Chapter 16
chapter
sixteen
SHAY
“No,” Eames said, “you don’t need a forty-year-old man who’s still ‘figuring it out.’”
True to my promise, a few days later we met across the hall in Eames and Olly’s apartment. They’d connected my phone to the television, so now all four of us saw my potential matches in HD.
Eames swiped, and then swiped immediately on someone with no bio whose only photo was a low-angle selfie in the car.
A new face filled the screen instantly.
Olly tilted her head. “Maybe?”
Eames and Lithie turned to her in unison, eyes wide.
“He’s wearing a Punisher tee,” Eames said.
Her eyes grew. “Oh, shit, didn’t see.”
Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. They filtered through a seemingly endless amount of men who were all rejected for some reason or other.
Olly and Eames’s apartment was a mix of Barbie Dream House and seventies hippie. Olly, Eames, and I squeezed into a burnt-orange couch. Lithie sat in front of us on a pink-and-white mushroom-shaped footstool.
“Oh, wait,” I said. “What about him?”
He was twenty-seven—a little young for me, but not too young—and at least had a fully formed frontal lobe. He played a board game in his photo.
“No,” my sister said, swiping before I could respond.
“But he was cute and into D&D.”
“You need someone grown,” she said. “Someone you don’t have to teach. You taught Graham for years. Taught him how to do laundry, taught him how to fucking brush his teeth properly.” Lithie made a face. It was true. When I met Graham, he didn’t know to brush his teeth twice a day.
She continued. “There is nothing less sexy than a man that needs to be taught.”
So we stayed like that, swiping and swiping, with occasional breaks to pop corn or grab a drink.
“Wait!” Lithie yelled. “Him.”
My gut did a somersault at the profile of a man named “C.” I felt an immediate tug, like something in my chest came loose at the sight of his sharp jaw and intense blue eyes. Some kind of tattoo snaked out of the collar of his shirt, and I was dying to know how many he had.
Oh my god.
I knew him.
“I met him,” I said. “A week ago. He…” Almost beat someone up for running into me. “He bought me tea.”
“He looks intense,” Olly said, approvingly. “Not in a puts the lotion on the skin way, but in like a…” She put her hand to her plush lips, uncertain.
“In like a you won’t know how to walk the next day way?” Eames asked. Olly placed her finger to her nose—exactly.
“What the fuck, he already messaged you.” Lithie shot me an accusing look.
“You’ve made us sift through every Euphoria reject on the planet when this was in your inbox?
” She turned her attention to his message, reading aloud, “Not sure how a three-way with two galaxies works, but I’d like to learn.
You’re the hottest thing I’ve ever seen. ”
My breath caught. I swallowed something sharp. He hadn’t called me a cosmetologist or asked if my lips were pouty from dick sucking.
He knew what that picture was.
Or he’d looked up the image and studied. Which was infinitely hotter.
“Are you kidding me?” Lithie said. “He even responded to your nerd bait.”
“He called you hot too,” Olly said.
“He called the Bullet Cluster hot,” I clarified. “Which, it is. It’s like the hottest known cluster.” Eames and Olly released a groan in unison.
Lithie exhaled and rubbed between her brow in a fucking save me way. “You’re responding.” Before I could say anything, Lithie read her response aloud slow and staccato, enunciating each word as she typed it. “What are you doing this week and do you want one of those things to be me?”
“Oh my god!” I lunged for her. “You can’t say that!”
“Sent!” She squealed as I tackled her off the mushroom-shaped stool.
He wouldn’t respond. He’d probably sent that by accident.
“He’s already typing!” Lithie said, her voice squished and breathless with my weight.
“Damn, already?” Eames said. “He’s down bad.”
Lithie squirmed out from under me and I followed her, toppling us both over the couch as she read the newest text aloud.
“Are you free tomorrow?” Lithie squealed, her voice reaching a pitch only a dog could hear.
“No!” I said. “I can’t meet him.”
“Why?” Lithie deadpanned. “Is your vagina still toppling democracies and installing puppet nations? Or has Obama-era hope finally entered the labia?”
Before meeting Void, I’d gotten my first wax in two years, which my waxer was kind enough to inform me was why it hurt so bad.
“I mean, I don’t know if it’s that good,” I said. “But Bush has vacated the White House.”
She gave me a look like, What is your damage then?
“It’s, uh…” I struggled for a reason. “It’s weird to go on a date on a Thursday.”
All three of them collectively groaned.
“It’s Thursday,” Olly said. “So tomorrow is Friday.”
“One of these days your inability to remember the day of the week is going to get you into trouble,” Eames said.
“Now that we’re all on the same calendar,” my sister said, “I’m telling him tomorrow works.”
“No!” Lithie froze at my outburst, waiting. “I’m nervous…”
Lithie rolled her eyes. “So you’ll let a random fuck you in a graveyard—”
“I didn’t fuck anyone—”
“But getting drinks is just a step too far?”
I covered my face in my hands. I don’t know.
“There’s something wrong with me,” I groaned into my hands.
“You’re going out,” Olly said. “Lithie, tell him yes.”
“No!” I pulled my head out of my hands and reached for the phone. She rolled her eyes and, ignoring my outstretched hand, stood up.
I followed her, scrambling to my feet. I reached for the phone but my five-foot-four couldn’t match her five-foot-eight”. The last time Lithie pulled this bullshit, I was ten and she was twelve, keeping the remote away from me.
“There, sent,” she said, handing me the phone.
“Bitch,” I grumbled.
Lithie smiled saccharine. “You’re welcome.”
A moment later, C responded, sending an address for a restaurant downtown.