Five Things I Can't Live Without (7 page)

The bedroom was more hospitable. It’s small and it was going to be a challenge to fit everything in, but I felt sure I could make it work. I had a spot picked out for the drafting table I use for a desk, right under the window. A window that opens.
We’ll be happy here
, I thought as I started chopping the asparagus.

When Dan opened the front door, the table had been set and dinner was just a few minutes from being ready.
I’m finally getting my timing down
.

“Oh, baby!” Dan said, smiling broadly and embracing me. “You are a find, you know that?”

“I know that.” We kissed, and while I felt a stirring of passion, I felt a greater desire to eat. I realized I was ravenous. When his hands started to move down the front of my shirt, I gently shrugged him off. “Dinner’s going to be ready in five minutes.”

“It’ll keep, won’t it?” he said playfully, reaching for me again.

“I’m really hungry. You just walked in on this smell; I’ve been smelling it for a while now. I’m practically salivating.” There was a defensive note to my voice that bothered me. I wanted to sound as light as he did.

“It’s cool. We can eat.” And it did seem to be cool with him. He tossed a cherry tomato in his mouth and smiled at me as he leaned against the counter. “This was a nice surprise.”

I handed him a glass of wine and pecked his cheek. I still felt the tension of having moved away from him, though he didn’t seem aware of it.

“So you made it through another day,” he said.

I raised an eyebrow at him quizzically.

“At your job. At your brutish job.” He waggled an eyebrow back at me.

“I was no Cinderella there today. They barely got a half day’s work out of me.” I drained the ravioli and started arranging our plates. “Sorry I didn’t get any salad.”

“Don’t apologize. This is great.” He touched the back of my hand lightly. I felt myself glowing slightly at his appreciation as I brought our loaded plates to the table.

“I didn’t even notice the flowers before. Man, you are a find,” he said again, shaking his head. It was something he’d told me on our third date, and until the past five minutes, only once or twice since. I smiled at the memory. “Thank you.” He held my gaze for an extra few seconds before picking up his fork.

I watched him eat, feeling my nervousness surge. I really wanted him to approve of my—well, Kathy’s—freelance idea. I thought if he approved, it would mean I was doing the right thing. I hadn’t told anyone else about the idea yet, and it felt like expensive wedding china, like something precious and easily broken.

“I ended up having kind of an exciting night last night.” I was shooting for casual, but landed on labored instead.

“Yeah?” He glanced up, but continued eating.

“I was losing it, actually, totally panicking about leaving my job, and I called Kathy and we just stumbled onto this great opportunity.”

He nodded in that “go on” way, his face betraying nothing.

“Maybe opportunity is the wrong word. Or at least, it’s not a ready-made kind of opportunity.”

He nodded again, making a face of approval. My heart leaped, then I realized it was because he was gesturing at the ravioli with his fork. “These are delicious. You didn’t stuff them yourself?”

“No. They came from that market on Seventh.”

“Wow. We’ve gone upscale.” He squeezed my hand. “Baby, this was so good of you.”

“I try.” It was good to be appreciated, but he was ruining my flow. I plunged in again. “The opportunity is for me to write profiles on dating Web sites. Have you ever been on those?”

He shook his head. “I’ve heard of them. Never been on one. It’s, like, advertising for dates.”

“Right. That’s the point.”

He did a little shudder.

“I had a profile on one for a while. But then I met you,” I said.

“And you could get hired by the Web sites to write profiles for people?
Dating Profiles in Courage. Let Us Now Praise Famous Daters.
” He smiled wryly, still focused on his plate. When he joked, he never looked for my reaction.

“No, I’d be a freelancer. I’m going to put an ad on Craigslist and offer my services to the people who have profiles and aren’t getting a good response, or to people who’ve been too shy to put profiles up, or, you know, to anyone else who answers the ad.”
Say it’s a great idea. Say I’d be a natural.

He cocked his head to the side. “Sounds interesting. Do you think it’ll work?”

“I think I’d be good at it.”

“I’m sure you would. But”—he furrowed his brow almost imperceptibly—”do you think it’ll work, you know, getting people to hire you?”

My heart sank slightly, but I tried not to let it show. “It’s a big market. Lots of people do Internet dating now.”

“A lot of people looking to get laid. I was listening to some radio station and this guy called in and said he’d slept with three different women that weekend. The DJ says, ‘How’d you do that?’ and the guy says, ‘Two words for you: Mymate-dot-com.’ Complete idiot. Those aren’t two words.”

I tried to conceal my irritation. Didn’t he get what big news this was? Why was he telling me anecdotes about radio call-in shows? “But what do you think of the idea?” I prodded.

“It seems clever.” He didn’t shrug, but it seemed like he should have.

He probably didn’t mean it to be dismissive, but it stung. “And clever ideas fizzle out, right?” I said it more sharply than I’d intended.

“I wasn’t criticizing. I know you’d be good at it. I just don’t know if you’ll get enough people from Craigslist to make a run of it.” He pointed at my plate. “Aren’t you going to eat? It’s good stuff.”

I popped a ravioli in my mouth to placate him. He was right. They were good. He was always aggravatingly right. I chewed another ravioli to work out my rising annoyance before speaking again. “I don’t know if I’ll get enough people, either, but I think this is my time to try, with my rent being so much less. I think it’s worth trying.”

