LENA
“Hey, sorry I’m late,” I said, pulling out a chair across from Violet.
She’d texted me the night before when I got home and asked me if I wanted to meet for breakfast before her wedding dress fitting. As my ass hit the chair, I winced. It hurt. Actually, I had noticed my ass hurting when I’d gotten on my bike on the way to meet her.
“What’s that face for?” Violet asked.
“My ass hurts.”
“What in the hell did you do? Did you go on one of those crazy bike rides of yours? Like, thirty miles and counting?”
I laughed, trying to recall if she might be right. No, I hadn’t been on one of my “crazy” bike rides, as she liked to call them. I replayed the events of the last twenty-four hours and realized why my glutes were so sore.
Oh.
“No,” I said with a half-embarrassed laugh. “I masturbated.”
Violet’s eyes bugged out and a surprised laugh escaped her lips. “What? Why? I mean, what the hell were you doing, Lena?”
“I guess I kind of was going to town on it. It was pretty epic.” I smiled and shrugged nonchalantly, grabbing the menu and scrolling through the available options.
Part of me felt ashamed, however—not because I’d spent my evening masturbating, but rather because of whom I had been thinking of while doing it.
Amos.
Amos was all up in my head, and I couldn’t shake the thought of him, as much as I tried. I had been thinking about him looking at me, his arms, his scent, the memory of his lips that seemed to haunt me any time I let my guard down.
Amos, who was in a relationship; I shouldn’t have been thinking of him.
He was off-limits, but that didn’t seem to be enough of a turnoff for my dirty mind. Did I want him now because I couldn’t have him?
Was I so twisted and selfish to desire him only now that I knew he was unavailable?
No.
Part of me had always wanted him, but my sense of self-preservation had made me run away from him and shut the door on any kind of sexual relationship we could have had. I needed to stop thinking about him, but as I thought that, something twisted in my stomach and I felt a painful twinge in my chest.
Oh, great. Just great.
Was I developing feelings for him now? It was absurd.
I was the hookup queen. I didn’t do love, and I ran away from people who could hurt me.
And yet, there I was, fighting an internal battle to forget about the guy.
Violet’s laugh distracted me from my inner monologue. She gave me that kind of sympathetic smile friends have for each other and shook her head.
“Oh, goodness. You must have been. But, you know, you might want to be careful. One of these days you might break your vagina—or your vibrator. One of the two.”
“Ehhh. I might have to watch out for my clitoris, but my vagina doesn’t get a whole lot of play with that massager I use,” I told her with a wink, and she laughed again.
“Why are you resorting to toys anyway? I thought Tinder was working just fine for you.”
“Ugh. It’s been days and days of swiping left. Not a male worth fucking in a twenty-mile radius.”
“Gosh, dating in the digital age sounds exhausting. It was exhausting years ago, so I’d guess it’s even worse now. I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“It’s not just that. The horror stories you hear are true. It’s not just hard to find someone to date, it’s also hard to find someone you can fuck one or two times without them turning into a freaking psycho. Mostly what I find depressing is how pathetic some of these profiles are or how they decide to approach you. You can’t honestly believe I’m going to fall for it if you put ‘big dick’ in your profile. That will be the number one thing to make me swipe left.”
It was true that I had been in a funk. Since I wasn’t one who looked for a relationship and was in it just for a bit of fun, I could be quite shallow when it came to swiping right. A guy had to have a certain “something” for me to want to meet him, and no, I didn’t mean the size of his package. In my experience, those with a big dick weren’t always all that. Scratch that—in my experience, those with a very big dick almost never knew how to use it, because they thought size would automatically take care of everything else.
Wrong.
Going jackrabbit on a woman never did it for anyone, thank you very much. It was all about the rocking of the hips and hitting the right spots.
I hadn’t found anyone not even just good-looking, but who looked interesting enough lately.
“What do these guys look like anyway?” Violet asked. “What do they put on their profile?”
“Here, I’ll show you,” I said, pulling out my phone.
“Ugh. What is that guy wearing in that picture? And why would he think disclosing that would be appealing?”
“I know, right?” I kept swiping left to show her more profiles. “Jerk, poser, too sure of himself, power trip, jerk, tortured soul.” Then I swiped again and came across one that wasn’t half bad.
Tall, broad shoulders, short dark hair. Strong jaw, straight nose. His eyes were brown, and there was something about him that reminded me of a certain someone.
“This one looks all right,” Violet said.
Seventy-eight percent match.
He really did look like Amos in a way; maybe it was his shoulders or the shape of his face. Since I couldn’t get the thought of Amos out of my head by going to town on my own, maybe fucking someone who mildly resembled him would work?
This is bad.
This meant my pathetic crush was getting out of control and heading for obsession-ville. I wasn’t the kind of person who got obsessed over anyone particularly.
