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I hear a rustle of clothing and the clunk of feet as Kayla gets up to walk around her apartment. She’s always been a pacer when she talks on the phone. Between that and the way she clomps around the house with heavy feet like Shrek, she nearly drove me crazy during the three years we lived together post-college. When I first met Benjy, he thought my roommate was a literal giant until he and Kayla finally met and he realized she was just a five-foot-one blond thing with an inexplicably loud stride.
Benjy. I don’t even like thinking his name in my head, much less saying it out loud. It’s been two years since I last saw him. If we never crossed paths again, it would still be too soon.
But the scars he left on me are here, living rent-free in my head—not unlike he did, actually. He was a leech in every way that mattered. Physically, emotionally, financially, spiritually. Sometimes, I still wake up in the middle of the night and reach out just to make sure he’s not on the other side of the bed.
Kayla is still talking, though I haven’t been listening. “… I’m saying is that if you don’t open yourself up to love, how will it find you? There are plenty of fish in the sea, but you’ll never catch one if you don’t throw out a?—”
“First of all,” I interrupt, “you hate fish. Do you not remember when I tried to take you out to sushi for your twenty-first birthday?”
Her shudder is audible. “Don’t remind me. I still taste that spicy tuna roll in my nightmares.”
“You are once again being the dramatic one. But anyway, second of all, when did ‘love’ enter the equation? This is a blind date.”
“So you’re gonna do it?” she asks eagerly.
“Hold your horses. We’re still discussing how I’m mad at you.”
“As if it’d be such a terrible thing for you to get laid. When was the last time you got laid, Loon? Hm? Do you even know? Are there cobwebs between your thighs?”
I wrinkle up my nose and peek over at the bar bouncer to make sure he’s not listening in. “It’s been… a while.”
“If you tell me that Jason the Jerkoff was your last time, I’m literally going to scream.”
“Well…”
I hold the phone away from my ear as Kayla makes good on her promise to scream. When she finally runs out of breath, I listen in again with a sigh. “I know you think I’m pathetic, but?—”
“I do not think you’re pathetic,” she insists firmly. “I just want you to be happy, Luna McCarthy. I want you to be so happy you can’t stand it. Because you’re special—to me, to everyone who knows you. And it’s just been… It’s just been a long time since I’ve seen a light in your eyes. The Spawn of Satan snuffed that out. I just want to see it again.”
I release a long exhale I didn’t realize I was holding in. “A blind date won’t fix me,” I whisper. “I’m starting to worry that nothing will.”
“Don’t say that. I love you. It’s gonna be fine. You just have to… close your eyes and jump, I guess. That’s what this is. Jumping.”
I eye the sign over the bar. “Jumping right into the bear’s mouth, apparently.”
“It could be good. Don’t rule it out.”
Once again, as frustrating as Kayla is in that way that only best friends and sisters can be, she isn’t wrong. “Ruling stuff out” is why I am lonely. It’s why I can’t fall asleep at night, why I spend way too long looking at the popcorn ceiling of my darkened bedroom like there will be answers to my future there if I just squint hard enough. I’ve been hibernating from the world for so long now, trying to heal.
But wounds just fester in the darkness.
They need light to heal.
“What does this guy look like?” I ask.
Kayla gasps in delighted surprise. “Tall, dark, and handsome. You can’t miss him. He should be waiting for you in the restaurant next to the bar. His name is Sergey.”
Scowling, I march over to the window and peer through, doing my best to stay out of the line of sight in case anyone inside is glancing out. No need to come off like an uber-creep before the date has even begun.
The restaurant is full of happy couples, happy families, happy servers and busboys and hostesses and chefs. Everyone has dazzling, genuine smiles.
Except for one man.
The only person without a dinner companion isn’t smiling at all. It’s easy to see that he’s huge, even though he’s seated in the far corner. His shoulders are almost as broad as the booth itself and the light reflects off hair that’s black and silky and effortlessly tousled.
His scowl is what grabs my attention, though. It pulls all the sharp lines of his face into relief. Planes of shadow mixing with the angles caught in the candles’ glow. He’s holding his jaw tight and, at first, I think he looks furious. But then I blink and look a little closer and I realize there’s more to it.
There’s melancholy there. Something so sad that it reaches out and pokes at the bruised parts of my own heart.
