Mariah

All of the ingredients to make lemon bars are lined up on the counter. They’ve been sitting there since I got home. Two loads of laundry have been washed, dried, folded and put away. The new flannel sheets fit perfectly on my bed and the carpet in the living room smells like the lavender scented water I used in the shampoo cleaner.

It was enough to provide a semi-distraction from the day. The goal, however, was missed. While my body might be tired, my brain is not.

Extending my arms across the table, I rest my forehead on them. The water and soap from cleaning has washed away Lance’s cologne. I sniff around my shirt, shoulder, forearms, and it all comes back lacking his scent.

My groan is obnoxious. It’s repeated, quieter this time, as the click of Whitney’s key frees the front door.

“You home?” The door clasps shut. “Mariah!” She mumbles about knowing I’m here, that my car is out front, about what a jerk I am to make her play hide-and-seek. But when she comes into the kitchen and our eyes meet, she stops. “Um, what the hell happened to you?”

I angle my face toward the table so I don’t have to see her.

“Are you okay?” She drops into a seat next to me, her palm resting on my wrist. “Talk to me.”

“I never should’ve used that app,” I mutter.

“You used it? I didn’t know that. I’m kinda proud.”

Groaning again, not so obnoxiously since I have an audience, I drag myself into a sitting position. She performs a quick evaluation of my appearance and flinches.

“Don’t be,” I puff. “There’s nothing to be proud of in this fiasco.”

“Did you meet someone from it?” She squirms in her seat. “There are rules about meeting up with people, Mariah. You didn’t meet a freak, did you?”

Lance’s smile flutters through my memory. The way he showed up out of nowhere when I ran into my mother when he could’ve just stayed away. Remembering the way he buffered that situation makes me fill with an outrageous warmth.

“No,” I ruminate before answering. “He wasn’t a freak.” While I’m scrubbing my hands down my face, the muscles in the back of my neck become tense. “I met someone though. Someone I already know.”

“Um …”

“Yeah.”

“I’m humiliated, Whit,” I cry. “I tell students every day to watch who they are online. To not do or say things they wouldn’t say to someone in real life. I preach and preach and preach, setting out pamphlets about this topic. Hanging these cute little posters around the library to remind them about the dangers of social media, and what do I go and do? Exactly what I tell them not to.”

I could cry real tears. Pinching the bridge of my nose, I shut my eyes and feel like a fraud. “I said things to him on that stupid app that I would never, ever say to him in real life. And now I’ll have to see him every day knowing he knows that I said those things. I just …” Dropping my hand, my shoulders fall right along with it. “I just want to climb under a rock and die.”

She watches me warily. “Can I ask who this guy is?”

I brace myself for her reaction. “Lance.”

“The hot teacher?” she says, poker-faced.

“Yes,” I grouse.

“The guy who was here the other night. Who took you to his grandma’s house.”

“Yes.”

Her amusement knows no bounds. “Let me get this straight. Out of all the men on that app, you somehow managed to find him?”

It’s a rhetorical question. Or it better be because I’m not holding her hand through this process.

“It is a semi-local, kind of regional app. So it’s not entirely impossible, but I am leaning towards fate, Mariah.” She gets to her feet and floats around the room like a cartoon princess.

“Fate? Since when is fate a form of hell?”

The spinning stops and she laughs. “Since when is screwing a hot history teacher a form of torture?”

“I didn’t screw him,” I mutter. But I’ve fucked myself to thoughts of him a million times.

“That’s your fault.”

Yes, it is.

I appreciate the few quiet seconds as she flops back in the chair again. My fantasies of Lance were just that—fantasies. Make-believe. Not real. Now my reality has been skewed, flipped upside down and it’s all merging together in one ridiculously hot, yet slightly mortifying, situation.

Whitney shakes her head. “You are the only person in the universe who can find fault with an app that helped you meet a gorgeous and sexy man who already likes you to begin with!”

It’s so much more complicated than that. So complicated, in fact, that I don’t even know how to boil it down to make sense of it.

“How’d he take it?” she asks.

“Oh, he thought it was the greatest thing ever.”

