“I, uh. Yeah. Just.”
“What about the guy from Instagram?” Zara asked, as though she knew that was exactly who I was thinking about right now. Who I wastalkingto right now, between sentences, because I waited for his messages like a kid waiting for Santa on Christmas Eve.
“Who?” I asked.
“You know exactly who,” Zara said.
A seagull waddled up to me and looked me right in the eyes as I sipped my coffee.
“No,” I said.
“Yes you do.”
“No, uh.” I met the seagull’s eyes again. “I was talking to this bird. Don’t like the way it’s looking at me.”
“So you’re what? Establishing dominance?”
I straightened up just in case that made any difference to the seagull. “Can it hurt?”
“Oh my god,” Zara said. “You know when I said last week you need to get laid?”
“And the week before that, and the week before that?” I asked. It’d been a recurring subject for a while.
“Yeah, well, now you’re squaring up to face off against a seagull, so I was definitely right. They’re gonna reissue your v-card it’s been so long.”
The seagull took a half-step toward me, but I stared it down.
catdad_93: sure is
catdad_93: just have to get you down to my neck of the woods now
He lived somewhere on the Oregon coast. I knew, because he posted pictures of the scenery from time to time, between fluffy adorable foster kittens.
I hadn’t told him I was heading down that way, and that I might have been near enough by to take him up on that coffee date. Or any of the other things he’d jokingly promised me over the last few months.
Because it was a joke. All he’d seen of me were my hands and my sugar habit.
And the casual flirting we’d fallen into was the closest thing to any kind of romantic intimacy I’d had in longer than I cared to admit. I couldn’t bring myself to risk disappointing him.
“You could take this opportunity to get laid,” Zara said. “You’re out of town, it doesn’t have to be a whole big thing…”
“I’m out of town to help my pregnant sister,” I pointed out. “Not work my way through the local gay population, which I assume is like. One.”
“Otter Bay isn’tthatsmall,” Zara said. “I googled it. It’s adorable. And it has a gay bar.”
“Wow, my favorite.”
Gay or not, there was nowhere I felt more out of place than a gay bar. At least, the ones in Seattle. I’d never even heard of one in a small town.
I still didn’t think I’d like it, though.
“How are we friends?” Zara asked.
“I took you to prom so you wouldn’t have to tell your mom you had a crush on Cindy Harper.”
Zara groaned, and I grinned to myself as I swallowed down another few mouthfuls of too-sweet coffee while she recovered from the flashback to the terrible taste her high school self had in women. Not that I was an expert on taste in women.
“Don’t remind me. Ugh,” she said. “We look hot in those photos though.”
