A week later Ash Garrison—the “Guy’s Guy”—and I were prepping for our first lunch conference. At least, I was prepping. God only knew what he was doing.

We’d figured out a shared spreadsheet with questions on it, dates they came in, email addresses, all that kind of stuff. We could both edit it, so we just transferred all the requests for advice over to it as a master version. His questions were in blue font; mine were in pink. Original, huh?

When I read over what he was adding from his email, I began to wonder if he was cherry-picking all the ridiculous questions about sex just to irritate me.

Granted, these were surely important philosophical questions for the survival of mankind, but it sure wasn’t the kind of topics that Miss Behave usually got.

I knew that I had built a reputation for being a “good girl” online, but I hadn’t realized just how much until Ash Garrison stormed into my cubicle and my life.

Now I wasn’t sure if I needed to keep up the act or climb him like a tree to prove him wrong.

The morning of our meeting, I found myself carefully picking my clothes. I put on a plain black pencil skirt that stopped at my knees, and a pink sweater that clung to all the right places. My hair went up in a messy bun. In most ways it was an ordinary outfit, except for the shoes.

The shoes were extraordinary.

My retro pink and black spectator pumps made me three inches taller, but also made me feel like a million bucks.

Pete blatantly checked me out when I arrived at work, and even Dara lifted her eyebrows at me from under her heavy bangs.

“Big date later?”

I blushed and dropped into my chair. “No.”

My friend waited for an explanation. I busied myself with signing in to my computer.

“Isn’t today your first working session with Ash?” she asked me, folding her arms on the top of the cubicle wall.

“Maybe.”

“Ah.”

She disappeared for a moment. I checked my email. When I looked up, she was holding a freshly sharpened #2 pencil over the wall.

“Shove this in your hair. Better hot librarian effect.”

I took it.

The morning dragged, and at quarter to twelve I found myself fidgeting. Gah, what was wrong with me?

Yeah, Ash was an attractive guy, but he was also cocky, irreverent, and had “dude” written all over him. He was a guy’s guy—not just for advice, which was usually the kind of guy that you didn’t date for long.

Not that I planned to date him.

But it still irked me that he assumed my Miss Behave persona was my true personality. Maybe I was a closet party girl and he wasn’t giving me the benefit of the doubt.

Okay, I really wasn’t. But I hadn’t really become Miss Behave in the last couple of years, had I? I wasn’t a Puritan, but I did believe in manners and people being honest and considerate—something that didn’t usually show up in Tinder profiles.

I just wanted to believe that true love could still exist. That two people could meet each other, hit it off, find things in common, and like each other first. Maybe I was a little archaic that way. I talked about those things in my blog, and my following was growing, so I knew I wasn’t the only person who thought that way.

Just because I wanted to believe in love, didn’t mean that I didn’t also appreciate the allure of lust. I simply kept it just beyond arm’s reach most of the time.

“Lizzie?”

Ash stood just outside my cubicle looking like he’d just showered. Smelling like he’d just showered. For a brief moment I imagined the privileged life of his shower gel, rubbed between his hands and his body. The bubbles on his chest, his fingers trailing over his six-pack, down, down…

“Hello? Lizzie?”

I blinked. Must stop fantasizing. “I’m sorry, was noon too early for you?” I snarked. My inner bitch tended to come out when I was feeling embarrassed—which was more often than I wanted to admit.

“Not at all. I’m raring to go.” He lifted his laptop bag. “Did you eat yet?”

“No.”

“Okay, I’ll leave my bag here and go get us some lunch. Falafel or sushi?”

“Are those my only two options?”

He grinned. “They’re the two closest I scouted out that would be fast and probably won’t get shut down by the Health Department.”

“Sushi, I guess?” He sauntered off, leaving me staring at the lunch bag and thermos in the tote bag under my desk.

And eyeing his computer bag. It was plain, black, and easily snoopable. No, Lizzie. Don’t go there…

“Pete!”

“Yeah?”

“Can you take Ash’s bag and my laptop to the conference room for me while Dara and I have a mini-conference first?”

