Dahlia

As I'm changing out of my work clothes, I hear someone knocking on the front door. I kick off my patent leather pumps and wiggle quickly out of my pencil skirt, practically ripping off buttons as I try to take off my pink silk blouse. In just a few seconds I'm back in snug jeans and a white tank top, pulling my dark blonde hair back into a bun on top of my head.

The doorbell goes off, then twice more.

“I'm coming! I’m coming!” I holler as I rush down the front hallway, but then stop. I can see the top of Bunny's head in the diamond-shaped glass as she pushes up on her toes and tries to peek inside. I don't need to rush, not for Bunny.

I stand behind the closed door, glaring at it for a few more seconds until she rings the bell yet again. Then I open it so fast she practically falls inside.

“What are you doing, laying on my doorbell like that? Are you insane?”

She stumbles for a few seconds and then stands up, shrugging and rolling her eyes. “What. You told me that I’m not supposed to just come in anymore, right? I’m being polite.”

Still, she just walks inside and strolls off down the hall, ducking into the kitchen without waiting for me to ask. It's true, we've been friends since kindergarten, but she doesn't actually live here. I think that information would come as a bit of surprise to her. She seems to think our houses are interchangeable.

“Don't eat my potato chips!” I yell out as I hear the plastic bag crinkling. By the time I make it to the kitchen, she's already got the bag open and one dusty red chip poised in front of her open mouth.

“What did you say?”

“I said, don't eat my potato chips!” I insist, snatching the bag away from her and rolling down the open top.

The bag is torn on one side, a jagged bolt of lightning splitting the plastic dangerously close to the top level of potato chips. She knows I hate that. I've been known to open the bags with scissors, even. I hate it when the bag tears down the side.

“Oh my frigging God, Bunny. You’re a savage, I swear.”

She pops the chip into her mouth and chews loudly for a moment. Then she pouts, sticking her lower lip out as she watches me hiding the chips in a cupboard. She bats those big brown eyes at me and I pretend not to notice.

“But I'm starving, Dahlia,” she whispers. “You invited me over for dinner, remember?”

“I invited you over so you could you could help me make dinner,” I sniff. “I just got home. I haven't even had time to shop or do anything.”

“Oh, I'm supposed to do chores? You're a terrible date, Dahlia.”

I open the refrigerator and stick my head into it so I don't have to look at her. I know she's playing around with me and expects me to laugh, but I just got home from work. I'm tired. I'm cranky. I'm not in the mood for her sass right now.

I remember when I was a kid, my mom would complain about coming home from work and being tired, and I just did not get it. After all, her job was office manager for a real estate company. It was pretty much the coolest thing in the world, I thought. They had air conditioning and multi-line phones and a whole closet full of office supplies. Heaven! I just loved it. I couldn't imagine what she found so exhausting.

Now I get it, but of course, it's too late to tell her. She passed away three years ago already, before I even graduated high school.

“Okay,” I remark into the open fridge. “I've got chicken, a couple of steaks, some kind of leftover rice thing… any of that sound good to you?” I call out, scanning the shelves for some sign of inspiration.

“I'm a vegetarian now,” she announces.

I stand up, peering at her over the door. She's looking through cabinets, pushing boxes of dried pasta and lentils around, probably searching for something with the word “instant” stamped on the side.

“Since when are you a vegetarian?”

She shrugs her bony shoulders and keeps opening and closing cabinet doors.

“Oh, off and on… started again last week. I won’t be any trouble, I promise! I’ll just have a salad or whatever. Or some more chips. Chips are good. Where did you put those?”

“Salad, salad…” I mutter, peering into the depths of my refrigerator. “Actually, I think that will work. Here, start chopping these…”

I empty two produce drawers onto the counter including lettuce, peppers, zucchinis, and carrots. Bunny drags the wooden cutting board from its cubby and slides the ten inch knife from the block. She leers evilly.

“Yes, boss!”

This is good. I give her a giant salad bowl and figure we will just make a huge selection of greens, maybe with some walnuts or sunflower seeds or something. I whip up a vinaigrette with some olive oil and dried herbs and leave it on the counter to marinate.

“And steak!” I blurt out.

She stops, her knife paused in the air. “Um… Vegetarian?” she says again.

“Well, I'm not!” I snort. “And neither is my dad. We will have marinated steak salads and you can just have… regular old salad-salad.”

“Yuck, meat,” she mutters, but she continues slicing zucchini into little circles, then dumping them in the bowl. I rinse a can of chickpeas in the sink and then dump them in there for her also, before slicing up the steaks on another cutting board and dropping them into a gallon bag with a half cup of marinade in it.

I’m feeling sort of pumped about how I pulled this all together in less than fifteen minutes. I give myself a little mental high-five and pop open a bottle of Corona from the fridge.

“You want one of these?”

Bunny barely looks up from her chore of scraping ribbons of carrots into the bowl.

“That would be awesome,” she sighs, as though chopping vegetables is some huge exertion.

I hear the front door open again and then voices, looking up with alarm. Two voices? In moments, my dad walks into the kitchen, smiling and automatically pulling a couple slices of zucchini off the cutting board and popping them into his mouth.

“Hey, girls,” he smiles. “This looks fantastic. What's for dinner?”

I start to answer then startle when another figure appears in the doorway. It's August Berner, my dad’s BFF — or whatever the manlier word is for that. His eyes rake me from top to bottom and small smile curls the corner of his full mouth, before he seems to go suddenly ice cold and looks away. He practically pivots in the opposite direction, like somebody just called “about face.” I stand there like a deer in headlights, not sure what to do.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” my dad stammers. “Is it cool if August has dinner with us? I forgot to text you. The playoff game’s tonight, and —”

“— totally fine!” I blurt. “Fifteen minutes, no problem. Totally fine!”

