Chapter Seven
Maya
The drive home takes eleven minutes, and I spend every single one of them touching my bottom lip at red lights like a woman conducting a very serious scientific experiment.
Data point one. He kissed me in a parking lot with one working light, which by any reasonable review criteria should score low on romance. Data point two. My whole body disagreed with the reasonable review criteria the second his mouth touched mine, and hasn't finished disagreeing yet.
I stop at a stop sign and just sit there a second, foot on the brake, replaying it.
Not the pool, not Lottie, not the specific horror of my sex life becoming a betting market with a seventy-two-year-old bookie and her banana bread.
The kiss. The way he stepped in like he'd already decided, the way his hand found my jaw like it had been there before in some version of tonight I didn't get to live through first.
Been wanting to do that for a while now. That's it. That's the whole speech.
I laugh out loud in an empty car, alone, at a stop sign, like a person who has lost the plot.
The pool thing should still be humiliating.
An hour ago it was the single worst development of an already catastrophic week, right up there with the eviction notice and the conference room, and Vicky's rice cooker.
But somewhere between the door guy, the business thing, and driving home safe, the humiliation got up and left, quietly, without a note, the exact opposite of everything Vicky ever did.
He didn't fix it by arguing with me about it.
Just told me what mattered to him, plain, no cushioning, and it turns out that's more effective than any pep talk I've ever given myself in a mirror.
He has a way of tilting a thing sideways until I see it differently.
Doesn't try to talk me out of the feeling.
Just hands me a better one to hold instead.
My apartment looks like a crime scene when I let myself in, in the staged-listing-photo sense and the literal sense both.
Boxes stacked three high in the living room, labeled in my handwriting: KITCHEN — MISC, BEDROOM — DO NOT OPEN UNTIL EMOTIONALLY STABLE.
The couch sits alone in the middle of the room as if it's the last thing standing. I should keep packing. Once again, I have a system, and of course it’s color-coded and everything.
Instead, I sit down on the floor between two boxes and pull out my phone.
I scroll backward through two weeks of texts before I've decided to, thumb moving on its own the way it did with the kiss earlier, my body apparently running its own agenda tonight without checking in with the rest of me.
Wrong number. Not your landlord. Sounds like progress.
Sixty percent crime scene. Happy early birthday, Maya.
I read them in order, then read them again, and somewhere in the second pass I notice the thing underneath the jokes, the thing I've been too busy being funny about to name.
He makes me feel calm.
Not exciting-calm, not the adrenaline-and-butterflies kind everybody writes songs about.
Actual calm. The kind where my chest stops doing its usual thing, the tight, over-packed-suitcase feeling I've carried since the day Vicky's sticky note and my layoff had a joint custody arrangement over my nervous system.
When he's around, or even just when I'm looking at his name on a screen, some part of me stops bracing for the next bad thing.
I don't have a spreadsheet for that. Wouldn't know what column to put it in.
Me: Thank you.
Three dots. Then his reply, quick, like I knew it would be, because I've learned his rhythms the way I used to learn brand voice guidelines, except this one I didn't have to study for.
Archer: For what?
Me: Had a bit of an epiphany on the drive home. I wanted to say thanks for being a part of it.
I don't explain further. He doesn't ask me to.
That's the whole thing about him, the thing I keep circling back to like it's a discovery every single time even though it's the same discovery I made at one in the morning on my kitchen floor with a stranger's tequila in my system.
He takes what I hand him and doesn't demand receipts.
Archer: Alright. Glad I could help. Get some sleep, Spreadsheets.
I stare at the cursor blinking in the empty message box for longer than a reasonable person stares at anything.
My thumb hovers there the way his must have over my contact info weeks ago, if I've got the story right, if Sunny's whole falling-for-a-stranger playbook runs the same in every version of this.
I type in my address before I let myself think about it properly, before the list-making part of my brain can build a pros and cons column and ruin the moment with logistics.
I hit send.
Time to be bold.
The three dots appear, disappear, and reappear again. Making me question what I did. Was I reading too much into everything? Did I screw it all up?
Archer: You sure?
A major exhale leaves my body, and I smile.
Me: Yes.
If I’m to learn anything from these past two weeks, it’s living more in the moment and not in the plans. Embrace the misdirections and what life has to offer. And Archer is definitely something life has to offer.