Chapter 16
“Text him.” Whitney sits up, rallied by my Reed saga.
“Your husband is missing, and you want me to text some guy to potentially spend time away from you while you’re here, fretting all alone?”
“Yes. Then I can fret over you for a second instead of the five thousand horrific explanations of what’s happened to Glenn that I’ve cooked up in my head. Help me tune out Catastrophizing Whitney and live in a romance bubble with my cous-sister for a second.”
I cut her a serious look. “I thought we agreed never to use that word.”
“Mom says it a lot. It’s rubbing off on me.” She holds out her hand. “Let me see what you came up with on the plane.”
I reluctantly hand over my iPhone, watching nervously as she scrolls through the list of text drafts.
She taps one. “This.”
I peer over her shoulder.
Free Tuesday for a second date? 7 p.m. Barney’s in Studio City at the bar. Eat beforehand. Wear clothes.
“That?”
Whitney makes some edits: switching out Tuesday for tomorrow (Monday). She changes 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. and flips the phone around to show it to me.
“This isn’t a text—it’s a demand. This draft was a joke! Most of these drafts were a joke.”
She shoots me an impassive glare. “How many people have you casually dated?”
“. . . Zero,” I mutter.
“Exactly. And how many people have I casually dated?”
I hunch forward with the weight of her expertise. “Everyone ever until you met Glenn.”
“And did I seduce them successfully and make them come to me wanting a relationship?”
“Yes, many times,” I mumble.
Whitney can date multiple people at the same time. Honestly that’s some sort of superpower. How does a person even have time to think about multiple people romantically, let alone date them?
She taps my phone again. “Send him this text.”
“That text has absolutely no context about what I’m doing here at all.”
“That’s the point, Rick.”
“It acknowledges nothing that’s gone on in the email realm of this situation.”
“Again. That’s the point.”
I pull a blanket over my head and yank it tight under my chin. “It doesn’t sound like something I would say.”
“I thought you wanted this text to be casual.”
“Yeah.”
“So that. Is. The point.” Whitney comes alive for the first time since I got here. She grabs my arm, shaking it, eyes flashing. “You need to gauge how much you actually like him. That way you’ll know if pursuing him further, in any fashion, is worth it.
“Think of it as a research date. How much of the wedding-date chemistry was you being swept up in the moment, and how much of it was cold, hard, irresistible sexual magnetism? Do you legitimately have an emotional connection or was that just a one-night passing feeling? You’ll only find out if you see him again.
” She pauses, mushing her lips together in thought.
“You know what, I’m going to give you an official assignment because I know how much you fucking love your homework. ”
I guffaw. “I don’t ‘fucking love’ homework. I enjoy taking a task and accomplishing it on time to my fullest ability—”
“You do, too, fucking love homework. All your jobs are adult homework.” She squeezes my arm.
“I want you to come back to me having evaluated both your emotional and physical connection on a scale from one to a hundred. Here.” She yanks a notebook from under the coffee table glass and rips out a page with a breakdown of physical and emotional categories to grade him on, including but not limited to: physical attraction, kissing, casual touch, emotional intelligence, comedic compatibility, and “other.”
I stare at it for a minute, committing the categories to memory.
The woman’s right—having this tiny shift in perspective makes me feel less vulnerable. It shifts the power dynamic just the slightest amount in my direction. Now this isn’t necessarily a date, it’s a research project, and I can rock a research project.
Me [11:01 p.m.]: Free tomorrow for a second date? 9pm Barney’s in Studio City at the bar. Eat beforehand. Wear clothes.
Reed [11:30 p.m.]: Okay Renee.