My phone goes off as I grab a folded towel and step out of the shower. It’s my bestie, Trish’s personalized ringtone. Since her teaching job let out for the summer, she’s been calling more often. Her timing isn’t great today, though. My shift starts in a few hours. I still need to eat before I leave. Throwing on some clothes, I towel dry my hair and turn on the blow dryer, and I’m instantly pissed. I do this every time, thinking I should probably cut all this hair and do away with this forty-minute ritual with the damn blow dryer. I haven’t been able to bring myself to schedule an appointment with my hairdresser lately, which is why this tangle of thick red mane is all the way down past my butt. I look in the mirror, studying how it frames my face. My chest starts to ache and I take a long breath. It kind of reminds me of a picture of Mom when she was younger.

The phone screen lights up again, and I see Trish’s name on the screen. This time, it’s a text message, so I quickly check to see if it’s anything urgent.

I reply with,

As I finish up drying my hair, I’m itching to tell her that as much as I enjoy them, I have a limit as to how much PDA I want to witness when I go out with my friends. Trish, Luke and I spent a lot of time together in high school, but back then, they weren’t dating. Hanging out with them now means watching the happy couple snuggle up, share inside jokes and innuendo whose meaning I’m not privy to, and overall, be a constant reminder that I’ll forever be single.

I’m not girlfriend material. I won’t do dating or relationships. Trish says that my past prevents me from opening up to most people. She doesn’t know how true it is. She knows that I lost my parents, but I’ve spared her the mental trauma of the details. But she’s right that other than her, Luke and my Grams, I trust no one.

I feel my stomach twist up in knots in reaction. The life we have here is fragile. It’s built on a lie and I can’t afford to have the bottom drop out by letting my guard down with anyone else.

The phone buzzes again. Jeez, she can be persistent. It’s Trish’s reminder to make good on my promise to call her back. Putting away my hair dryer, I do just that. She answers on the first ring.

“Hey,” I greet her.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“The hair needs tending to,” I groan. “But to answer your question, yes! I really miss you guys too,” I say sweetly. “And yes, dinner sounds great.”

“Awesome,” she squeals like we’re back in high school. “What are you feeling like? Italian, Japanese, or Indian?”

I can tell that she’s starting to get a little bored already and it’s only the beginning of summer break. She and Luke recently tied the knot and bought their first house together, all in the same couple of months. They have a baby on the way too. This year, they won’t be traveling like they’re used to, as the budgets are tight. That’s where I come in.

“How about Malloy’s?” I ask. It’s a quaint little bistro with a decent menu that won’t break the bank. “Can we go on Tuesday, for around six?”

“Works for me.”

“Great. I’ll make a reservation. Don’t be late,” I tell her.

“We won’t. We’ve been dying to have a night out with you. Hey, How’s Jeff?”

Trish used to work part-time at the Speak-Easy, the gentlemen’s club where I still work. She was pretty good. My boss, Jeff still asks about her. Stripping helped her pay for college, and didn’t affect her when it came time to apply for her grade school teaching job. That’s why I like a city this size. It’s big enough for a person to disappear into and resurface as someone else, without attracting too much attention.

“Jeff’s good. He’s still missing you.”

“Tell him I said hi.”

I laugh. “You live twenty blocks away, lady. Swing by the club and tell him yourself.”

“Hell no,” she shouts. “Luke will have a fit. And Jeff will probably try to squeeze me into one of those outfits and shove me on stage again.”

“You’re not wrong,” I agree. “But shut up about squeezing your size two scrawny behind into anything. Have you seen my ass?”

She laughs hard then huffs out a long, frustrated breath. “Wait until you see this baby bump. Nothing fits me anymore.”

I haven’t seen Trish for a few weeks, so I have to try to imagine what a slender gazelle would look like with a little tummy. I’m sure she’s exaggerating. “Luke must be so excited.”

“He is. I just wish he’d calm down with all the sex. I swear he won’t leave me alone. He’ll be at it all night long if I don’t tell him the baby and I need our beauty sleep. Then he wakes up and starts all over again.”

“And there it is,” I groan.

“What?”

“TMI, girl. Way, way TMI. Tone that shit down a notch. Single people like me don’t want to be reminded that everyone except me is having sex. Tell it to your married friends.”

“Shit, sorry Rose,” she tells me in a less than empathetic tone.

“No, you’re not,” I tease her.

“You know, you can take care of that little problem anytime you want to,” she says suggestively.

Trish knows that I’m not dating, but it’s by choice. She believes that I’m just way too picky. Maybe I am, but that’s not the reason I’ve kept myself out of the meat market. I don’t want anyone to get too close. I don’t want to be forced to start over.

“Maybe so, but that doesn’t change the fact that whatever happens between you and Luke in the bedroom needs to stay the hell out of my ears. I don’t need the visual,” I add, laughing a little.

Grams calls me from the bottom of the stairs to come down for dinner. Grateful for the well-timed interruptions, I tell Trish I’ll call her tomorrow and mentally wipe the image of her and Luke from my brain.