“Uh… okay?” floated his voice over the wall.

Dara popped up, her head appearing. “I heard my name. What’s up, Buttercup?”

“Roof?”

She nodded.

The roof unlocked, it was the place where staffers often went for a breath of fresh air, to shoot the shit, or contemplate the shitty reality of modern journalism. When we got up there, I pulled her to a corner away from the lunchtime smokers.

I crossed my arms over my chest. “I have a problem.”

“Is he six foot two and has shoulders you could build a hockey rink on?”

“I hadn’t noticed.” I’d been too busy looking at the way his t-shirt clung to his chest, showing off some impressive abs. “But yes.”

I looked off into the distance at the nearby buildings. The heat of Indian summer shimmered in the air, but soon enough it would turn cool. Just like me. Maybe I was just going crazy from lack of companionship. Clearly I’d gone too long without a date.

“What’s the problem?”

I swiveled back to her, frowning. “He thinks he’s God’s gift to women, and I feel compelled to be the first recipient to return him.”

She laughed. “Nobody is saying you have to date him, just work with him.”

“He rubs me the wrong way.”

The wind blew her bangs, revealing a raised eyebrow. “You want him to rub you the right way.”

“Maybe. But he already thinks I’m a…”

“Cock tease?”

I flushed.

“Then why can’t you just flirt with him?” she asked.

“I’m terrible at flirting! I don’t even know how!”

“Usually sexy clothes and witty banter does the trick. You didn’t dress up like that today for Pete or Rob,” she pointed out and gave me a knowing look.

“Shit. I’m already doing it, aren’t I?”

Dara shrugged. “If it walks like a duck…”

Even if I had been subconsciously flirting, I didn’t want Ash to think that I knew I was doing it. As mixed up as it sounded, I wanted him to think that I could flirt but chose not to.

Or rather, Miss Behave wasn’t as behaved as he thought.

“What do I do?” I asked Dara. “If I want to de-flirt myself right now?”

She looked me up and down. Down and up. Then took the pencil out of my bun. “Best I can do,” she said with a shrug.

We headed back downstairs, where Ash was waiting in the conference room for me with a styrofoam container and a cold bottle of water. He had his computer set up, staring at it with a small smile on his face and shoveling seaweed salad into his mouth.

“Sorry, I started without you. I was starving. Just came from the gym.”

That explained the fresh shower. I tried to imagine him at the gym. Was he a treadmill runner? A lifter? Which muscles did he flex… agh!

“Thanks for lunch.”

He nodded. “I think I know which question we should do this week,” he announced.

I flipped my laptop open. “Please don’t say the Shark Week one.”

“Eww.” His nose wrinkled. “No.” Then he read out: “

Huh. That was so… straightforward. I’d been expecting something a little more… twisted from him. A little more salacious.

“Okay.” I looked at my California roll then over at his lunch. He had spicy tuna, and was adding more wasabi than I believed a human could survive. “So how do we answer him?”

“Well, I know a little bit about dating sites.”

“Really? I thought women just dropped at your feet in the streets.”

He grinned, pointing his chopsticks at me. “Depends on what heels they’re wearing. I can’t be responsible for wardrobe malfunctions,” he joked.

At least, I think he joked. There was a good chance he got a long look at my heels earlier—and my legs poured into them. The possibility made me warm inside.

I grabbed a legal pad and started jotting down some notes. I was old-fashioned that way, too.

“So, we’ve got match dot com, eHarmony dot com, plentyoffish dot com,” I began.

“Trust you to know the mainstream, lame ones.”

“What’s your go to? Onenightstand dot com?”

“Ouch.” He put down his chopsticks and leaned over the table at me. “I’ll have you know I’ve never had a one-night stand.” His eyes darkened to almost black in his glare.

I froze, pen poised in my hand. “I’m sorry.” I’d gone too far with the bitchiness, but it was like I couldn’t control myself around him.

“I’ve yet to meet a woman who thought one night with me was enough.”