He glances at me, his expression both startled and apologetic at the same time. Bunny casts her weight to one side and looks at everybody else in the room, one at a time like she's figuring something out.

“Really sorry I didn't mention it…” he continues.

Yanking the bag off the counter with the meat and marinade, I give it a hearty shake and smile confidently, a lot more confidently than I feel.

“No worries! Just go do your thing. Bunny and I will get everything on the table in just a few minutes.”

August and my dad exchange looks, squinting uneasily. Then my dad grabs a couple of beers out of the refrigerator before offering me another apologetic grimace and leaving the room. As soon as they're gone, I feel like the air trickles out of me, letting me collapse just a little bit on the inside. Like one of those inflatable figures you see at a used car lot, my whole body just goes slack for a moment or two.

“Oh my God, girl,” Bunny breathes. “You are certifiably insane.”

“I am not,” I insist. “We have got plenty of salad, I'm pretty sure. I think I have another couple of tomatoes or something. Don't worry about it.”

I grab the last two tomatoes from the produce bin and hand them to her, trying to avoid the squint she's giving me.

“You know that's not what I'm talking about,” she continues. Her eyes track me everywhere I'm going, like a searchlight outside of a prison tower.

I put a cast-iron pan on the stove and turn the heat almost all the way up.

“I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“I'm talking about sex-u-al tension!” she stage whispers, a little bit too loudly for me. I shoot her a venomous glare.

“You keep your voice down!”

“Whatever. Maybe you better keep your super sexy kitten voice down, Dahlia!” she smirks.

I want to object, but my heart is still beating way too fast. I stare at the surface of the pan as it heats up, just imagining all those molecules getting excited. Vibrating.

“Oh, yeah… you know what I am talking about,” she keeps going. “You can try to deny it all you want, but you are still hot for that man.”

“I am not!” I hiss. “And keep your voice down, I mean it! You're talking crazy!”

“Isn’t there some new guy at work? I told Tommy to give you a call too.”

“Jesus, don’t do that. I don’t want to talk to Tommy.”

“But he’s cuuuute!” she complains, drawing the word out until it gets weird. “And you need to get serious about somebody, Dahlia. Or, even not serious. You just need to get with somebody.”

“I don’t need any such thing,” I shoot back. “I am fine.”

“You’re gorgeous!” she declares, winking. “But that’s not the point. You need to find you an IRL boyfriend so you can have IRL sexitimes like a normal person.”

“You can’t rush that sort of thing,” I mutter.

“Sure you can,” she chuckles. “But that is also not the point. The point is that they’re available and possible, not just inappropriate obsessions you build up in your mind. Know what I mean? Hm?”

Opening cabinets, I force myself to read the descriptions on the side of the boxes so I won’t bite her head off. Rice a Roni. Cous cous. Bunny should stay out of my damn business.

She resumes cutting vegetables, rolling her eyes and raising her eyebrows sarcastically. “I don't even blame you. He is a seriously hot piece of ass. He's got that most interesting man in the world thing going on.”

“Bunny, quit it.”

“He's all handsome... educated… and he’s got those lumberjack muscles. You think he works out? I bet he has to work out for his job. He probably has to do lots of sweaty, sweaty workouts…”

“Bunny!”

“Not to mention that sexy widow thing.”

I whirl around to look at her, forgetting about the pan for just a second.

“Exactly what does that mean?”

She glances up at me, her expression changing from playful to horrified instantly.

“Oh… I didn't mean anything by that! I was just saying, you know… like, widows are all wounded and sweet. Like used teddy bears. Not like divorced guys who probably cheated on their wives or couldn't hold a job or whatever.”

“You're telling me that widows are wounded? And sweet? Seriously?”

She pulls a face, flaring her nostrils for a second. She knows that my dad met August in a widow support group shortly after my mom died. August’s wife had been taken in a car accident just a few months before my mom succumbed to pancreatic cancer.

“You know what? I'd like to retract that part.”

“Which part? The sexy part?”

“Oh no, I meant every word of that. Maybe, uh, just the part where I said widows were like, a sweet thing.”

“Like a teddy bear thing?”

“Yeah. I like to retract all that stuff specifically.” She gives me a faint, hopeful smile. “You think we could just forget I said any of that?”

I open the marinating bag and use tongs to lay slices of steak on the now hot pan, letting them sear on both sides for a couple minutes each. The pungent, savory aroma fills the air, and I remember that I’m really, really hungry. I can't help but feel just a little bit more charitable about Bunny’s big mouth.

“Yeah, okay. I'll forgive you if you set the table.”

“Consider it done!”

I hear her clanking plates around while I focus on my stovetop steak task. As long as I remember that I'm a little bit irritated with her for her insensitive comments — even though they weren't really all that bad, and she has certainly said worse — then I can avoid thinking about August and how he looked when he walked in the room.

I can also avoid thinking about the way, for just a second, he seemed to forget that he's not supposed to look at me like that.

For just a second, before his defenses went back up, I saw something in his eyes. Something hungry. Something electric and maybe even a little dangerous.

Something I've been hoping I would see for a long time in real life.

I have seen it in dreams, though. I've imagined him looking at me like that: the way that men look at their conquests in the movies. I have played through the way my body would shiver in response over and over again, savoring the anticipation of that moment.

It was just like that. When his eyes raked over me, it was just like being struck by lightning, or startled by a predator, or rocked by an earthquake. Right down to the core of me, I could feel it... just from that one millisecond-long glance.

I hope I get to see it again.