16. Myer
M yer~
Dinner was going well enough to get my hopes up for that kiss at the end of the night, and Calista was also proving to be a lot more than what you assumed when looking at her.
Blondes always got a bad rap, but not only was Calista beautiful, but everything about her was entertaining as hell.
I never knew what was going to come out of her mouth, and I found myself looking forward to whatever it was going to be.
Nevertheless, I wanted to know what my chances were with her, and there was only one way to do that. So, once our waitress delivered our desserts, I decided to go big or go home.
“Okay, so why are you single?” I asked. “Honestly, you’re a goddamn delight, and it’s blowing my mind that you’re not taken.”
“Five years ago, I broke up with my boyfriend of ten years for the same reason that any woman leaves a man after that long,” she answered candidly.
“I caught him cheating on me, and after a showdown worthy of a Jerry Springer episode, I threw him out of our house, never wanting to see him again. Luckily, we’d been renting, waiting to combine our finances until after we got married, so our breakup hadn’t been that messy.
Well, apart from the broken heart thing. ”
“Jesus,” I whispered, never imagining that she’d been in a relationship for that long. “I...I’ve got no words. I’m...I’m sorry.”
“What’s there to say?” she sighed. “It was my mistake, and one that’s taken me five years to deal with.”
“You must have loved him a lot if it’s taken you this long to move on,” I remarked evenly, doing my best not to let my jealousy shine through again.
Calista scowled. “Oh, please,” she huffed. “The fact that he was a cheating snatch napkin helped me get over him rather quickly, so it wasn’t that at all.”
“What in the hell is a snatch napkin?” I asked, my spoon paused in the air.
Calista rolled her eyes. “A menstrual pad.”
“Of course, it is,” I replied, refusing to visit that topic on our first date.
“Anyway, I hadn’t wanted to jump into another relationship right away, so instead of using another man to help mend my broken heart, I had decided to take some time to heal completely, so that I didn’t carry any baggage with me into my next relationship, but then.
..” She shrugged. “Time just got away from me. While I’ve been on a couple of dates here and there, they’d been.
..I don’t know. It’d felt as if I’d just been going through the motions, which I might have been. ”
“So, you can honestly say that you’re over your ex?” I asked, my chest feeling a bit tight.
“Oh, yeah,” she scoffed. “More than over him.”
After taking a bite of my ice-cream brownie, I leaned back in my seat, saying, “That’s good to know.”
“So, what about you?” she asked. “Why are you single?”
“I’d met Paula six years ago, and we were together for five years,” I answered, and it was hard not to notice how Calista shifted in her seat, not happy with the news that my breakup was still rather fresh.
“Five years is a long time,” she remarked evenly, her teeth nibbling the inside of her cheek.
“I agree,” I replied. “Especially, the five-year gap between our ages.”
“She’s five years younger than you are?”
I nodded. “Yep, and when we’d first started dating, I had convinced myself that five years was no big deal, but they turned out to be a really big deal.”
“In what way?”
“While I’d been thinking about marriage and kids more, all Paula seemed to care about was being the next big thing on the internet,” I explained.
“Not sure what she’s doing now, but back then, she’d been aiming to be another social media influencer, and she’d also been happy enough with letting me carry all the household finances myself.
It was three years into our relationship that I finally began to see her for what she was, and that was someone on a very different page from my own. ”
“So...so, you broke up with her?”
I nodded again. “I had to. Even if she hadn’t been ready for marriage and kids, it’d been clear that Paula hadn’t been interested in anything other than fun, and I was too old for that shit.
I mean, yeah, I like to have fun and enjoy myself every now and again, but that’s all that Paula had been about.
She had five years to where she needed to catch up to me, and I hadn’t been willing to wait. ”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t imagine that it’s easy to break up with someone over something so non-dramatic.”
“Breakups of any kind are never easy,” I replied, doing my best to keep Calista from thinking that she was a rebound for me.
“However, it wasn’t the actual breakup that I had struggled with; it’d been the doubt.
You know, wondering what if I’d just given her some more time to. ..to find her way or whatever.”
“Well, how did she react when you broke up with her?”
“As expected, she’d been upset,” I answered. “However, looking back, I think that she was more upset about losing her opened wallet than anything else.”
Calista winced. “Ouch.”
“Yeah, and it was easy to see that we’d been falling off long before the breakup,” I went on. “After she had finally moved out, it hadn’t taken long for me to sell the house and move on. Honestly, I should have been more upset than I had been.”
“Do you hear from her at all?”
I shook my head. “No, and the fact that I’m not bothered by that says a lot.”
“Have you been on any dates before this one?” she asked, and I almost cursed my honesty. Calista was probably feeling like a rebound right now, and that was not what I wanted.
“A few,” I admitted. “However, they were all misses, no hits. Either I’m doing something wrong, or dating is a lot different these days.”
“I wouldn’t know since I don’t date,” she said. “I get asked out a lot, but it’s usually from guys at the facilities that I audit, and so that’s a big conflict of interest that I’m just not interested in getting involved in.”
Yeah, that wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
“So, you...you get hit on at work all the time?” I asked, needing clarification because I didn’t like to share.
Calista just shrugged. “I wouldn’t say it like that. Just that...that I’ve been asked out enough times that...well, most of the guys at these places know that I will say no.”
“I can’t say that I’m okay with the idea of guys hitting on you all the time,” I told her bluntly. “So, we’re going to have to figure something out there.”
The woman’s hazel eyes widened. “You want me to quit my job?”
“No,” I rushed out laughing. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Well, then what in the hell did you mean?”
“I just meant that...that if you end up letting me kiss you at the end of our date, I might have to buy you a ring or something to show that your taken.”
Her beautiful eyes got even wider. “Have you lost your mind? I’m not going to wear a fake wedding ring or whatever you’re thinking.”
“We can always go get matching tattoos,” I suggested, just throwing out ideas. “We can get each other’s names inked across our necks.”
The woman looked like she was going to tip out of her seat. “Why can’t I just tell them that I have a boyfriend? Why isn’t that acceptable?”
“The word husband packs a bigger punch,” I answered, shrugging like it was no big deal to pretend that we were married.
“You’ve got issues, Myer Justus,” she stated as she pointed her dessert fork at me. “Serious ones.”
I just grinned. “I never said that I didn’t.”
Luckily for my chances at landing this woman, dessert was quickly finished before we headed on home, and it really was convenient that she lived just next door. In fact, maybe the city would let us submit a petition to combine our houses once we exchanged I love yous.
I pulled into my driveway, then got out to open the door for her.
Silently, I walked Calista to her front door, and it was hard not to feel like a teenage boy with his first crush.
My heart was beating wildly inside my chest, and while I knew that there’d be no sex tonight, I really wanted that fucking kiss.
“So, I guess this is it,” Calista mumbled, and I had no idea if her choice of wording was a good thing or a bad thing.
“I guess so,” I agreed.
Then she leaned up on her tiptoes, grabbed my face in her hands, then kissed my cheek.
Well, fuck.