* * *

When Tuesday rolls around, I let Trish and Luke drag me to a new sports bar for drinks after dinner. This is so not my scene. Crowds put me on edge, and new places make me weary, so it’s zero for two already. We’re seated near a window, bringing it to zero for three, because now I feel even more exposed. At least the music is decent. The waiter who takes our drink order is nice to look at too. And he’s back with our orders in record time. Big servings of booze, beer and cocktails in flashy, oversized glasses and stemware. Impressive.

I look around as we catch up on gossip and other updates, relaxing into the ambiance and letting the alcohol loosen me up.

Luke lets go of Trish’s shoulder and leans forward. “You have a few admirers,” he informs me with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes.

“I’ll pass,” I say dismissively.

He runs a relaxed hand through his neatly combed sandy brown hair and raises his thick eyebrows. “Without even checking them out?”

“Trust me, I already have,” I giggle. “Pass on all of them. Pass, pass, pass, and pass.”

From a young age, I’ve taught myself to be attuned to my surroundings. Trish always used to say I have eyes at the back of my head. Luke says I was a trained spy in a former life. But it’s about staying alert and observing without being too obvious.

“Pass on who exactly?” Luke tests me, but he should know better.

I take a long sip of my custom drink. It’s a sex on the beach with pineapple and kiwi wedges on one side of the rim of my massive glass. It tastes so good that I hear myself moan without meaning to after each sip. If they keep up the serving sizes after their grand opening launch period, they just might convert me into a regular.

Leaning back in my seat, I smooth out the skirt of my black knee-length dress and prepare to answer Luke’s challenge, going from memory of what I’ve already seen. “Let’s see. The guy in the red shirt is too uptight. Black blazer sitting two tables away is a player. Navy and white striped polo shirt by the bar is faking it till he makes it. The two over there with matching black muscle shirts like to share one woman, and… who else?” I look around again. “Right. Dude with the cowboy hat and office boy drinking scotch are both regulars at the Speak-Easy, so that’s an automatic no. White shirt with the military haircut is a cheater. He took off his wedding ring while he was walking toward the girl he’s now sitting next to at the bar.” I can’t hold in my laughter when I see one more. “Oh, and stud muffin with all the ink down his arm, it’ll take me all night to tell you why he’s all wrong. It’d be like the way we’re wired to slow down to witness a car crash.”

Trish and Luke can’t stop laughing either.

“How do you do that so fast?” Luke asks after a minute. “Dismiss all the potentially eligible single men in a room before they say a word to you?”

“Oh, they talk to her,” Trish tells him with a gleam in her eye. “Just not with their mouths.”

“Why do you have to make it sound so dirty?” I whine. “I prefer to call it listening with my eyes.”

Trish stares off at someone behind me. “Hang on. What about the mysterious one at the bar? He’s only been watching you since he walked in.”

“Which one?” I ask and start to turn.

“He hasn’t been sitting there for very long,” she answers. “Don’t look. Shit, now he knows we’re talking about him.”

“Describe him, then.”

“Tall. Really tall. Grey eyes. Beard. Wearing all black. He ordered a gin and tonic but hasn’t touched it yet. Oh crap, he’s leaving.”

I turn, but only catch a glimpse of his back as he slips through the door to the packed outdoor patio. “Oh well. I missed one.”

“You never miss,” she reminds me.

I hold up my huge drink. “I also never had one of these before.”

“Boo-hoo,” Luke teases me. “Cry me a river.”

“She doesn’t cry, remember?” Trish says. “Which means I’ll have to.”

She’s right.

I cried hard for four days when I was seven. It started on the night I saw my parents murdered right in front of me, and it ended on the day of their joint funeral. I shed a lifetime’s worth of tears, and then I told myself I needed to be strong, and I stopped.

All the tears and prayers and wishes in the world wouldn’t bring them back.

Tears wouldn’t save me either. That’s why I put all my energy into my survival.

Grams was sure that the people who took my parents’ lives would eventually come back for me. I never saw anyone’s face that night. I just remember the fear, and all the blood. But Grams grew up in a different reality. She was a paratrooper nurse during the Vietnam War. A tough cookie, my father used to say. She saw a hell of a lot and lived to tell the tale. Thank God for her. I don’t think I’d be alive if I didn’t have her.

She walked away from her entire life to protect me. Gave up friends, sold her house. She changed both our names and moved us out of state to get away. Then she taught me the five rules she lived by.

Don’t trust the system.

Always watch your back.

To survive, you have to be ready to die.

Always have an out.

A friend you share your secrets with can be an enemy waiting to happen.

The last time I cried was on my sixteenth birthday. Grams took me to meet her trustee to go over her will, and to review everything my parents left to me. It was the first time it hit me that I might have to live in a world without her in it. That evening when we got home, I sobbed for the entire night.

“You’re off your game, young lady,” Luke muses, pulling me from my thoughts.

“What’s with you two? Is it tag-team Rose into a corner night?” I shake my head, but I’m not taking them too seriously. This is how we are whenever we get together.

Trish shrugs and relaxes into Luke’s shoulder, turning a bit somber. “You’ve never shed a tear in the entire time that we’ve known each other.”

“Cut me some slack,” I tell them, thinking about whoever it was that was watching me. It bugs me that I didn’t notice that one person. For the rest of the evening, I have an uneasy feeling that won’t leave my gut.

I can’t afford to miss one.

One wrong move and it can be all over for me and Grams.