I told myself I might. That I was saving it—that it needed to settle, steep like tea or bruises. But really, I didn’t know what the story was. There was no arc, no revelation, no elegant metaphor to tie it all together. Just a handful of scenes that kept playing in the back of my head, like a film reel slightly out of order. His laugh. His hands. That thing he’d said about my writing voice being “quiet in the way you have to lean in to hear it.”
Basically meaning, you had to want to care.
Another one of Gina’s new art friends, with the tiny astrological tattoos in the spaces between his knuckles, hissed, “A residency lover doesn’t count.”
And most people didn’t care for the whole story.
“It’s like … an affair,” Brent added. “It doesn’t count.”
“I’m pretty sure affairs count,” said Melanie.
“Not likeaffairs, affairs. Like …love affairs? They’re stories you get to tell your grandchildren to scandalize them when you’re, like, eighty or whatever,” Brent said before returning his attention to me.
I had enough issues right now. I didn’t need anything from my life to be referenced as “an affair.” It sounded dirty.
Gina hugged my shoulders again. This time, I let her. If anything, I needed a little support as we pivoted away from this conversation. “My girl wants a good, sweet man to spoil her.”
Or not.
I shook my head. The lighting was dark enough here that no one had to see my flushed face—and not only from the absurd amount of alcohol in my mug.
“Come on, just have us all set you up with someone,” Gina suggested.
“I thought you were on my side.”
“I am on your side.”
Melanie sighed, leaning over the table, propping her chin in her hand. “The side of love. No, better.Holidaylove.”
“Is that really a thing?”
“Of course it is!”
“All of you want to set me up with the same guy?” I cocked my head at them. Foreheads creased around me at the proposal. “Are we living in a fairy tale now?”
“No.” Gina shook her head.
“I don’t know,” said Brent, blinking down at his cup before taking another sip. “I kind of feel like Gina might’ve just poisoned us all.”
Gina rolled her eyes. “Different guys, Bri. All of us will set you up on a date. One each. Or more, of course, if things go well.”
“If you have to find more than a few guys to go out with me, I’m pretty sure things would be going the opposite of well,” I murmured.
No one seemed to hear me.
“Did everyone hear that?” asked Gina.
A few more heads—half in our conversation, half in their own—turned to focus on what was being plotted around me.
“That would be, like, a dozen people,” I said.
“A dozenchances,” Gina corrected, as if that made a difference.
That was a lot of chances. So many chances that it would be more than pitiful if none of them made it to a second date.
“You all know that many single guys?”
Melanie opened her mouth?—
