“Manhattan gets hot too.”
“Yeah.” Meera finally unsticks her menu from the table. “But even when it’s hot, it’s still cool.”
It’s been eight years since Meera’s then-husband convinced her to leave New York City to move to his hometown in Texas, and she’s still bitter about it (mostly because Hari ended up leaving her just a few years later). But Talia—who moved from Lee County, Alabama, about three years ago—loves life in Austin, where being over the age of thirty without a ring on your finger doesn’t invite strange looks. At Auburn University, she was one of three girls in her sorority who didn’t get engaged before graduation. Here in Austin, there’s far less pressure to settle down—though that doesn’t stop Talia from putting pressure on herself.
Meera fans herself with her menu. “Fuck. I don’t know how anyone functions in this heat. How am I supposed to go on a date when I can’t stop sweating?”
“Have you?”
“Been sweating? Yes, a fuck ton.”
“No.” Talia swats her friend. “Been dating.”
“A little. As it turns out, no one wants to date a thirtysomething, chronically ill divorcée who’s still carrying baby weight, even though her kid is seven.”
“C’mon. You’re a knockout, and an awesome mom, and a badass engineer. Any guy would be crazy not to want you.” Talia doesn’t quite believe the words she’s saying any more than Meera probably does, but it feels like the right thing to say. After all, Meera didn’t expect things to end up like this.
Meera was still married and had already been at Cuff for a year when Talia was hired as a machine learning engineer. Talia had never imagined herself working for an online dating service—she’d hoped to become an AI trainer—but Cuff had just been acquired by Match Group and wanted to expand, so getting an entry-level position was easy. Talia liked to say it was fate that she and Meera were paired together for Talia’s first assignment (though being the only female engineers on the machine learning team probably had something to do with that decision).
Initially, Meera seemed like someone who wasn’t looking for new friends, what with her handsome husband and handful of a toddler at home. But still the two bonded over Shonda Rhimes shows and sushi restaurants and the pitfalls of being women in STEM. And when Meera’s marriage started to crumble, Talia was the one who kept Meera from falling apart too. Three years and a messy divorce later, Talia considers Meera the closest thing she has to a sister—despite having an actual sister, to whom she hasn’t spoken in years.
“Yeah, okay.” Meera flips her off with both fingers. “What about you, hot stuff? Whatever happened with that lawyer who took you tothe fancy omakase restaurant? Has he gotten a chance to see your new little French-girl haircut?”
The server arrives then, saving Talia from having to answer right away. As he fills their water glasses and takes their orders, she steels herself. Then she takes a deep breath and tells Meera the news she’s been both eager and reluctant to share all morning.
“He was nice, but I don’t think I’m going to see him again. I think I’m seeing Townsend again, actually.”
After that night a few weeks ago when they watched the bats take flight, she wasn’t sure Townsend would call. She hoped he would, obviously, but she’s been working on letting things unfold at their own pace. For years, she was always hurry up and go, impatient to get to the happily ever after she’d always longed for. Now, however, she knows that some things just take time. For the right guy, she’s willing to wait.
Like a perfect gentleman, Townsend rowed her back to shore, kissed her chastely on the cheek, and said they should see each other again soon—on purpose, next time. It was a piecrust promise, she figured. Easily made, easily broken.
But he did call. He called her the next morning (a phone call, not even a text) and asked her to dinner that night. For nearly four hours, they laughed over pre-Prohibition cocktails andpommes fritesat Péché in the Warehouse District, where the lighting was so dim and the drinks were so strong that Talia was tempted to kiss Townsend right there at the table. But she didn’t kiss him then, and she didn’t kiss him three nights later, either, when he took her to Red Ash and ordered a $950 bottle of Barolo and finally, fully, apologized for how their relationship had ended last year. No, it wasn’t until their Saturday-night date at the Blue Starlite Drive-in—one week after they’d reunited—that she leaned over the center console of Townsend’s silver sports car and kissed him, just as she’d been dying to do for the past six months since their breakup. Neither of them cared about the movie (some slasher flick about an aspiring actress stalked by a vicious killer in 1980s Los Angeles), so they left and returned to Townsend’s condo, where they had sex twice beforefalling asleep in each other’s arms. It was the happiest Talia had felt in a very long time. Perhaps ever.
In the morning, they stayed in bed and talked, the conversation spanning from a childhood trip Townsend took to Monterey, to Talia’s childhood fear of stingrays, to Townsend’s dream of spending one more afternoon with his father, to Talia’s wish that she could have been there for him when his dad passed.
“It just means the world to me that you’re here now,” he told her. “With all the fucking pressure I’m under right now, I feel like you’re the one person keeping me sane.”
“I’m here for you,” she promised him. “I’m not going anywhere.”
She didn’t ask him to make the same promise, but somehow, he sensed she needed to hear these words back: “I’m not going anywhere either.”
Across from her now at the table, Meera goes still, and for a moment, she looks pissed. But her face softens again just as quickly. “Tal, really? Townsend? Do you think that’s a good idea?”
“I ran into him a few weeks ago at Town Lake. Or, really, I ran into his friend, and he invited me to go out on his boat to ...” Talia hesitates, debating how best to describe Party Island. “It’s just, like, a huge group of people who hang out near Lou Neff—”
“I know what Brotilla is,” Meera says. “I’m a mom, not an alien.”
“Right. Well, Townsend and I started talking, and he took me to watch the bats at Congress Avenue Bridge—”
Meera scrunched her nose. “Ew.”
“It was cool, believe it or not. And we’ve been hanging out ever since.” She pauses and then adds, “I was with him last night. He asked me if I want to be exclusive.”
If she closes her eyes, Talia can take herself right back to that moment, to lying naked beneath Townsend’s buttery-smooth Egyptian cotton sheets with her back pressed against his chest and his fingers in her hair. The mahogany sleigh bed, the handwoven shag rug, the heavy velvet curtains blocking Townsend’s view of downtown from the forty-eighth floor—just a few weeks back together, and it already feels sofamiliar again. And while it’s easy to be wooed by the opulence, Talia knows that isn’t the reason Townsend’s bed feels like home. It’s the way he makes her feel when they’re together, like he’ll keep her safe and warm in that pretty room forever.
“He wants to be exclusive? That doesn’t sound like Townsend. What did you tell him?”
“I said I’ll think about it,” Talia lies.