“And you should’ve too.”

“Look,” I gulp, feeling my cheeks ready to betray me. “We have one relationship, for lack of a better word, at work. What we had online wasn’t really me and wasn’t really him. Or maybe it was him, actually. But I definitely wasn’t being myself.”

It’s easiest to leave it at that. There’s no sense in bringing up the fact that he’s a hook-up guy, a one-night stand—a couple nights at best. And even if I could pull off a one-night-er, I couldn’t do it with Lance.

Whitney is my best friend for a few reasons. One, she’s loyal. Two, she takes me as I am. Three, she can read all my nuances appropriately.

She gets comfortable, curling a leg beneath her. “So what you’re saying is you are the book nerd in-person and a little vixen online?”

“No,” I say too quickly.

She barely contains her laugh. “How vixen did you go?”

“I’m not a vixen.”

“Clearly or you would’ve rode his cock like any other hot-blooded female. I saw him, Mariah. Your self-control is on a whole other level.”

“Can we focus here?” I say, pulling her out of that line of questioning. “I don’t know what to do.”

I expect a quick chirp about how to have sex or something equally inappropriate, but she surprises me.

It’s a moment you can only have with someone you’re close to, a moment where you don’t have to speak but thoughts are still being exchanged. Her foot starts to bounce on the floor as she grasps my panic. I, on the other hand, inflate my lungs a little more easily than I have been able to in the last handful of hours.

“I’ll see him in the morning,” I say, resolved. “How do I navigate this, Whit?”

“I didn’t think you’d use the app, to be honest. I love that you did, but I’m surprised.”

“Yeah, me too. Surprised, I mean,” I clarify. “Not loving that I did it.”

“Let’s start there. Why did you do it?”

A sense of calm settles over me, like when you’re in trouble and finally accept that everyone knows it was you who did it. You go through the motions of telling the truth because it’s only going to delay the inevitable if you dance around it. You just want the conversation to be over and the fallout realized.

“I was sitting here one night right after I heard about Chrissy being pregnant.” My throat is scorching as I put the thoughts I’ve kept to myself into the universe. “And I guess I kind of broke down, you know. Not crying and all that, but more of a pity party. Wondering if there’s something wrong with me. Considering adopting a cat.”

She drops her jaw in mock horror.

“Anyway,” I continue, “I just needed that confirmation. I just wanted to know I could still reel a guy in. That I wasn’t lame.”

“You can’t believe that. I won’t sit here and let you say you think you’re lame.”

“You know what I mean.”

She scoots her chair closer to mine and kicks at my foot. “I know you thought you’d be in a different place right now, but you aren’t for a reason.”

“I’m fine with that. Really,” I insist when she looks at me like I’m lying. “I’m happy I’m not with Eric. But it wouldn’t be a bad thing to have some nice, sweet, cute guy want to be with me.”

The words don’t make it past my lips before Lance’s face pops back into my mind. It’s the image of him at my car, his arms stretched overhead, a soft look in his eyes that is such a contrast to the playful one I often see.

“Like Lance?” she asks carefully.

“The end of that story would be a happy one,” I laugh. “That excludes him.”

“But what if it doesn’t?”

“It does.” Getting up, I head to the oven and get it pre-heating. “He’s the most woman-hopping man I’ve ever known. Ever seen. In my office alone he talks to a different woman on the phone at least three times a week.”

“But he’s single, right?”

“Yes. He’s single. His goal in life is to be single.” The words cause a little ache to spread across my chest. “I don’t fault him for that. That’s not what this is about. It’s about me knowing I have no desire to compete with other women for a man’s attention and this guy plays that game as hard as it can be played.”

Sugar and butter go into my mixer. My hand shakes a little as the vanilla is added, but I choose to think it’s because I haven’t eaten today and not from anything else.

“Fine.” It’s a simple response with no indication she’s going to argue with me. This annoys me, but I try to hide it. “Guess you’re going to have to figure out how to balance this then.”

“That’s what I said from the beginning,” I grimace, busting an egg with a little more gusto than necessary.

“You said some, what, sexier things on line than you would’ve said in person?”