“Sure.”

“And hopefully, if I do the profiles well, I’ll get word of mouth.” I started in on the wine, hoping it would relax me. I told myself Dan wasn’t doubting me, he was wondering about the market, but it still felt discouraging. I knew it wasn’t fair to ply him with food so that he’d be enthusiastic about my idea; I just hadn’t realized that was what I was doing until right then. “And I can send out e-mails to everyone I know asking them to tell their friends.” I figured I could use the same lists I’d made the day before to beg for nonprofit jobs. “Oh, this might be jumping ahead, but I want to ask your permission for something.”

“What’s that?” I wished he’d stop being so fixated on dinner.

“People might want to know my credentials for doing this. And I thought I could tell them that you and I met over the Internet. More specifically, I want to tell them that you liked my profile and contacted me.” I looked at him intently.

“I wouldn’t have to meet them, would I?” He seemed perturbed at the thought.

“I don’t see why you would.”

“But if you’re sending the e-mail out to people you know and asking them to send it on to their friends, there’s the possibility I could meet those people someday.”

Damn his scruples. First he couldn’t even feign excitement, now he was throwing up roadblocks. “What are the odds that even if you did happen upon such a person, say, at a dinner party, they’d actually try to confirm that we’d met online? It doesn’t make sense.”

“I just don’t want to have to lie.”

“It’s a white lie.”

“Well, it’s a full lie,” he said.

“A white lie doesn’t mean half a lie; it means it’s the kind of lie that doesn’t matter.”

“Let me think it over.”

“Are you serious?” I burst out, exasperated.

“You want to rewrite our history. Don’t I get to think about it?”

“Here’s the thing,” I explained, summoning my patience. “It’s like white lying at a job interview. You might say you have skills that you don’t actually have because you can learn them, and if you admitted you didn’t have them up front, you’d never get hired. In this case, the reason it’s a harmless lie is because I am qualified to do this, I just need to get in the door.” I looked at him beseechingly. “I won’t even tell people unless they ask.”

“Why don’t you say you met your last boyfriend on the Internet?”

“I thought of that, but then they’ll know that it wasn’t a lasting connection.”

“Are you really going to start using phrases like ‘lasting connection’? I don’t know if I like this.”

“I can’t even tell if you’re joking.”

“That’s because I don’t know if I’m joking.”

“Please. It’s not a big deal.” I let out a sigh. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. I was only asking you as a formality.”

“Nice.”

“You know what I mean. I just didn’t think it would matter to you.”

“It’s one thing to lie to some phony in human resources, but it’s another thing to instill false hope in the kind of desperate people who need to hire a matchmaker.”

“Now you’re saying I’m predatory?”

“That has never crossed my mind.” He brushed my cheek with his forefinger. “You tell them whatever you decide is right, okay?”

“Okay.” I decided to take that as an expression of confidence. I would have done what I wanted anyway.

Chapter 5

I
can’t believe you’re going to be doing the Internet dating thing. That’s my turf,” Larissa said. She lifted books from my shelf and placed them in the box at her feet. It was moving day, and she’d generously offered to help me with last-minute packing.

“Spine-side down,” I directed.

“Really? I’ve always done it the other way.”

“It’s completely counterintuitive, I know, but when I worked in a bookstore, that’s how they did it.” I crossed back to my closet, where I was transferring the hanging clothes to suitcases. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to cut you off.”

“It’s okay. I was just thinking that now you’re going to really see what it’s like out there.”

“Oh, I know what it’s like. I was out there six months ago.”

“But now look at you.”

I surveyed the mostly empty room. “Yeah. Look at me.”

“Did I tell you I’m on a new dating site now? You know, the one I laughed at a few months ago. Well, desperate times, right? It’s the one where they match you based on these exhaustive questionnaires. I filled mine out last night; it was like taking the LSATs again.”

I laughed. “How’d you score?”

“I guess I’ll know soon enough. The site’s going to do the matching for me. Everything’s a science now.”

“How many sites are you on now?”

“This new one brings it to four.”

“That sounds tiring.”

“Not really. I’m old news on three of them, so no one writes to me anyway. The depressing part is that I keep seeing a lot of the same guys, with slight modifications depending on the site. Like, on the sexier site, they add virile flourishes. Of course I tart it up sometimes, too. But it bugs me anyway. I mean, the whole point of being on multiple sites is to get access to new people. If I keep seeing the same ones, it defeats the purpose.”

“But you’re defeating their purpose, too.”

“I know.” She paused. “I have this new bad habit of tracking my ex-boyfriends by their profiles. Remember Jason? He’s on the market again.”

“Tell me you don’t want Jason back.”

“No. I want the schadenfreude. I hate when their profiles disappear because it means they’ve met someone, and I love when they reappear because now they’re in the same boat as me. I can even tell how their last relationship went by the changes they make in their profile. Jason’s last girlfriend must have been clingy because now he’s all about finding an independent woman.”

“You’re right; this is your turf.”

“I’m just going through the motions, really. I still miss Dustin. Six months, and according to Debbie, I’m still in denial.”