He misses her already. Wants to know what her favourite flowers are so he can prepare for their next date. (Bee might be stuck in this lie for as long as the relationship lasts, I think. You can’t just pull up stumps at six months and say, ‘By the way, babe, those expensive ephemeral gestures you keep getting me? They cause me physical pain.’)
What has Bee done today while William was doing all that texting? Oh, she got up, went for a run, had a coffee and an açai bowl. Then she went for lunch with the girls. (They weresoexcited to hear all about William. They all agree with Bee that he’s the real deal. And isn’t it nice to meet a real, adult man who has his shit together? Chlo was beingsucha perv, hunting out all the sexy details, but women don’t talk about sex in a Samantha way anymore. Oh! And Emmy is going to Thailand in the new year, so Chlo was giving her all the tips. I got them to put them in a shared-notes app, just in case. I can send it to you if you want!)
I revel in the secondhand girl-chat. Bee and I never talk about sex; we steer clear of discussing it like the pothole at the end of our street. (‘Hey, I’ve faked every orgasm your boyfriend’s best friend thinks he ever gave me, and it makes me feel like a bad feminist’ doesn’t really roll off the tongue.) Bee has other friends for that, I guess.
I keep looking for an in. Lunch with the girls—I hadbrunch today! William has his shit together—Arthur is going to help me gather my own!
Half an hour later, Bee gets up to shower. It’s only after I go back to my own room that I realise I never answered Bee’s question about what I was doing in there.
It’s fine. We’re both out of practice.
By the time I wake up the next morning, I’m doubting that the whole thing even happened. I have absolutely no proof that it did. Nothing in writing from Arthur. No hearsay witness in Bee. I’m used to the ‘let’s catch up’ signoff. Like when you run into someone from a past life and you exchange some upbeat generic nothings and then, as they are trying to make a graceful exit (especially awful if all parties are headed in the same direction), they saywe should catch up soon.
Those catch-ups never happen and they’re not meant to. I know that. It’s just one of those things people say. It means the brief exchange was nice and we won’t have to pretend we can’t see each other properly without our glasses should the situation ever crop up again.
There is a not-insignificant voice in my mind now wondering if Arthur’s ‘I’ll come up with a plan’ is a more context-specific ‘let’s catch up’. It might just slip his mind as a thing of little relevance to his own day-to-day. He probably has a lot going on. Most people do. He probably isn’t going to get in touch. It’s good that I didn’t tell Bee. Maybe it can be a funny little thing we bring up every so often when forced to interact alongside Bee and William. An amusing dinner-party anecdote.
But I wake up to a wall of text from Arthur. I can’t decide if a wall-texter is worse than a multi-texter, and he has exhibited both behaviours in our short acquaintance. He could at least use some paragraphs. He seems like a paragraph guy, so I’m a little thrown off to see such disregard for form and convention from a guy who has used the word ‘thus’ in a text.
Focusing on his grammar helps me temper my excitement that he not only remembered but also followed up (at length). I’m really hoping that ‘desperate’ isn’t a new thing for me. Best to play it chill for now.
He texted at five in the morning. I suspect being awake at that time is a regular thing, and I really hope he isn’t one of those guys who gets up at two a.m. to rise and grind like Matt Damon. I can’t work with that, friends-wise; it’s too big a fundamental difference in values. It’s a value chasm.
The message:
I’ve decided that the solution to our problem
is quite simple.
Our. Not reading too much into all of this is getting harder.
The two of us don’t want to spend more time
one on one.
He just gets me.
Thankfully, our slightly unhinged friends have
given us the in we need with these group
dates. And before you ask, I have tried again
to get William to explain to me the reasoning
behind the weird chaperoning and gotten
nowhere. I think at this point we just have to
file it under ‘quirky hot people things’. Thus,
I am convinced that we should encourage
them to keep doing this, and use it to our
advantage. I might need to lay it on a bit thick,
but I promise this won’t end up becoming