I threw the pen at him. “Ass. So you want to take Tinder and all the skeevy sites?”

“And I’m guessing Miss Behave wants to take eHarmony and OK Cupid.” He batted his eyelashes at me as he tilted his head and drew a heart over his chest.

Yeah, because I needed to notice his chest more.

“Don’t you think that people can find true and lasting love through the Internet?” I asked him, genuinely curious.

I knew more people who used dating sites than who didn’t. These days, when the first thing you did upon meeting a person was Google them, it made sense to vet potential relationships online.

“Do you think that true and lasting love even exists?” he lobbed back at me, pushing away his empty containers.

I squished a stray piece of avocado with a chopstick. “I’d like to think so.”

“How very optimistic of you. Most people can’t even sustain a lasting relationship with a plant, much less people.”

“Okay, what’s next?” I asked. I wasn’t about to tell him about the plants that had taken over my dining table. “We’re not doing this every day. Let’s punch out a week of questions at a time, and then we can do the back and forth over email.”

Thankfully, the Powers That Be had given us a couple of weeks to get up to speed and write enough columns to get ahead.

“How about this?” he asked.

I cringed. “Oh my god, really?”

Ash nodded.

I shook my head in disbelief as I scanned the spreadsheet. Some people. “Here’s one.”

“You are being ghosted, sweetheart,” he scoffed. “Get over it. Nothing lasts forever.”

“Is that the theme of all your responses? I gotta ask—what qualifies you to be an advice columnist? Because I can get better advice from a fortune cookie.”

“I tell it like it is.” He got up to throw out his sushi box. When he leaned over my shoulder to grab my trash, he turned his head and added close to my ear, “Most people want to hear the truth, in my experience.”

His breath warmed my cheek. “Even if the truth hurts?” I asked, feeling on edge at his nearness.

“Especially if the truth hurts. Come on. They’re not writing a stranger with the expectation that they’ll hear what they want to hear. They’ve got friends and family who can tell them that.” He lifted my empty container and backed away, leaving the ghostly imprint of his body heat beside me.

“What about empathy, compassion, sensitivity?”

“They have their place—with real friends. These people aren’t your friends. You’re kidding yourself if you think they even really trust you. Hell, you don’t even know if they’re real or not. They could be making up these questions for shits and giggles.”

I jolted in my chair. That actually hadn’t occurred to me. I always approached every question as though it was a real problem, from a real person. Maybe I was too naïve.

I’d always tried my best to be kind, considerate, and sincere. As a result, I probably got more softball questions than Ash did, but that didn’t make them any less worthy of answering. Even people with wedding invitation questions needed help. Just because they weren’t kinky or offensive didn’t make them less valuable.

I told him that.

He didn’t pull any punches. “Which is why you’re Miss Behave. I’ve figured it out. They write you knowing what tone you’re going to take. You’ll let them off the hook. You won’t make them accountable, but I will. I do.” The criticism in his voice was clear.

“I make people accountable!” Somehow he’d managed to make me feel like a lesser journalist.

He sat down in front of his laptop again, looking skeptical. Saying nothing.

My forehead creased. “I’m not just a hand-holder!”

“Okay. We’ve got a few more questions to decide on, here.” He checked the time on his phone. “Let’s keep moving.”

The rest of the meeting went faster, but it felt more like picking a jury than working together. He had objections; I had objections. In the end, we had a week’s worth of questions that neither of us was crazy about answering, but hopefully that’s where our writing skills would come in.

I was already formulating responses in my head to some of them, now super sensitive to the fact that I might be ‘too nice’.

But that was what the editors had wanted with Miss Behave. They wanted an old-fashioned kind of column, which is what I gave them—even if sometimes it went against the grain of what I really thought.

Thankfully, I could use some of those questions for my blog. I needed to get a new post out, but I was struggling to balance being Miss Behave and Miss Givings.

With the dreaded day job winning out recently, I found myself worried that I was becoming too behaved. Soon I would need to write into my own column to sort out my looming identity crisis.

Where did Miss Behave leave off and Lizzie begin?