“That’s pretty much what it was,” I say. “Just…cheaper. No lawyers. More thrown objects.”
She tilts her head. “Was she the problem, or are you, like, emotionally unavailable?”
I choke on my drink and rasp, “Wow. Straight to the boss level, huh?”
She smiles, unfazed. “I don’t like wasting time. My therapist says I should ask direct questions if I’m seeing red flags early.”
I’m a red flag.
Good to have that confirmed.
“She was…not honest with me,” I say, picking each word like it’s sitting in front of me on a buffet of egg salad sandwiches sitting in one-hundred-degree heat and I’m trying to avoid food poisoning. “And I ignored some signs I shouldn’t have.”
“Like what?” she presses, eyes bright.
Not exactly first-date conversation material, but sure, why the hell not. “Like pretending to be pregnant to get me to move up our wedding date.”
Her jaw drops. “Shut up.”
“I wish I could,” I say. “It’s very loud in here.” I tap my temple.
She winces. “Okay, yeah, that’s a red flag the size of a Target.”
“Yeah.” I nod. Does she mean the store?
There’s a beat of silence where the clink of glasses and low hum of conversation from other tables rushes in.
The restaurant is one of those places with exposed brick and Edison bulbs, where the menus are on clipboards and the waiters have more interesting haircuts than I do.
I thought it looked like a good neutral place for a date.
Now it feels like a bad set for a show I keep bombing my audition on.
“So, you’re, like, traumatized,” she says finally, not unkindly, just…diagnosing. “That explains the eye twitch.”
I touch my eye automatically; because of course it’s twitching again. “Work might have something to do with it too.” I seize the opportunity to change the subject. “Spend a lot of time at my computer, I design video games.”
Her expression brightens. “Oh my God, that’s so cool. Like, Candy Crush?”
“Console, mostly.”
She blinks, confused.
“Xbox, Play Station, Nintendo Switch.”
She nods like that clears it up, though I doubt it does. “Anything I’d know?”
I give her the polished answer. “How into gaming are you?”
“Um…” She laughs. “I played that farming one on my iPad where you can marry the villagers for a while? Until my crops died and I felt like a failure.”
“Then probably not,” I say. “But one of my titles got picked up by a big producer a while back.” I don’t say the name. I’ve learned that either it means nothing to people or it means too much.
Her eyes widen anyway. “So, you’re, like…loaded?”
Here we go.
“I’m comfortable,” I say. “My accountant is happy. I still shop for bargains, if that helps.”
She leans in a little. “Do you work from home?”
“Yeah.”
“And you live alone?”
The word hits different now that the house isn’t just mine. “Mostly,” I say. “I have a dog. And, uh…a roommate.” Meaning, Darby, my little sister’s best friend.
Darby who recently went through a messy and hurtful breakup and had been living with the guy. When I heard they broke up and Darby was sleeping on their couch while he brought other women home to the bedroom, my knight-in-shining-armor complex jumped to attention like it was spring activated.
The next day, we moved her into my spare room. It was either that or my sister’s couch, since no way I was letting her stay with that guy.
I didn’t even need a roommate. I like living alone. But I’m not doing much with the house yet anyway, and I have a few spare rooms. I bought it because it was a fixer in a good neighborhood—close to my best friend Wyatt and his wife Bristol, aka, my little sister—and the price was right.
Plus, I need the tax deductions thanks to that producer, whose name rhymes with bike-row-loft, and the big money that followed.
“A roommate?” Her tone shifts just enough to make my shoulders tighten. “You can’t afford to live alone?”
“I can.”
“So, is it like multiple roommates?”
“Just one.”
“A guy roommate, or…?”
“Woman,” I say.
Her facial expression tells me everything I need to know about her feelings on that.
“She’s my little sister’s best friend. Kind of a long story. She’s just staying with me while she gets back on her feet,” I explain.
Her mouth makes an “O.”
“So you live with a younger woman you aren’t dating, you’re newly, like, emotionally maimed from your ex, and you work from home making video games.”
“When you say it like that, it sounds bad,” I say with a chuckle.
She scoffs. “I mean, it sounds like a setup for a bad rom-com series.”