“Oh, a little.” I told him I wanted him to come on my chest. “I want to die.”

Whitney adds the lemon juice to the mixer and turns it on. “But you felt comfortable enough with him to say them.”

“Because he wasn’t standing in front of me, Whit. It’s so much easier to tell him I want him to slap my ass or make me get off on his face when his face isn’t there. When I think I’ll never have to see his face.”

“You said that? I’m impressed.”

The dam is broken so I just roll with it. “I typed worse.”

“He’s probably going insane right now,” she giggles. “And I doubt he’d qualify them as worse.”

Putting a face, his face, to those words makes me almost moan in the middle of my kitchen. Typing them out was one thing when the point was to feel powerful. Knowing it was him on the other side has the opposite effect.

“I have to quit my job,” I say gravely.

“You do not.” She turns off the mixer. Leaning against the counter, she crosses her arms over her chest. “How does it make you feel to think he knows it was you who typed those things and he still wants you?”

Biting my lip doesn’t help the smile from cracking across my lips.

“It feels good, right?” she asks.

“Yes. Fine. It feels good. But he’ll tease me about it endlessly.”

“Because he’s a boy and boys do that.”

There’s nothing boy about him.

The pre-heat alert dings and Whitney glances at the oven before speaking again. “You should’ve considered this before you met up with him. I could’ve pointed that out if you would’ve told me your super-secret plans.”

I should’ve considered a lot of things before I met History Hunk. Or before I used that stupid app.

“For some really, really dumb reason, it didn’t seem like a bad idea. Yes, most of our conversations were sexual in nature, but it was good-hearted. It was fun. Our banter was great …”

My finger presses into the butter as I turn away. Just thinking of Lance and the easiness of our chats fills me with a gooey sort of feeling.

“Like your banter at work?”

“Ugh. This is not helping.”

At all. At work, Lance treats me like an intelligent, respectable, attractive woman. History Hunk made me feel downright sexy. Alluring. Wanted. They are two very different sides of … the same coin? With the same guy? Processing this doesn’t get any easier as the minutes tick by.

Digging around the cabinet and then the dishwasher, I find my nine-by-nine pan for the lemon bars.

“Meeting this guy didn’t seem like I was meeting him for sex,” I say, searching for more butter. “It felt like meeting a friend for the first time. There weren’t expectations and I wasn’t afraid, like I thought I’d be. It was just easy. Nerve-wracking, but easy.”

The butter in hand, I spread it around the pan before I turn my attention back to Whitney. There’s a knowing look aimed my way.

“I think everything between you two is easy, Mariah.” She takes the pan and sets it next to the mixer. “Don’t you see that?”

Yes, I see it. How could I not? But therein lies the problem—it’s too easy.

The boiled-down truth is sitting on the tip of my tongue. There’s a peacefulness that goes along with finding it in the rubble of everything else.

With one last reconsideration, I go for it. “Before this weekend, Lance was Lance. It wasn’t hard to compartmentalize him in a box in my head. We’d flirt or whatever at work but there was a line and it wasn’t crossed. It started at eight and ended at four. His personal life was his thing. It didn’t involve me. His conquests didn’t matter.”

“But they do now?”

I consider her question. Neither answer, yes or no, is right. It doesn’t matter because I’m still the girl from work. But it does matter because it doesn’t feel like he’s the guy from work anymore. All of that is muddied up now because the guy I told I wanted to feel his tongue on my pussy while his cock was halfway down my throat is the same guy who hugged me in front of my mother.

Whitney laughs when I rest my head against the cool counter. “You should’ve just fucked him. That would’ve eased some of this tension.”

“Right.” Standing up straight again, I go back to my lemon bars. “I’m going to have to pretend it didn’t happen. Erase this entire weekend from my brain.”

My friend looks at me like I’ve officially lost it. “You can do that?”

“I’m going to have to.” With a cup of flour balanced in the air, I look at Whitney. I should just make the lemon bars and be done with it, but I don’t. With a hefty sigh, I just stop pretending like it’s not going to happen. “Want to make some red velvet cupcakes?”