“I’m fine,” Grace lied, kissed Ivy on the cheek, and slipped into her white BMW when it pulled up.
The drive nearly an hour north to her Sunny Isles oceanfront condo was silent. Silent in the car, anyway. Inside Grace’s overworked mind, an orchestra of constant thoughts clashed like too many cymbals.
The bartender had been very attractive, she thought in the same dispassionate tone she’d use to analyze the merits of a potential legal claim.Not just objectively. I found her attractive. So why wasn’t I, in fact, attracted?
Grace clicked the button in her visor and the garage gate roared awake.It’s been five months, she said to herself, like that changed anything. Like she was one of her white-collar crime clients serving a prison stint. Like heartache had a presumptive release date and she’d been on her best behavior. If only there was a parole board to sway.
On the seventh floor, Grace backed into her designated parking spot. Crossing the walkway between the garage and the high-rise, she tried to solve the quandary of her love life. New answers didn’t spring from the ground she’d been retreading by the time she opened the door to her twenty-first-floor condo.
Immediately, and with deafening gusto, Icarus and Sheila bolted toward her. Her Siamese cats greeted her with a cavalcade of complaints. Given that the open concept two-bedroom smelled overwhelmingly like Fabuloso and Pine-Sol, Grace was sure that Naomi had only just left. Her housekeeper wouldn’t have forgotten their dinner. The pair wouldn’t allow it.
Relenting, Grace fed them again, despite the vet’s suggestion that the twins could stand to lose a little weight. He just didn’t understand that they were Cuban Siamese cats and curvy like everyone else in the Ortega family.
Grace only made it as far as the long L-shaped sectional that faced the ocean because she didn’t have time to watch TV. She didn’t like enough people to ever fill the couch, but anything smaller would have looked ridiculous in the sprawling space. Her family had visited, but rarely.
She’d loved the idea of being in a completely different part of the county when she found the place. Enjoyed the fact that no one would ever just drop in on her. But now, rather than solace, all Grace felt was lonely.
Head on a throw pillow and dress pants tossed on the far end of the couch, Grace curled up her legs and decided she was done being sad. She just had to get over Julie. That was it. They’d beentogether twenty-four months and been broken up for five. That was, what? Twenty percent? That seemed like a very reasonable amount of time to be over it.
People had been falling in love and getting their hearts stomped on since the beginning of time. Certainlysomeonehad to have figured out the way out by now. Grace turned to the internet for help. On her phone, she opened a browser and searched:how to get over a breakup. After a beat, she addedfast.
The internet was disappointingly useless. She’d already done everything she’d read on every list. The things she could, anyway. She couldn’t cut off all contact because they worked at the same firm. Remove all reminders from her home? No problem. They weren’t big gift people, and they spent most of their time at Julie’s house because she hated driving all the way to Grace’s place. Avoid social media? Easy. Julie wasn’t online. At all. Get rid of photos? Considering she only had a handful, it only took minutes to lock them away in an app she didn’t have to see. As for exploring new hobbies, she already went to kickboxing three times a week.
Spending more time with friends and family was useless. Ivy was her only close friend, and she couldn’t tell her. Telling her family felt pointless when they hadn’t known she’d been dating anyone to begin with. How could she ever explain to her mother that she’d fallen in love with someone who’d built the foundation of their relationship on secrecy? That it was the same secrecy that had crushed them? She imagined her mother’s disappointment and groaned. It simply wasn’t acceptable. That wasn’t the life her mother had sacrificed so much to give her.
Annoyed, Grace flung the phone across the couch and dragged herself into the shower. It was only when she went to bed after stemming the tide of never-ending emails two hours later that she opened her phone again. She’d intended only todouble-check that she’d set her alarm but ended up on a social media doom-scroll spiral.
The targeted ad that hit her feed made Grace sit up. Icarus, nonplussed, meowed his displeasure at being shifted from the pillow next to her head.
“Breakup Buddies?” she muttered into the room illuminated by the blue light of her phone screen.
She stopped scrolling and watched a video for an app that promised a new kind of matchmaking service. The tagline alone was intriguing:When your friends tap out, we tap in.
Grace’s friends weren’t sick of her talking about her breakup, but that’s only because she had no one to tell. Desperate enough to download a free app that was probably full of spyware, Grace took the plunge.
Setting up a profile was easy when all she had to do was pick a username and a photo that described her but was not of her. She picked GoGatorsESQ, an ode to her former law school, and a photo of the ocean at sunrise taken from her first morning in her condo. Done. Sure that she was going to delete the stupid thing in the morning, Grace skipped the optional bio and searched for queer women any distance from her location.
Grace scrolled through the surprising number of options. She stopped at another profile that had used an image of the ocean. Unlike hers, this one had one of those cute lifeguard towers like inBaywatch. This person, who had chosen Scissorsaurus as their handle, had created a bio:Alix with an I, not an E. Big fan of potatoes in all forms. Heartbreak connoisseur.
Her mouth twitched into a smile. Who didn’t like potatoes? And someone who knew their way around a heartbreak sounded like the perfect match. Desperate to find a solution to her irritating problem, Grace clicked on the chat icon. She didn’t let herself think about it before she started typing.
GoGatorsESQ
Heartbreak connoisseur? Does that mean you’re an expert at curing or causing?
She wasn’t expecting a response before she deleted the app. Much to her surprise, she was still awake when her phone chimed a little while later. A new message from Scissorsaurus.
Scissorsaurus
I’m more of a Charon, but I like to think I guide souls out of hell.
Grace raised her recently sculpted brows and shifted her gaze slowly to Icarus, who’d wedged himself into his sister’s bed under the window, much to her disdain. Of all the things Alix could have said, a Greek mythology reference? Was that a good omen?
GoGatorsESQ
That didn’t exactly answer my cause or cure question.
Scissorsaurus