I don’t tell her that I’ve been thinking about Darby all night. Or that the roommate situation has already crossed state lines into Poor Decision Territory in my mind. Or that my dog cries at the door when she leaves and pretends not to know me if she’s in the room.
“So, this roommate,” she says, twirling her straw. “Are you sure there’s nothing going on there?”
“Positive,” I lie, because there is nothing going on there that doesn’t exist solely in my imagination. “She’s just…someone I wanted to help.”
Her eyes soften a little. “Wow. You have a hero complex.”
“I prefer decent human being,” I say. “But sure.”
She chews on that for a second, studies me over the rim of her glass. “Okay, so engaged once, burned badly, now living with a hot roommate you definitely don’t have feelings for.” She ticks each item off on her fingers.
“I never said she was hot.”
“Which means she is,” she says decisively. “Do you actually want to be in a relationship, or are you just collecting red flags for fun?”
I blink. “I thought we were getting tacos.”
“I can multitask,” my date returns.
Truth is, I don’t know how to answer that.
The part of me that bought a ring once still wants the whole thing—commitment, inside jokes, someone who knows what my face looks like before coffee.
The part of me that watched a life I didn’t want being built around me is terrified of handing anybody that kind of power again.
“I want…something real,” I say slowly. “But I don’t want to bulldoze someone else’s life to get it. Or mine.”
She nods like that’s acceptable. “Good answer.”
“Do I get a gold star?” I ask.
“We’ll see,” she says, and there’s a little smile there. “So tell me about this dog. Is he also emotionally damaged?”
“Loki?” I can’t help grinning. “I rescued him, so yes. He howls when he doesn’t get his way, steals socks, and is currently in a monogamous relationship with my roommate.”
Her brows jump. “The one that’s not hot.” She air quotes the word. “Are you jealous of your own dog.”
“Deeply,” I say. “He gets way more treats.”
She laughs for real this time, head tipping back. It hits me that, maybe, I’m close to succeeding at the basic mechanics of a date. Talking. Joking. Making a woman laugh who isn’t related to me.
It still feels…off. Like I’m playing a character I haven’t rehearsed in a while.
The waiter swings by to drop off our food—tacos that look incredible and which I will devour because I’m starving. My date picks one up daintily and studies it, like she’s overthinking the best way to eat without dripping salsa on her shirt.
“So,” she says around a small bite, “do you ever talk to your ex?”
“Only in my nightmares,” I say. “We’re not in touch.” My mouth engulfs half a taco.
“Do you hate her?”
I think of the dent in my wall, faked sonogram photos, and the way she could make me feel like the worst person alive for asking perfectly reasonable questions.
Then I think of Darby on my couch, thanking me too much for things that shouldn’t require it—taking out the trash, fixing the leaky faucet, picking up after my dog, existing…
“I don’t…hate her,” I say. “I just don’t want her anywhere near my life.”
She nods, chewing. “That’s fair.”
We make it another ten minutes on safer topics—her job, a podcast she likes, the fact that she’s training for a half marathon—before the check comes. She offers to split it; I insist on paying; we do the polite dance of back and forth until the server takes my card.
Outside, the evening air is cooler. We stand on the sidewalk in that awkward post-date space where you’re supposed to decide if this is a we should do this again moment or a have a nice life moment.
“I had a nice time,” she says. “You’re…interesting.”
“Thanks?” I’m not sure how to take that.
She smiles tightly. “I’ll be honest. There are way too many red flags here.” Her hand does a vague little circle that seems to encompass me, my ex, my roommate, my dog, my job, my life. “But you seem great. And I wish you well.”
Cool.
“Yeah. Right back at you,” I say, because isn’t that what you’re supposed to say?
We do an awkward half-hug that involves way too much shoulder and zero spark. Then she walks one way and I go the other.
Not a total disaster, not a success. Just another reminder that whatever version of myself I used to be in these situations doesn’t quite fit anymore. It gives me something to think about as I get in my car and head for home.
By the time I’m in my neighborhood my mind has already drifted ahead of me—past Loki’s inevitable howling greeting, to the soft glow of the TV in the living room where Darby will probably be, knees tucked under a blanket, pretending she’s fine.
And for the first time all night, my chest loosens.
Whatever else is broken, at least I know exactly who I want to see at the end of the night.