She liked women. They were beautiful and soft and smart, and thus far, none of them had led her astray romantically. At minimum, spending the night talking to a woman seemed far preferable to hanging out with a guy.
Hallie gave her a look like Brynn had lost the plot. “Are youintowomen?”
Brynn shrugged even as excitement skittered through her. Hallie was a woman, and she couldn’t imagine having a better night with anyone else, regardless of gender. “I don’t know who I’m into. Just that it isn’t Gregory or Grant. I think the responsible thing to do is leave as many doors open as possible.”
Her mind felt cleaved down the middle, two paths warring for her attention.
She thought about the possibility of approaching dating from a scientific perspective. How she could quantify, measure, draw conclusions. Experiments excited her. They always had.
But there was also that buzzy sensation that made her feel like nothing was quite real, the one that hadn’t really left. It scared her, but, maybe even more than the scientific method, it excited her, too.
She wanted to lean into it. A lot.
But even as she tried to work through the mechanics, the edges of her brain were starting to feel fuzzy. Her first glass of whiskey had done a stellar job of making everything seem like a great idea, along with making said ideas difficult to execute.
Hallie grabbed Brynn’s phone from the coffee table, where it had sat during their conversation, only pinging with texts from her parents over the last few hours. “You need to make a dating profile.”
Trepidation, for the first time that night, coursed through her. A dose of cold water flickered but didn’t fully extinguish the flames smoldering in her stomach. “I don’t know what I’d say.”
“Whatever you include, it will be better than Sydney making mine. I can promise you that. Actually,” Hallie said, readjusting her position so that she could grab her phone, too, “I’ll update mine at the same time.” And then, Hallie shot her a soft smile that made Brynn feel like, for whatever it was worth, they were in this together.
That smile, with Hallie’s dimple just visible, made Brynn’s initial reservations melt away.
She navigated to the app store on her phone, recognizing an icon. “Do I really want to use the same app that Grant was using to cheat on me?”
“That’s a ‘him’ problem,” Hallie said decisively before she looked at Brynn with big, expressive eyes that made her pay attention to whatever Hallie was about to tell her. “But this is a very good time for me to point out that nefarious creatures abound. You cannot take anyone at their word. A few years ago, I went on a date with a guy who told me that he was an entrepreneur.”
Brynn wasn’t sure where this was going even as she leaned toward Hallie. “Lots of people start businesses?”
“He ran an illegal ferret farm out of his living room,” Hallie answered drolly.
“Is the problem that it’s illegal or that it’s ferrets?” Brynn asked, trying to hold in her laughter. Regardless of which one didn’t pass Hallie’s test, it was… eccentric. Even she could see that.
Hallie bit her lip, her brows furrowed, and Brynn could tell that she was thinking. “Have you ever had to search for an apartment? And lots of words are code for other words?”
Oh god, this was going to be so much worse than Brynn had thought. She had no idea what Hallie was talking about. And yeah, maybe she wasn’t embarrassed with Hallie, but she also didn’t relish looking like a complete idiot. She already knew that she was ridiculously sheltered. “Maybe remind me?”
Laughing lightly, Hallie patted Brynn’s knee. She missed the contact—the connection—once it was gone. “I’ve got you. So people will say something like the studio is ‘cozy’ but it actually means, ‘You will be lucky to fit a Murphy bed in here.’”
“The different words make sense, actually. Precision in language is important, but connotation also matters a lot. It’s part of why the focus on linguistic philosophy has fallen by the wayside in the last couple of decades,” Brynn said excitedly, feeling like she was finally getting the hang of something. It was probably for the best that Hallie wasn’t touching her knee anymore; it was distracting. Except, “What is a Murphy bed? You say it like it’s something that I should just know. And now I’m zero-for-two on references. Based on this conversation, I don’t even know what I’m going to talk to these people about.”
“People love to answer questions about themselves, and you clearly love to learn about things,” Hallie said graciously. “It’ll be perfect.”
“But… what if they lie to me?”
Hallie set her cup down on the coffee table and then punched her fisted hand into her other palm. “Then they’ll have to talk to me about that.”
Warmth flooded her chest again, even as she bit nervously at the edge of her lip. “Ummm… it’s going to be hard for me. I don’t exactly have that thing that lets me know when people aren’t being honest or genuine.”
“A bullshit detector?”
Laughing at Hallie’s word choice, Brynn said, “Sure, if that’s what we’re calling it. I don’t have one of those.” As much as anyone could be real with themselves, Brynn tried to believe that she was aware of the majority of her flaws. She was way too much of a people pleaser when it came to her parents. She got irrationally annoyed when people chewed loudly. And, most inconveniently as of late, she’d realized that unless it was well and truly shoved in her face, she always assumed people were telling the truth.
But sheknewall of these things about herself. That must count for something?
At this moment, though, it didn’t. Because she was about to venture into a brave new world with Hallie, where Brynn had to decide if she trusted someone.
She looked at Hallie then, tapping away on her phone, a completely different look on her face than the one she’d been wearing an hour ago. It settled something inside of Brynn, to feel like they were about to jump into this ridiculous plan together.
