He grins. “Please do.”
She waves at me while Penn grabs the cart and rolls along, whistling, like that little exchange doesn’t require explanation.
I jog to reach him as he curves around the aisle endcap and beelines toward boxed cakes. Which are also not on our list. “Who’s Melissa?” I ask. I have several other questions, but Mrs. Baker’s knowing wink makes this one a priority.
“Her niece,” Penn explains, tossing two boxes of Funfetti into the cart. “Cindy set us up a few months ago, and we did dinner and a movie. She’s nice, but we’re just friends.”
Dinner and a movie. It’s so classic, and so very unlike Penn, who I imagine as more of a darts-and-dive-bar dating type.
“ ‘Just friends,’ ” I echo, placing the cake mix back on the shelf. “Was that your choice or Melissa’s?”
Penn fights a smile. “Since when do you want to hear about my love life?”
“Fresh start. Remember?”
“Ah.” He nods. “Well, there’s not much to say. A little something here, something there.”
That sums up Penn’s dating history in the real world, too. For years he’s tried on girlfriends the same way he dips in and out of jobs. I will never let him forget the spring he got into making homemade jam, all because he briefly entertained the company of a preschool teacher with big Martha Stewart energy.
“Why just ‘a little something’?” I ask. For research.
Penn pauses in front of the frosting. “Same as you. I want nothing serious.”
My laugh is a firework. “Me? Nothing serious?”
“What?” He eyes me sideways. “Do you have a secret boyfriend I don’t know about?”
An entirely secret timeline, but that’s neither here nor there. “No,” I tell him. “But I’m not a ‘nothing serious’ type.” I raise my color-coded shopping lists as evidence.
“You’re serious about lists and dress codes,” Penn allows. “But love?” He drops two tubs of frosting into the cart and looks at me. “I thought you had—how’d you put it?—‘too many lives to live’ to settle down.”
“When did I say that?”
His features pinch, like he can’t believe my question. “Which time?”
My vision blurs, the aisle growing and shrinking in front of me. This Penn knows a version of me who wrote to Bridget about late nights with strange, sexy men. Not me, the serial monogamist. All I’ve ever wanted is to settle down.
Penn mistakes my silence for shame. “There’s nothing wrong with it, Wynne,” he assures me. “We both just do our own thing. And we’re happier this way. Right?”
I reshelve the frosting and nod, wondering if that’s true for me here. If it’s true for him anywhere. Maybe he’s tried to adopt his mom’s dating philosophy as his own.
His eyes meet mine, as if there’s more to be said. He steps closer.
“What?” I ask. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
He bites his lip, drawing my focus to his mouth in a way that makes me blink. Holding my gaze, he pulls a bottle of rainbowsprinkles from the shelf right over my shoulder and shakes it toward me. I grab it, clasping my hand over his, and Penn startles at my touch. We both look at the bottle, and at our hands, then at each other.
“We do not need sprinkles,” I tell him.
His mouth ticks up. “Sprinkles spread joy.”
I narrow my eyes at him, hot anger in my cheeks. “I feel joy.”
Penn laughs and wrestles the bottle from my grasp. He adds it to our heaping pile of groceries, which includes three varietals of Cheez-Its he must’ve snuck in when I wasn’t looking.
He watches, waiting to see if I’ll pull the rainbow sprinkles from the cart.
“Next time, I’m shopping alone,” I announce. Then I storm off, leaving the sprinkles where they are.
