His smile is so wide it reveals his elusive right cheek dimple. “An absolute disaster.”
Chapter 3
Clothing Is Merely an Extension of a Plate
Saturday, Now
“So, it’s likepart taproom, part dystopian art installation, but there’s cornhole on the patio.” I’m in my bed, cocooned in a fluffy robe, scanning a listicle entitled “18 New and Exciting Bars in the Twin Cities” and avoiding eye contact with the farmer’s breakfast that was waiting for me on the bed when I finished showering the hangover off me.
Ethan winces at my description of the nearby bar, shaking his hair out like a dog. “I’m fine sticking around here. You don’t need to entertain me.” He’s shaved and fresh from the shower in a faded concert tee the color of an oatmeal cookie, which clings a little to the damp spots on his chest. I direct my gaze back to my laptop screen.
Even though Ethan grew up an hour north of here, I can’t help but do that little song and dance reserved for all old friends and extended family when they come to town. That desire to take ownership of their life and justify every small choice—from where they live, to their career, to the quality of the nearest coffee place. Not to mention, structured activities have historically provided an off-ramp out of our stilted long-distance-friend demeanor and on to our ordinary, comfortable dynamic.
“You didn’t eat your eggs.” He observes the mostly full plate next to me. He insisted on making me something when he realized exactly how hard I’d been hit by both Ruth and Chris respectively.
“I ate the potatoes,” I argue. He tuts and moves my now-chilly scramble to the dresser. He replaces the plate with his body, sprawling out next to me on my bed, where my laptop sits between us like a barrier wall. I’m really wishing I’d kept so much as a folding chair in my Broke Divorcée: Everything Must Go sale. It’s hard to dip my toes back into this newly face-to-face friendship when he’s so…present. Making me breakfast, using my shower and washing machine, dampening my pillow with his wet hair.
“What about mini golf?” I suggest in a rush.
“You and your itineraries,” he moans with a full-body movement that causes his knee to nudge my laptop. “Are you going to force me to go to an escape room after? Or do you have a Groupon for an aerial gymnastics class? Are we going on a double cooking-class date?”
I snort. “I wish. I think I’d fall over dead if one of my dates actually planned an activity beyond staring at each other over boba tea.”
It was only adate, singular, and to the man’s credit, the boba tea was at my suggestion—there’s something so nonthreatening about meeting a man for boba tea—but I’d rather walk into an intricate spiderweb than disclose this statistic to Ethan, who’s possibly the only hetero man to leave a dating app due to the sheer volume of sexual inquiries. I’d rather take the boba-date body count to my deathbed, thank you.
He leans closer to inspect me. “You’ve started dating again? Wait. Chuck. Have you been going to escape rooms withmen?”
Now I groan. Once Rich moved out, dating was something I wasexpectedto do. I was supposed to be meeting up with fortysomething men seeking twentysomething women, and share a bruschetta platter while describing our jobs and listing siblings.
Just as single women revel in watching their favorite formerly “smug marrieds” flounder on Hinge, married womenloveto shove their divorced women friends in the direction of divorced men. In the eyes of married women, we go together like pairs of worn socks, and if I’m not actively seeking a second husband from the pool of discarded suitors, their antennae go up with one whiff of my “comfortably divorced woman” aroma. Suddenly, I’m inherently threatening, as though I’m going to spot their man at a Super Bowl party loading up a Wheat Thin with the glob of jalapeño popper dip that dripped onto his golf polo and be overcome by the carnal desire to take him for myself. As though my friends’ husbands, men who regard their clothing as merely an extension of a plate, are my best option.
It took only one uncomfortable date for me to pack it in. What was the point? I know how it ends: arguing over the antique buffet neither of us liked but that we can no longer part with now that it carries a perplexing symbolic weight.
So Itelleveryone I’m dating, even though I’m not. The path of least resistance and all that.
I shake off my unexpected moment of self-consciousness, answering him with a breezy, “Escape rooms right out of the gate? Absolutely not. I watch too muchDatelineto let a strange man lock me in a room and force me to solve riddles.” I get up and grab a crystal tumbler from the bar cart next to my bed. “But one time, my coworker set me up with her uncle,who took me to one of those rooms where you break stuff with a bat,” I explain, pulling a Brita out of the minifridge.
His smile is smug. “Anuncle? Your coworker must hate you.”
“He was a youngish uncle, okay? I didn’t make Stacy bust out a family tree, but I think there were some remarriages and severed branches in play.”
He shakes his head when I lift a cup to offer him a drink. “Are we not going to talk about how you have a bar cart next to your bed like a 1960s bachelor?”
I shrug. “It looked weird alone in the dining room without any friends.”
Rich and I got an offer on the house fully furnished without even listing it. Word had spread through the neighborhood that the newly minted Warrens had gone kaput. It didn’t matter that I’d never taken Rich’s name. Those aren’t the scintillating details that interest busybodies in the relationship postmortem.
Still, they were right about the house. Rich didn’t want it. He’d never wanted it. It’s one of those shiny new builds that are made to look like carefully built Craftsman-style homes but were produced by a single developer, so that every house on the block is more or less identical. He said it reminded him of one of those fake neighborhoods constructed for nuclear missile tests.But you love it, he’d told me.And it doesn’t matter, so why have a fight about it?
He was good at agreeing when we were together. Less so once we were apart.
Rich was only willing to sell the house to me if I met the price and terms of the offer. So I sold all the furniture we picked out together that he insisted I take—partially out of spite, but mostly because I needed the money.
Everything I couldn’t part with found its way to the mastersuite. It’s temporary, of course, but every other space in the house is punishingly empty. Everywhere I look in the chef’s kitchen, the formal living room, the basement gym, I see empty space. My bedroom is my safe place. It’s the only room where I’m not constantly aware of my score on the ledger of a relationship where I came up undeniably short.
“The minifridge is a newer addition. It got annoying walking downstairs for water when I had everything else in here. It’s kind of nice, though, right? Like a hotel. And I use the space in the door for my liquid collagen, my facial creams, my serums…”
Ethan sits up. “How am I supposed to believe you’re ‘totally fine’ when you’re drunk-spamming my phone and becoming a full-blown ‘bed person’?”