This wasn’t me, and part of me knew already that fucking a guy who sort of looked like him wasn’t going to help at all.
But something had to give.
Maybe if the guy answered and we ended up meeting, it wouldn’t be too bad.
Oh hell. What did I have to lose? Go for it, Lena.
“You swiped right! Are you sure about that? Now what?”
“Now we’ll see if he answers.”
He might not even swipe right. Oh well. I didn’t really need to meet the guy.
Just as I thought that, my phone buzzed with the notification.
“Oh, look! He said yes! What’s next?”
“One of us will message the other, see if we want to meet up.”
“What do you do with these guys? Do you actually message them or talk on the phone before you meet?”
“You know me, I try to get straight to the point. I try to make sure they aren’t into some weird fetish and I check their Facebook profile to make sure they aren’t in a relationship—or worse, married.”
“How many douchebags like that have you come across?”
“A few.”
“Men are such bastards.”
“Women do it, too.”
“You’re right. It’s just that I hate cheaters. Marty and I had a long heart-to-heart about it.”
“Please. Do you think Marty is ever going to cheat on you? You guys have been together how long now? He’s still as in love with you as when you first started going out, if not more. Plus, after what happened to him with that slut in college, he’s not down with the cheaters.”
“Sure, you might be right, but marriage is hard, Lena. Yes, we’ve been living together, but you never know what life will throw at you. You never know how a relationship will develop over time. I just hope we can make it.”
“You will,” I told her with absolute certainty, holding her gaze. Not only had I witnessed Marty and Violet’s relationship bloom, I had been around them long enough to know how much they loved each other.
Sometimes—only sometimes—I got a little twinge of sadness thinking I was probably never going to have something like what they had.
I didn’t seek it, and I didn’t put any hope in ever finding it.
Yes, it was irrational to think I was cursed in some way, but in the last few years, I had come to the conclusion that I wasn’t destined to find happiness—not with another human being, at least. For as long as I could remember, every time things were good in my life and I was truly happy, something inevitably changed and I ended up losing the person I loved.
My phone buzzed in my hand again.
We both stared at it.
“Oh, look! You got a message! How exciting. He’s so cute, let’s see what he has to say.”
Violet and I went to her fitting. Somehow, she had decided to spare me and had made arrangements for me to try on my bridesmaid dress with just her.
She had a separate appointment scheduled with the rest of her wedding party.
“Ugh, the other bridesmaids are going to think I’m such a bitch!” I lamented, but I understood why she’d done it. I didn’t do well with large groups of women, for one reason or another. I was too different from them, and it always seemed so hard to find common interests with women who were outside of my work circle.
I didn’t fall for the latest hairdo or fashion trends. I didn’t dream of having a family of my own one day.
My dreams didn’t include wedding dresses.
I dreamed of drawing and creating new characters and stories until the day my old self couldn’t hold a Staedtler pencil anymore.
Yeah, I know, I was a weirdo, but that was what I did, what I lived for.
I stared at my reflection, clad in a heather-lilac dress with a wide skirt and an organza strap around my neck. The bustier with a sweetheart neckline made my boobs look bigger. My eyes widened, surprised by the fact that I didn’t look that bad, after all.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d worn a dress.
“Yeah, yeah, you’re welcome,” Violet said dismissively from inside her dressing room.
“Well, I appreciate it. Thank you for giving me some peace of mind and your undivided attention.”
“All right, maid of honor, are you ready? It’s time to give me your undivided attention and tell me how I look,” she said, stepping out of the dressing room in a gorgeous organza tea-length dress with a slight ’40s pin-up vibe.
It fit Violet’s personality to a T.
The corset highlighted her curves perfectly, and it made her look both sexy and sweet. Her violet hair looked incandescent under the bright lights of the fitting room.
“You look like a sultry cupcake,” I blurted out.
“What? A cupcake? I don’t want to look like a cupcake. Is this the wrong dress? Oh my gosh, it’s totally the wrong dress. I need to have a backup plan,” she let out in a high-pitched voice.
I took her hands in mine, realizing I might have said the wrong thing. I sucked at this stuff. How could I always be so damn awkward at basic human interactions?
“Violet, listen to me: you look beautiful. Marty’s going to want to eat you up as soon as your minister is done declaring you husband and wife.”
My words seemed to reassure her, and she let out a deep, calming breath.
I turned her around, and we both faced the mirror. I put my hands on her shoulders, determined to make her realize she was fretting over nothing.
“Look at yourself—you look gorgeous. Marty is one lucky man, and he knows it.”
She gave me an uneasy smile and then slumped her shoulders, relaxing a bit. She stared at herself and after a few more seconds, a confident smile appeared on her red lips.
“This is the one,” she said in a low, sure voice.
“Yes, it is. This is your dress.”